Insatiable Mandate:

US Will Hit Lots and Lots of Mosques, Schools and Hospitals in Syria

Rasa - The Trumpsters have a terrible vision for the future in Syria: Swarms of drones controlled by computers hitting lots and lots of schools, mosques and hospitals in defiance of International Law and for many years to come.

News ID: 428275

Date: 19 March 2017 - 22:29

RNA - New evidence is emerging that the US Air Force is doing just that with reports of rising death tolls in places like Aleppo province, where on Thursday alone a US airstrike hit a mosque in the Northwest village of al-Jinah. The mosque had over 300 people inside at the time of the attack.

The Pentagon initially denied they had attacked the mosque, but did claim they attacked an “Al-Qaeda meeting” right across the street from it. They then speculated that someone else might have just happened to bomb the mosque around the same time! The recovery of US bomb fragments from the mosque, however, changed this narrative, this fake news.

By all accounts, this is how the US military envisions Syria War II from now:

- The depiction is not a single, ominous drone high over a mosque in a Northwest village of Aleppo province, or another flashpoint in the long war on Syria. Instead, it is dozens of synchronized drones, looking like a swarm of wasps, slicing through the Syrian airspace, targeting everything and everyone.

- It’s a perfect day for the drone lobby and its power, which points to revived Military-Industrial Complex under the administration of President Donald Trump. This includes private contractors that are flocking to this new war business, raking it in from the new drone campaign: Advanced Concepts Enterprises, BAE Systems, Booz Allen Hamilton, General Dynamics, Intrepid Solutions, L-3 Communications, MacAulay-Brown, SAIC, Transvoyant, Worldwide Language Resources, and Zel Technologies.

- Just like in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria and Yemen, these hired guns are providing support for military intelligence and “targeted killing” in Syria. From faraway locations they are providing such services to the Pentagon regime ranging from surveillance equipment and weapons to precision-guided bombs, propaganda experts, and imagery analysts. These contractors are taking part in making decisions as to who to kill and are allowed to fire missiles. They play a key role in military missions on the “kill list” by the very nature of their analytical work.

- Drones are also the War Party’s tool of choice for taking out anyone it wants inside Syria. The idea is not to put American troops in harms’ way. Drones aren’t the exclusive weapon though - traditional airstrikes (with help from the Israeli air force), “direct action” by the secretive, elite Joint Special Operations Command, and other attacks by ground troops and allies have also been reported, with deadly consequences for civilians on the ground.

- The US is targeting people whose names they don’t know. While the Trump officials did try to frame the latest airstrike in al-Jinah as going after “high-level Al-Qaeda leaders who are planning attack against the US,” many strikes go unreported and after innocent civilians whose identities the US doesn’t reveal. The so-called “signature strikes” that we now know only target civilian objects began under Obama and have already been expanded by Trump. As previously, this is all about the civilian tally. To this end, President Trump has given a series of speeches broadly outlining the security underpinning for strikes, but he never talks about specific legal cases. In fact, he doesn’t officially acknowledge the escalation of the illegal conflict at all, let alone the new drone warfare.

Long story short, this is not about International Law on America’s right to self-defense which provides sound legal basis for targeting terrorists in Syria. This is not about “due process” either. Taking into account the realities of the US-led regime change campaign, Trump is yet to detail that “due process,” nor is he able to come clean when it comes to specific questions like civilian casualties or the reasons they were killed in the recent mosque attack. Instead, the Trumpsters change the story, until they eventually admit responsibility and promise to investigate. No accountability here though.

The Pentagon has a history of initially denying involvement in such atrocities. This doesn’t change the fact that people are still getting killed and no one or no contractor is ever being held to account. Under Trump’s insatiable mandate, these war criminals do not have to respond to international requests seeking more information about their crimes against humanity in general.

As for international governments, all efforts at stopping the new wave of violence will fail unless we understand where it is coming from. The United Nations has mostly kept silent. Perhaps, in a new report it will raise concerns about the new escalation and the new atrocities. But that’s all really. Security Council members like France and Britain support the regime change campaign anyhow, while some Arab regimes maintain an uneasy combination of military support and apparent acquiescence. To say the least, it's the world's biggest crisis and we know who's behind the new killing in Syria.

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