Wanted: Military-Age Males

Trey Smith

This morning [Tuesday, May 29], the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths...

For the moment, leave the ethical issues to the side that arise from viewing “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants”; that’s nothing less than sociopathic, a term I use advisedly, but I discuss that in the separate, longer piece I’ve written.
~ from “Militants”: Media Propaganda by Glenn Greenwald ~

What Greenwald is referring to above is one of the "jobs" of government that few people grasp. Government is in the business of providing contorted legal definitions for words and phrases! These definitions often contradict the definitions society has agreed on, but, in time, the government's definition becomes the standard definition. The reason that this is so is due to the fact that the compliant mainstream media repeats these fractured "definitions" ad nauseam and this insistent repetition worms its way into people's heads!

Take, for example, a subject I've written about numerous times before: unemployment. The standard definition of unemployment means not to be employed. But the US government has found that the standard definition doesn't work for their political agenda, so they have narrowed the definition considerably. If an individual is out of work, but isn't actively looking for jobs that can't be had anyway, they are excluded from the "official" definition. The same is true for those individuals who seek full-time employment, but can only muster a part-time job.

In this particular case, narrowing the definition allows the government to limit the number of individuals who are deemed officially to be unemployed and this limitation allows the government to publish an unemployment rate that is far lower than reality!

When it comes to civilian deaths caused by the drone campaign, the government goes in the opposite direction by expanding the definition of the word, militant. By including almost everyone in a particular geographic location, government officials can look at us with a straight face and declare that ONLY "militants," not any civilians, were killed!

Imagine if you or I employed this same strategy in defining the word, pedophile. Instead of using it solely to identify those individuals who are sexually aroused by and victimize children, we included every person the pedophile comes in contact with on a daily basis (e.g., barber, banker, waitress, sales clerk, minister, etc.). We could then tell our neighbors with a straight face that our town is being overrun with pedophiles and every one of them needs to be locked up with the key thrown away!