Before December 30, 2009, in a more innocent time, back when the CIA trusted double agent recruits from the Jordanian intelligence service, drone attacks on suspected Al Qaeda bad eggs were just business, one of the many facets of the “war on terror.”

Then a trusted double agent the CIA recruited from the Jordanian intelligence service walked into a supposedly safe CIA outpost in Afghanistan and blew himself up, along with seven CIA agents.

As a consequence, when the new year dawned CIA drone attacks became personal. So personal, in fact, that the CIA kind of went apeshit last month in Pakistan, killing a grand total of three Al Qaeda operatives for the low low price of…123 dead civilians!

But who’s counting? A hundred dead here, a hundred dead there…pretty soon we’re talking about thousands of dead civilians killed in the CIA’s not necessarily efficient and somewhat cowardly prosecution of the “war on terror,” from cubicles somewhere in Virginia where they play Solitaire with their Blackwater, sorry, Xe, buddies in between video game-like killing sessions.

Set aside the facts that these are extrajudicial killings perpetrated in a sovereign nation, without any pretense of due process of law, by the CIA, with practically no oversight and hence no accountability, on “enemy combatants” whose identification as such is left solely to the big brains in the CIA.

And let’s leave for another time how the Washington Post and other media outlets identified the dead as “civilians,” even though they pull the trigger on suspected “enemy combatants” in the field, and the intelligence they gather leads to their comrades raining death from the sky on unsuspecting civilians, along with the odd “enemy combatant.”

Drone attacks killed 123 civilians and 3 Al Qaeda leaders in January 2010. In January 2009 two drone attacks killed 36 people. The difference? President Obama, who gave the green light for the CIA to bomb the fuck out of whoever, wherever they fancy, as part of his plan to reduce American casualties but still continue to kill Al Qaeda-related leaders or operatives or whatever they call them.

So Obama effectively decided to trade casualties of Americans, who volunteered for military service, for casualties of civilians who, by accident of birth, find themselves living in a war zone. Such is the honorable way the United States prosecutes the “war on terror.”

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