To the U.S. military, children are now legitimate targets in the “war on terror.” |
First Item:
In response to the U.S. military killing three children, aged 12, 10, and 8, in an airstrike in Helmand, Afghanistan in early December, 2012, the Military Times in a December 3, 2012 article entitled “Some Afghan kids aren’t bystanders,” quotes a U.S. official justifying the killings:
“It kind of opens our aperture,” said Army Lt. Col. Marion “Ced” Carrington, whose unit, 1st Battalion, 508th Parachute Infantry Regiment, was assisting the Afghan police. “In addition to looking for military-age males, it’s looking for children with potential hostile intent.”
This article also has a sidebar promoting a Related Reading dated 7/18 entitled: “Afghan kids recruited for suicide attacks.”
The New York Times reported that the families of the murdered children said the children were actually out gathering dung, which the villagers use for fuel.
Thus, the U.S. military not only wasn’t apologizing for ordering the deaths from above of these three children, saying, for example, that they were unfortunate collateral damage. No, they are justifying it.
To the U.S. military, children are now legitimate targets in the “war on terror.”
Second item:
In Newtown, Connecticut, at the Sandy Hook Elementary School, on Friday, December 14, 2012, 20 year-old Adam Lanza, dressed in military fatigues and flack jacket, carrying a 223 caliber Bushmaster Rifle, which is the weapon of choice by U.S. troops in Afghanistan and Iraq, along with two handguns, shoots his way into the school, killing the principal and six other adults and shoots execution style twenty other children, then shoots himself. He kills these twenty-six people after shooting his mother in the face multiple times at their home two miles away.
In response to this murder of innocents, twenty children and seven adults, President Obama and the rest of the nation grieve and express shock that children should be killed. Many speculate that Adam Lanza must be mentally ill. Many argue that gun control must be instituted.
No one among these public grievers such as the President feel the need to address what would seem to be the obvious connection between ordering drone attacks that have specifically attacked rescuers going to the aid of the first individuals hit by drone missiles, including children, and the Sandy Hook Massacre.
No one among these public grievers shedding these very public tears sees the need to wonder if the U.S. military’s now public announcement that they consider children legitimate targets for assassination has anything at all to do with the utter madness of a young American using the exact same weapon that U.S. troops are using on the ground to murder execution-style twenty children.
The difference must be that in the first instance, the children killed by U.S. airstrikes are not Americans and in the second instance the children killed are Americans. That must explain the reason why these two seemingly parallel and connected events are not treated as such by the mass media and government.
Certainly, the actions of the U.S. military and its Commander in Chief ordering that children and other innocents shall be targeted are not in any way, shape, or form similar to the actions of a lone young man murdering children and adults, including his own mother. In the first instance, these officials are waging a necessary war against those terrorists who are so depraved as to use children as targets and suicide bombers and in the second instance, you have a lone, unauthorized young man, committing an unspeakable atrocity.
This article originally appeared on dennisloo.com on December 19, 2012.