RR Phantom
Location : Wasted Space
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 |  Subject: State-sponsored killing is just murder by another name  Thu Jan 19, 2012 2:50 am | |
| The West is shredding its values in the name of security as nuclear scientists, terrorism suspects and alleged militants in distant lands are killed with impunity.
On the morning of January 11, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan, the deputy head of Iran's uranium enrichment facility at Natanz, was on his way to work when he was blown up by a magnetic bomb attached to his car door. He was 32 and married with a young son. He was not armed, nor anywhere near a battlefield.
Since 2010, three other Iranian nuclear scientists have been killed in similar circumstances, including Darioush Rezaeinejad, a 35-year-old electronics expert shot dead outside his daughter's nursery in Tehran last July. But instead of outrage, we have been treated to undisguised glee.
''On occasion, scientists working on the nuclear program in Iran turn up dead,'' bragged the Republican nomination candidate Rick Santorum. ''I think that's a wonderful thing, candidly.''
On the day of Roshan's death, Israel's military spokesman, Brigadier General Yoav Mordechai, announced: ''I don't know who settled the score with the Iranian scientist, but I certainly am not shedding a tear.''
This sentiment was echoed by the historian Michael Burleigh in the London Telegraph: ''I shall not shed any tears whenever one of these scientists encounters the unforgiving men on motorbikes.''
These ''men on motorbikes'' have been described as ''assassins''. But assassination is just a more polite word for murder. Indeed, our politicians and their securocrats cloak the premeditated, lawless killing of scientists in Tehran, of civilians in Waziristan, of politicians in Gaza, in an array of euphemisms: terminations, targeted killings, drone strikes.
Their purpose is to inure us to such state-sponsored violence against foreigners. In his acclaimed book On Killing, the retired US army officer Dave Grossman examines mechanisms that enable us not just to ignore but even cheer such killings: cultural distance (''such as racial and ethnic differences that permit the killer to dehumanise the victim''); moral distance (''the kind of intense belief in moral superiority''); and mechanical distance (''the sterile, Nintendo-game unreality of killing through a TV screen, a thermal sight, a sniper sight'').
Thus Western liberals, who fall over one another to condemn the death penalty for murderers as state-sponsored murder, fall quiet as their states kill nuclear scientists, terrorism suspects and alleged militants in faraway lands with impunity. Yet a ''targeted killing'', the human rights lawyer and anti-drone activist, Clive Stafford Smith, tells me, ''is just the death penalty without due process''.
Cognitive dissonance abounds. To torture a terrorism suspect, for example, is always morally wrong; to kill him, video-game style, with a missile fired from a remote-controlled drone, is morally justified.
Nor are we only talking about foreigners. Take Anwar al-Awlaki, an Islamist preacher, al-Qaeda supporter and US citizen. On September 30, a CIA drone killed Awlaki and another US citizen, Samir Khan. Two weeks later, another drone attack killed Awlaki's 21-year-old son, Abdel-Rahman. Neither father nor son were ever indicted, let alone tried or convicted, for committing a crime. Both were assassinated by the US government in violation of the Fifth Amendment (''No person shall be deprived of life without due process of law'').
An investigation by Reuters last October noted how, under the Obama administration, US citizens accused of involvement in terrorism can now be ''placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the President of its decisions … There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel … Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.''
Should ''secret panels'' and ''kill lists'' be tolerated in a liberal democracy, governed by the rule of law? Did the founders of the United States intend for its president to be judge, jury and executioner?
Imagine the response of our politicians and pundits to a campaign of assassinations against Western scientists conducted by, say, Iran or North Korea. When it comes to state-sponsored killings, the double standard is brazen. ''Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them,'' George Orwell observed, ''and there is almost no kind of outrage … which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by 'our' side.''
But how many more of our values will we shred in the name of security? This is not complicated; there are no shades of grey here. Do we disapprove of car bombings and drive-by shootings, or not? Do we consistently condemn state-sponsored, extrajudicial killings as acts of pure terror, no matter where in the world, or on whose orders, they occur? Or do we shrug our shoulders, turn a blind eye and risk descending into lawless barbarism?
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/statesponsored-killing-is-just-murder-by-another-name-20120118-1q6dv.html#ixzz1jt8pHQ5Y
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