Do you know how many countries we are bombing? Go ahead. Try to guess how many.

You probably can't, and that is an incredibly awful thing about our country.
We've bombed brown-skinned people in seven different countries in the past few months and most Americans couldn't care less.

If you ask people in any other nation on Earth who their country is bombing the majority could tell you. America is the awful exception. Our indifference about who we are killing says something about our values, and that something isn't good.

America has a very long history of racist foreign policy.
From post-Civil War Latin American policy, to the Philippine Occupation, to the Internment of Japanese during WWII.

Generally our foreign policy is less overtly racist now. At least today's politicians will deny being racist anyway.
It's not hard to find incidents of our troops calling locals "ragheads" and "sandn*ggers", not to mention countless act is individual racism against people who may or may not look muslim here at home, but I want to focus on the policy itself.
It's a policy that focuses on mulims, while ignoring the fact that right-wing terrorists (mostly white) at home have killed twice as many Americans over the last 14 years.

What is the value of an innocent life?

The answer to that question depends on the color of their skin and their nationality.
When a drone strike killed two white, western hostages, President Obama publicly apologized.
But what happens when the innocent people getting killed aren't white and western?
What if they are, say, Yemeni police officers.

It seems the Obama Administration has known for years how Salem and Waleed died, and what a terrible mistake it was. Yet the President refuses to admit it.
Instead of an official apology, a few months after my visit, members of my family were handed $100,000 in sequentially-marked U.S. dollars in a plastic bag. A Yemeni security service official was given the unpleasant task of handing this over. I looked him in the eye and asked how this was acceptable, and whether he would admit the money came from America. He shrugged and said: "Can't tell you. Take the money."
What is the value of a human life? The secret payment to my family represents a fraction of the cost of the operation that killed them. This seems to be the Obama administration's cold calculation: Yemeni lives are cheap. They cost the President no political or moral capital.

Faisal's family are the lucky ones. As it stands, the United States plans no compensation payments to the families of innocent victims in Iraq and Syria.
Of course even before compensation is discussed we would have to admit actually killing innocent civilians, and until May the Pentagon didn't admit to any dead civilians, despite dropping thousands of bombs.
Those two children that the Pentagon finally admitted killing were from an airstrike last August.

Earlier this week Nasir ­al-Wuhayshi, one of the top leaders of al-Qaeda, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen. At least the CIA thinks he was. The thing is, Nasir wasn't even targeted. No one was. The site was destroyed because the target was possibly a terrorist hideout.
Maybe the CIA got lucky this time. If so, then great. But by getting "lucky" it also implies that we are more often "unlucky" in who we kill.

"The joke was that when the CIA sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers – but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued."
- NY Times, 2012

Our drone war really is nothing but a Global Assassination Program, complete with Secret Kill Lists and Terror Tuesday.
If that isn't a problem with you, consider that the President is the judge, jury, and executioner, without review or appeal. A concept incompatible with a free society and rule of law.

Probably the most convoluted rationalization for our Global Assassination Program is to "save lives". Also known as a Weaponization of Human Rights. Never mind that bombing your way to peace amounts to f*cking your way to virginity. Never mind the piles of dead children along the way (aka "Oops"). Never mind that it almost never works for achieving peace or greater human rights.
Nevertheless, this short cut has convinced some human rights groups to actually buy into this marketing scheme.
It might be easier to make this compromise of values when the innocent victims aren't "real people like you and me."

“The war on terror has been the basis for an ideology of racism, Islamophobia, and a climate of massive repression.”
- Ralph Schoenman

The War on Terror has always had a tinge of racism, but slowly that racism is becoming more overt.

Does anyone doubt that if Obama's bombs were killing nice white British teeangers or smiling blond Swiss infants - rather than unnamed Yemenis, Pakistanis, Afghans and Somalis - that the reaction to this sustained killing would be drastically different? Does anyone doubt that if his overhead buzzing drones were terrorizing Western European nations rather than predominantly Muslim ones, the horror of them would be much easier to grasp?
Amazingly, some Democratic partisans, in order to belittle these injustices, like to claim that only those who enjoy the luxury of racial and socioeconomic privilege would care so much about these issues. That claim is supremely ironic. It reverses reality. That type of privilege is not what leads one to care about and work against these injustices. To the contrary, it's exactly that privilege that causes one to dismiss concerns over these injustices and mock and scorn those who work against them. The people who insist that these abuses are insignificant and get too much attention are not the ones affected by them, because they're not Muslim, and thus do not care.

Some will justify this global assassination program based on the fact that most of the brown-skinned people getting killed are "bad guys". How do they know that most are "bad guys"? Because government officials tells them so.

Ironically, government officials are also the ones defending the shooting of brown-skinned people on American streets because they were "bad guys". The only differences are that when its done on American streets we actually know and care who we killed, while there is a distinct lack of outrage against our racist War on Terror.
Those who seek to seize the moral high ground against racism should not discriminate between which racist act outrages them.

So who are we bombing?

The question of who Americans thought we were bombing was asked in a survey last September.
The results were pathetic.

Less than a quarter of the public are aware that the US has recently launched strikes in Somalia, Pakistan or Yemen. 30% also say, incorrectly, that the US has recently conducted bombings in Syria and only 32% of Americans know that the US has not in fact launched air or drone strikes in Syria.

What makes this survey particularly interesting is that it then asks people who you would support bombing. If Americans had heard the country's name on the news, they generally supported bombing that country.
Finding the country on a map, however, is another story.
Philippines is not one of those countries, although Obama has bombed it via drones in the past.

Je suis la victime de drones?