Double-tapping is what the cool kids are doing

The weekly newsletter Roaming Charges: Kill, Kill Again, Kill Them All by Jeffrey St. Clair (CounterPunch) writes,

“The double-tap strikes are appalling and illegal, but Hegseth is merely following the bloody path Barack Obama blazed. Obama’s drone assassination team even had a name for wounded survivors they would target for a second kill strike: squirters. According to David Shedd, Obama’s former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.”

“We used double-taps all the time. You would get the initial signature off of a target that’s been hit and if you saw that they ‘squirted’ and were injured … you hit them again.” Shedd told Washington Post columnist Mark Thyssen: “There was often a second predator ready to go … that was fully expected to be used if you didn’t have a 100 percent coming out of the first hit — and maybe a third hit…It was done routinely.”

Speaking of drone-bombing civilians, the same newsletter writes that Israel continues its cleanup work in the Gaza strip.

“IDF Press Release: “The Air Force eliminated two suspects this morning in the southern Gaza Strip who crossed the yellow line, carried out suspicious activities… and approached the forces.” The two “suspects” were 8 and 11…”

Palestinian terrorists − now thankfully eliminated

NBC News dutifully reported this as:

Eliminating child terrorists tests but does not break a ceasefire

Now, just wait a minute. It depends on how you look at it: At least those kids didn’t have to starve to death. It’s like the IDF was doing them a favor by nipping things in the bud like that. It was downright merciful.

The article Democrats, Press Gloss Over Original “Double Tap” Operations by Matt Taibbi (Racket News) confirms that Gore Vidal was right when he called his home country The United States of Amnesia.

“The piece explained that British and Pakistani journalists had counted 50 civilians had died in recent “follow-up strikes” that sources on the ground claimed were intended to kill rescuers and first responders. The Times report elicited a bizarre non-denial denial from Barack Obama’s White House, in which an unnamed spokesman said we should “wonder” about “misinformation” coming from “elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.””

Does that sound familiar? Some of us have been listening to and hearing this kind of crap for decades. It doesn’t matter which actual people are in the U.S. administration—they all act and talk the same.

This kind of bullshit precedes Trump and it will almost certainly outlive him.

“The Trump/Hegseth scandal grew out of multiple different strains of recent American military history. One involves those prior “targeted killing” and bomb operations mainly across the Middle East that killed somewhere between 22,000 and 48,000 people from 9/11 through 2021 (a former CIA analyst who oversaw some of these operations put the number closer to 60,000). Another is in Barack Obama’s abortive Libyan campaign from 2011, which in some ways bore the closest resemblance to Trump’s Venezuelan mess.

“That brief display of what one lawyer called “total lawlessness” was a ghastly bloodletting involving high-powered weapons and essentially defenseless targets, deployed for questionable if not outright fraudulent reasons by another White House acting unilaterally. Like Trump’s White House, Obama’s deputies concluded his campaign fell short of the definition of “hostilities,” among other things because “there are no troops on the ground” and “Libyans cannot meaningfully exchange fire with American forces.””

Did you catch that? The Obama administration didn’t consider its drone attacks to be hostile because the prey had no way of fighting back. They don’t consider their own actions to be hostile, a priori.

“We documented really shocking killing from both Democratic and Republican administrations. When you look at the data we captured, it wasn’t that different than what these guys are doing in Venezuela. These strikes are more efficient, but they’re really being brazen about it. It’s like the mask is off.”

“Mustafa Qadri: My personal opinion is that it’s very clear double taps are an act of terrorism. The U.S. military is not the first to do a double tap. It’s been done for many years. The only reason they are doing it is they are trying to convey a sense of terror.”

Like napalm! Napalm was an indiscriminate way of killing so many people. They killed directly by fire, and indirectly, by starvation because there is nothing left to harvest. They defoliated what they didn’t burn using Agent Orange—causing untold cases of cancer. They mined the entire countryside.

It’s all the same thing. Drones are just the modern version of killing indiscriminately.

They possess an impunity to kill whatever the fuck moves or doesn’t move or is considered an enemy. Or whatever. They barely even seem to care what they’ve killed. Just kill, kill, kill. And make a ton of money while doing it.

“Mustafa Qadri: It’s really hard for a lot of liberal commentators to appreciate this. Trump is seen as a tough guy by a lot of non-western audiences. When he acts beyond the law, it is affirming for a lot of people that this is the way you deal with terrorists and your enemies. Many see Trump as out of control, but the U.S. is still seen as the main global power, so the actions of the Trump administration are still very influential. I don’t think the western audiences realize it’s norm-setting. It sends the message that everyone can do this.”

Western audiences have never experienced blowback. It’s been almost 25 years. They’ll cry when troops are attacked as if it were the greatest injustice the world has ever seen. Imagine if valuable civilians were to be killed by non-Americans.

“Mustafa Qadri: What Trump is doing is expanding on something that already existed. That’s something important for people to realize. As an international lawyer, I’m a huge fan of the role the U.S. played in setting up the international legal system. The Americans were the ones who insisted people go to trial. That system is being systematically dismantled, and it’s really a worrying development.”

Yeah, that’s all over now. Some people say not to panic, that we can still save the system.

Bullshit.

Prove it.