Donald Trump is being widely criticized for telling Bill O’Reilly of Fox News, the truth: that when it comes to killing, Americans do not have clean hands. I ask, does this means that Trump has a conscience after all? Perhaps he was thinking of his own first-ordered extrajudicial killing on January 29th, a few days before his now famous interview with Bill O’Reilly.
For the first time, this writer sympathizes with Donald Trump, who has, with a word or stroke of pen, shed innocent blood, and clearly he knows it! The media tells us Trump approved an attack in Yemen that took many lives, and at least two of those killed were US citizens. Thank you, President Donald Trump, for telling Bill O’Reilly the truth. It is our prayer that you will refuse to approve the next extrajudicial killing placed on your desk by the Pentagon, the CIA, Homeland Security, or any other agency. And, please tell us about it!
President Trump authorized a military strike by US forces in Yemen that resulted in the killing of eight-year-old Nawar Al-Awlaki. Her American father and brother were killed during two separate drone strikes approved by President Obama in 2011.
Wikipedia defines extrajudicial killing (also known as extrajudicial execution) as “the killing of a person by governmental authorities without the sanction of any judicial proceeding or legal process”. It hardly conforms to our Bill of Rights or Declaration of Independence.
Presidents are routinely asked to give advance approval of schemes by appointed bureaucrats whenever an American citizen may be a victim of the scheme, or when a sortie is to be made into a country where we do not have a formal war, as in several past drone raids in Yemen. We have every reason to believe that President Obama approved many such raids over eight years, two of which we have written about in Who Would Jesus Drone. However, this may have been Donald Trump’s first time to approve an extrajudicial killing–he too is a victim, for he has shed innocent blood.
In early 1991, during George H. W. Bush’s watch, I wrote a similar sad story about an authorized bombing and killing of over 400 mostly civilians in the Amiriyah public shelter in a Baghdad bunker where Iraqi civilians spent nights for protection from US bombs. President George W. Bush was not personally blamed for the “bunker buster” bombing. According to visitors’ reports, one woman who lost eight children in the bombing moved into the shelter to help create the memorial and serves as its primary guide today.
An NBC news report describes the new Yemeni disaster from the Pentagon’s point of view, downplaying those executed in this massive combined US Drone/ Seals/ Air Force attack. Among the known wounded were eight or more US Airmen and Seals, one shot dead. Hardly mentioned were the victims of the planned execution, which we are otherwise told was approved in advance by President Trump at a dinner on January 29th. It is not clear to me who presented the plan to the new president.
According to The Middle East Monitor (MEM), which looked behind the Yemeni story, it was President Trump’s first approval of an extra-judicial execution, where he “earned his bones”, an old Mafia term for his first killing. From various reports, as few as 10 and as many as 30 Yemeni civilians died, including a lovely little American citizen, a girl only eight years old, who bled to death in her mother’s arms after being shot in the throat by a Navy Seal.
A somewhat humanely sympathetic story appeared in a Guardian News release on February 2, 2017. What is most stunning is to learn that the juvenile brother and the father of the little girl killed were also extra-judicially executed in two separate drone raids four years earlier. They too were both American citizens, the father born in the USA. Both of these raids were presumably rubber stamped by President Obama. We wrote about this incident at the time in Who Would Jesus Drone?
Our questions about this latest disaster, the killing a beautiful child and many others with her, is: “Did Donald Trump knowingly and with informed mind authorize this raid, or are these presidentially-approved assassinations simply every-day rubber stamp acts that the President usually never sees or hears about?”
Again, quoting Middle East Monitor: “While the media attention has been focused on the death of one US serviceman who was killed during a raid in Yemen, the most heart rending casualties of the assault was an eight-year-old Nawr al-Awlaki, daughter of U.S.-born Muslim cleric, Anwar al-Awlaki. Her father was the first American born citizen to be assassinated in a US drone strike in 2011.”
His killing was decried by civil rights groups as an ‘extrajudicial execution’ that denied him his right to a fair trial. In fact he has never been accused of any crimes. Even more staggering to contemplate, Nawar’s older brother, Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaqi (16) (born in Colorado), was also murdered in a separate US drone attack while eating in an outdoor restaurant in Yemen, just two weeks after his father was ‘droned’. The Anwar al-Awlaqi family were all Americans though they have foreign-sounding names. Each was systematically deprived of his unalienable right to life, tracked down and ‘droned’ without a hearing.
Perhaps the most notorious extrajudicial execution ordered for sure by a president, Obama, was the execution (not capture) of Osama Bin Laden. It was supposedly witnessed on close circuit TV by President Obama, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and a small group of generals and Cabinet members. The photo op we saw on our screens showed a wide-eyed Hillary and a stern-faced Obama supposedly watching the attack in Pakistan. But later we learned there was no such closed circuit–it was Hollywood on the Potomac!
Osama Bin Laden was accused but never proved to have masterminded the destruction of the World Trader Center, killing more than 3000 Americans. He was not an American citizen, so our Bill of Rights and Declaration of Independence would not protect him, as it should have protected eight-year-old Nawar al-Awlaki. But when a Seal team executed an unarmed Bin Ladin, we Americans were deprived, perhaps forever, of whatever truth he could have told us, had he been captured, brought home and tried, as we now know the Seals could have done had they not had orders to kill him and dump his body in an ocean, without even saving DNA samples! Truth was the ultimate victim of Obama’s dramatized executive order. It is also true in each of the three Yemeni executions that, truth and the American people are always the ultimate victims.
We Hold These Truths own observations about the Bin Laden extrajudicial killing, was called, The Bin Laden Execution; Fall of the Anti-Christian Empire.
1/31/2017 NBC Nightly News report on the Obama planned, Trump approved operation in Yemen:
Thank you for this news. I do not have TV or free radio and they would not broadcast it anyway.
So the new President Trump is continuing the American tradition of murdering children and civilians. The saints go marching on.
I thing it a reform in foreign policy however since inveterate , Israeli foreign policy
was to kill everyone but save the young virgins for the libidinous Israeli soldiers. And this child should not be spared since Israeli have esoteric taste. But it seems the irreverent Americans have killed everyone which may save this child, Navar Al Awlaki from experience worse than death, the cruel experience of learning Jewish law.
I hear often about this “what would Jesus do” admonition. Usually the source is a promiscuous creature of no particular quality or a Jewess. I do not know what the Lord Jesus would do. I know what all men should do!
I should advance upon congress well armed and engage the discount prostitute and elected by fools there and then their Israeli AIPAC souteneurs and slay them all indiscriminately , then march to the global office and pay the president for his work , then to the pentagram and all the officers, myrmidons and mercenary responsible.
Then I shall stand before the King and Supreme Commander with blood on my hands but without compunction, without remorse or shame and to me he would say: “well done my good and faithful servant.”
Forgive my self indulgence in a moment of grief and shame.