A Depressingly Accurate Caricature of Today’s United States — Pakistani Drone Victim Rafiq ur Rehman’s Trip to America — and to a Government that Was too Busy Doing More Wrong to See Him

© 2013 Peter Free

 

04 November 2013

 

 

Evil’s banality looks exactly like this

 

Pakistani Rafiq ur Rehman’s innocent mother was blown up by an American drone in October last year:

 

 

"On October 24, 2012, a CIA drone killed my mother and injured my children," Rehman said, speaking through a translator. And so began the first time members of Congress heard a drone victim tell their story.

 

"Nobody has ever told me why my mother was targeted that day," he continued.

 

"Some media outlets reported that the attack was on a car, but there is no road alongside my mother's house. Others reported that the attack was on a house. But the missiles hit a nearby field, not a house. All of them reported that three, four, five militants were killed. But only one person was killed that day.

 

"She was the string that held our family together. Since her death, the string has been broken, and life has not been the same. We feel alone and we feel lost."

 

© 2013 Rania Khalek, Drone Victims Tell Empty US House Their Story; Is America Listening?, TruthOut (01 November 2013) (paragraph split)

 

Ordinarily, one would think that this would be a riveting story.  But only four members of Congress attended Representative Alan Grayson’s formal hearing with Mr. Rehman.

 

And, according to Rania Khalek, President Obama was reportedly (see here and here) meeting with the executive heads of:

 

 

(a) Northrup Grumman, which makes drones,

 

and

 

(b) Lockheed Martin, which builds both drones and the Hellfire II missiles that some of them shoot.

  

Consider the vignette as a political cartoon

 

The recently bereaved Mr. Rehman, and his two young children, made the long journey from North Waziristan to the United States, so as to highlight the illegal brutality of America’s indiscriminate drone murder program.

 

Congress, however, was too busy to see him because its loud-mouthed members were out and about thinking of ways in which to destroy the United States — by doing nothing of significance about any of the problems that beset us.

 

And the President metaphorically slapped Mr. Rehman up-side his (apparently not yet cynical) head by meeting with, and presumably encouraging, the arms manufacturers — who had made it possible to kill Mr. Rehman’s mother, without batting an American eye.

 

 

The moral? —  On the one hand, humanity, suffering and personal sacrifice — On the other, callous indifference and lie-telling campaigning

 

America’s murderously willful ignorance is Evil wearing a white suit.