This week, a family who fell victim to one of U.S. President Barack Hussein Obama’s drone strikes, by losing their mother/grandmother, visited the U.S. Congress in the U.S. to plead the case of all of the innocents being murdered by the deadly remote control airplanes, many being manned from Arizona, by Government employees who have recently come under attack for bilking more than $1 million out of the government through fraud. (See story here: National Guard “Good ‘ol Boys” Steal More than $1 Million Dollars From Deployed Troops)
The Rehman family, from Pakistan, came to the U.S. and confronted Congress and told their tale to the American media this week. The patriarch of the family, whose mother it was that was killed in this, just one of many drone attacks that have taken the lives of civilians around the world, told media outlet The Guardian, “I want them to know the drones are having an impact on our lives. It’s hitting our elders. It took my mom. It’s affected my children and we haven’t done anything wrong.”
Rehman’s mother, an elderly woman in her late sixties, was gardening, teaching Rehman’s daughter how to tell when Ocra is ready to be picked when the drone attacked. One of the stories the family was later told was that there had been a militant on a motorcycle at the location where the old woman had been killed, just ten minutes before the bombing, but that by the time the drone got there, the militant was gone.
Representative Alan Grayson, a democrat, representing Florida’s ninth district, told a Guardian reporter that the purpose of the family’s visit was “simply to get people to start to think through the implications of killing hundreds of people ordered by the president, or worse, unelected and unidentifiable bureaucrats within the Department of Defense without any declaration of war.”
“Under many people’s view of international law, they’re all illegal. All these attacks are illegal. The UN charter, as was discussed with great vehemence during the recent debate about military intervention in Syria, the UN charter sanctions the use of force only when a country is under attack, in self-defense, or when it’s been sanctioned by the UN security council.
“It is an abuse of the term ‘self-defense’ to say that our launching drone attacks in Yemen or elsewhere in the world qualifies. The fact that the technology is there doesn’t change the fact that it’s a use of force that ends up killing people.”
The phrase “Remember the Alamo,” has become synonymous with not giving up in American culture, stemming from the historic battle where roughly 200 American patriots fended off thousands of Mexican soldiers, killing or wounding 600 of them, for days before all of the Americans, save half a dozen or so who surrendered, were finally killed. Famous Americans whose lives were lost in the famous battle include James Bowie, William Travis, and Davy Crockett.
The Alamo itself, a very small structure originally used as a Spanish mission, has stood as a monument of American pride and strength ever since, though the city of San Antonio has grown up so much around it that this author passed it twice before finally seeing it when visiting it in the summer of 2007.
However, it seems that the city of San Antonio is in negotiations to surrender the Alamo to the United Nations. San Antonio’s mayor, Julián Castro, is currently dealing with the United Nations, attempting to designate the Alamo as a UN Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage Site. If the deal works out, visitors to the historic site may be seeing a blue UN flag flying above the historic shrine of liberty in the future.
No comments:
Post a Comment