America Doesn't Acknowledge

America Doesn't Acknowledge

Somebody shot a missile at a house where a top Pakistan-Taliban leader may have been, and killed one of his wives. If they did all the due diligence and were convinced he was in there, and felt their chances of killing him elsewhere were limited, this was probably a legitimate act of war, and we should regret they didn't get their man, not only that they did kill his wife. Recent history supplies quite a number of demonstrations that killing top terrorists saves lots of innocent lives.

The part of the story where I grimaced cynically hwever, was this:

The U.S. Embassy had no comment Wednesday. Washington generally does not
acknowledge the missile strikes, which are fired from unmanned drones. In the
past, however, American officials have said the missiles have killed several
important al-Qaida operatives.

America, being big and powerful, doesn't see any need even to confirm when it carries out such attacks. Of course, there aren't any other forces in the area with the technical ability to fire missiles from drones, but that's not an argument for transparency.

Israel is packed with self-appointed so called "human rights organizations", and they routinely blame their country even for things it doesn't do. Their American counterparts, however, all the Andrew Sullivan's, Glenn Greenwalds, Juan Coles, Mondoweisses etc, can't be bothered. That is, they can't be bothered when it's their own country. They'll gladly pile on when it's Israel.

taken from Yaacov Lozowick's Ruminations