soldiers in a war on “terror” not a state, have no protection under the Geneva Convention), it is sick, almost as sick as the CIA practice of striking funerals for the victims of their strikes. If the list of nations that engage in state sponsored terrorism were anything but a joke, Obama’s removal of Cuba from the list would have been accompanied by the addition of his administration to it. In Yemen, sales of pharmaceuticals for sleeping, anxiety, and depression increased dramatically at the same time as the U.S. drone campaign in Yemen was ramped up. In an interview with the Guardian, a 13-yearold Yemeni boy named Mohammed Tuaiman said, “A lot of the kids in this area wake up from sleeping because of nightmares from [drones] and some now have mental problems. They turned our area into hell and continuous horror, day and night, we even dream of them in our sleep.” This was after his father and brother had been killed in drone strikes. He was killed several months later. A Pakistani boy, Zubair
photo by new york times
Rehman, testified before Congress in 2013, “I no longer love blue skies.” A drone strike killed his grandmother in 2012, and when the skies are cloudy, drones do not fly. Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni youth activist, delivered a plea before the Senate in 2013 to end the drone strikes in his country, six days after one of the strikes hit his home village. He was educated in America, and his association with America caused his Yemeni friends to ask him why the United States was terrifying poor farmers in a remote region of the country. He had no response. As I noted above, the New York Times rebuked Raul Castro’s perfunctory answer to questions about his country’s human rights abuses. What did the press secretary for our “articulate statesman” have to say after drone strikes killed U.S. citizen Anwar al Awlaki and, several days later, his 16-year-old son (who was not implicated in terrorism)? Then-White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs is on video responding, “I would suggest that you should have a far more
SPRING 2016
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