Who's Next?

Good Morning America led with the news that the America-born terrorist mastermind, Anwar al-Awlaki, had been killed in northern Yemen. George Stephanopolous and Brian Ross were beside themselves with excitement, and if you didn’t know they were talking about the assassination of a man never charged with a crime or tried in a court of law, you might have thought they were reviewing a particularly exciting Super Bowl game.

I don’t know if Anwar al-Awlaki was as diabolical as he is being portrayed in the American media, or if he is just being used to justify the American War on Muslim Terrorists.

The Obama Administration speaks with the same certainty about Awlaki that the Bush Administration spoke about Saddam Hussein’s nuclear and biological weapons and the direct threat they posed to America.

Let’s not forget that the Bush gang cooked the intelligence books to buttress their justification for the invasion of Iraq; let’s also not forget that the American intelligence community frequently gets it wrong.

Osama bin Laden. Anwar al-Awlaki. Who will be the next terror czar to be taken out by the United States or its proxies? Who will be the next to die because of his “potential” threat to the United States?

I’m not making apologies for terrorists, but there is something deeply disturbing about the United States ceding to itself the power and authority to act as judge, jury and executioner, wherever and whenever it wants. How do such actions make the United States safer? Yes, Osama bin Laden is dead, and Anwar al-Awlaki is dead, but in killing them, how many additional martyrs has the United States created?

I felt a little sick to my stomach as I listened to George Stephanopolous and Brian Ross, watched as ABC’s slick graphics simulated how the American military’s technological wizardry tracked al-Awlaki’s every move. GMA’s infatuation with wizardry overshadowed any need to raise larger questions about the threat al-Awlaki posed or the legality of killing him without evidence or trial.

The website www.costsofwar.org estimates the monetary costs of the Iraq and Afghanistan invasions at $3.7 trillion. Six thousand two hundred and thirty American service people have died, thousands more have been maimed or scared for life. The number of civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan is routinely underestimated by the United States, and a reliable count of the number of wounded or displaced human beings is almost impossible to come by, though after a decade of continuous war, it stands to reason that the number is very large.

And as the War on Muslim Terrorists drags on year after year with no end in sight, as the number of innocent victims grows, so does distrust and hatred of the United States.