palestijntje
11-02-2015, 07:42
On January 26,xthe New York Timesxclaimedxthat “a CIAxdrone strike in Yemen. . . .xkilled three suspected Qaeda fighters on Monday.” How did they know the identity of the dead? As usual, it was in part because “American officials said.” There was not a whiff of skepticism about this claim despite the fact that “a senior American official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, declined to confirm the names of the victims” and “axC.I.A. spokesman declined to comment.”
ThatxNYTxarticle did cite what it called “a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), whoxprovided the names of the three victims, one of whom was “Mohammed Toiman al-Jahmi, a Yemeni teenager whose father and brother were previously killed in American drone strikes.” The article addedxthat “the Qaeda member did not know Mr. Jahmi’s age but said he was a member of the terrorist group.”
In fact, asxthe Guardianxreported today, “Mr. Jahmi’s age” was 13 on the day the American drone ended his life.xJust months earlier, the Yemeni teenagerxtold that paper that “he lived in constant fear of the ‘death machines’ in the sky that had already killed his father and brother.” It was 2011 when “an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.” In the strike two weeks ago, Mohammed was killed along with his brother-in-law and a third man.
Mohammed’sxolder brother Maqded said he “saw all the bodies completely burned, like charcoal” – undoubtedly quite similar to the way the Jordanian combat pilot looked after he was burned alive last month by ISIS. That’s not an accident: the weapons the U.S. military uses arexdeliberately designed to incinerate people to death. The missiles shot by their dronesxarexnamedx“Hellfire.” Of his younger, now-deceased 13-year-old brother, Maqded toldxthe Guardian: “He wasn’t a member of al-Qaida. He was a kid.”
There are a few observations worth making about this repugnant episode:
(1)xThe U.S. media just got done deluging the American public with mournful stories about the Jordanian soldier, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, making him a household name. As is often the case for victims of America’s adversaries, the victim is intensely humanized. The public learns all sorts of details about their lives, hears from their grieving family members, wallows in the tragedy of their death.
By stark contrast, I’d be willing to betxthat the name “Mohammed Tuaiman al-Jahmi” is never uttered on mainstream American television. Most Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display forxvictims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans werexswamped with storiesabout an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamoxfor seven yearsxwithout charges).
http://https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/10/u-s-media-13-year-old-yemeni-boy-killed-u-s-drone/
ThatxNYTxarticle did cite what it called “a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula” (AQAP), whoxprovided the names of the three victims, one of whom was “Mohammed Toiman al-Jahmi, a Yemeni teenager whose father and brother were previously killed in American drone strikes.” The article addedxthat “the Qaeda member did not know Mr. Jahmi’s age but said he was a member of the terrorist group.”
In fact, asxthe Guardianxreported today, “Mr. Jahmi’s age” was 13 on the day the American drone ended his life.xJust months earlier, the Yemeni teenagerxtold that paper that “he lived in constant fear of the ‘death machines’ in the sky that had already killed his father and brother.” It was 2011 when “an unmanned combat drone killed his father and teenage brother as they were out herding the family’s camels.” In the strike two weeks ago, Mohammed was killed along with his brother-in-law and a third man.
Mohammed’sxolder brother Maqded said he “saw all the bodies completely burned, like charcoal” – undoubtedly quite similar to the way the Jordanian combat pilot looked after he was burned alive last month by ISIS. That’s not an accident: the weapons the U.S. military uses arexdeliberately designed to incinerate people to death. The missiles shot by their dronesxarexnamedx“Hellfire.” Of his younger, now-deceased 13-year-old brother, Maqded toldxthe Guardian: “He wasn’t a member of al-Qaida. He was a kid.”
There are a few observations worth making about this repugnant episode:
(1)xThe U.S. media just got done deluging the American public with mournful stories about the Jordanian soldier, Moaz al-Kasasbeh, making him a household name. As is often the case for victims of America’s adversaries, the victim is intensely humanized. The public learns all sorts of details about their lives, hears from their grieving family members, wallows in the tragedy of their death.
By stark contrast, I’d be willing to betxthat the name “Mohammed Tuaiman al-Jahmi” is never uttered on mainstream American television. Most Americans, by design, will have no idea that their government just burned a 13-year-old boy to death and then claimed he was a Terrorist. If they do know, the boy will be kept hidden, dehumanized, nameless, without the aspirations or dreams or grieving parents on display forxvictims of America’s adversaries (just as Americans werexswamped with storiesabout an Iranian-American journalist detained in Iran for two months, Roxana Saberi, while having no idea that their own government imprisoned an Al Jazeera photojournalist, Sami al-Haj, in Guantanamoxfor seven yearsxwithout charges).
http://https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/10/u-s-media-13-year-old-yemeni-boy-killed-u-s-drone/