In the Vicinity

Trey Smith

I've been thinking a lot about the revelation that President Obama has redefined the word, militant, to mean "all military-age males [with]in a strike zone" (see yesterday's post, Wanted: Military-Age Males). It basically is a semantic subterfuge to hide from the American populace the number of innocent civilians that we are murdering through our drone program.

I was trying to think of a better example than yesterday's to drive this point home, so readers can understand the importance of this redefinition. If our domestic police forces defined the word, criminal, in the same way Obama defines the word, militant, we might end up with a lot of dead citizens in our communities.

The twisted rationale the Obama administration is employing is that any military-age males in the physical vicinity of suspected members of terrorist groups MUST be up to "no good" or they wouldn't be there in the first place. If these males were law-abiding folks, they would insure they stayed far away from these dastardly terrorists.

Suppose a local police department decides to use some form of deadly force to bring down a major drug kingpin or a gang leader. If the decision is made to move when this individual happens to be driving in his vehicle by your house and members of your family are killed, the news media would report that they too were criminals. They must have been! They were in the close vicinity of the "bad guy" and people in such a close proximity are assumed to be up to "no good."

Suppose this wanted individual just happens to live on your street. You may not be a friend of his; in fact, you may have nothing to do with him. You and your neighbors may have talked many times about how you wish he would move out of your neighborhood.

That matters not in this new way of seeing the world. If some of you are maimed or killed as the authorities move in to take out this fellow, you are deemed to be guilty because he moved into your neighborhood and you didn't immediately move out! If you all are as innocent as you claim to be, why did you stay?

What if this known "bad guy" happens to be a relative of yours? You may not approve of his actions and, maybe, you greatly dislike him. But what if he shows up at a funeral or wedding of a relative and it is then that the police decide to move in? All the various relatives killed in the attack will be deemed to be criminals too because only people up to "no good" would allow themselves to be in close proximity to this guy.

As I hope you easily can see, this sort of overly broad definition is a travesty. It scoops up people guilty of nothing more than going about their routine lives. If a targeted individual happens to cross their path when a drone missile or bomb is bearing down on the them, the average person automatically become part of the target as well.

Put another way, a military-age male doing nothing more than working in the family garden or walking to the market becomes a "militant" if he happens to cross paths with an individual or group being targeted by the US military...even if he has never met the person or the group of persons!!