Cameron Promises Us Hellfire
For a country that does not use the death penalty at home, killing its citizens remotely and without due process while they are abroad might give the impression that the government of the UK has decided it no longer needs to conform to the laws it has sworn to uphold. In following Obama’s US down the route of using technology to carry out the remote assassination of its own citizens, the British government reveals that it believes it is above the law.
Cameron, in giving the orders for the killing of the two accused British jihadists in Syria, has declared that the executive is now beyond the reach of the legislative part of our so-called democracy. If Tony Blair should be tried as a war criminal — and I believe he should be — then surely Cameron should be arrested and tried as a murderer. He has become the personification of the belief that his government has the “right to kill in the name of nationalist values” (Chris Hedges).
More disturbing still is the thought that when surveillance, technology and murder can be combined and used against our citizens abroad, surely the inevitable next step is that it will be used at home, too. If due process is rendered irrelevant for murder, then what hope is there for dissent and activism at home.
The erosion of civil liberties has been continuing for so long and has been championed by so much of the corporate media in concert with attacks on education and straightforward political and economic morality that the general reaction to the news of the drone attack is not only muted but almost self-congratulatory. “Look what we can do. If we don’t like what you believe, we’ll simply kill you — and any men, women, and children around you when our not-quite-as-accurate-as-we-want-people-to-believe Hellfire missiles find you.”
There will, of course, be the usual mealy-mouthed assertions that these men were a direct threat to the UK. There will be attempts to dress extra-judicial murder in the language of legalese. But in the end it comes down to the fact that the UK, like the US, is willing to inflict terror in a foreign land. And to assassinate and then to boast about it.
The only people who should be cheering — and they will — are those who make direct profit from war and who know that, by keeping us afraid of the terror promised by bad men and women from across the sea, we remain cowed and willing to hand over more of our liberty and continue to lessen our belief in democracy. As Chris Hedges says, “The war machine is not, and almost never has been, a force for liberty or democracy. It does not make us safe. It does not make the world safe.”
