Written by Elle Kurancid   

Our refrain is as follows:
"Will I be next?"
"Getting it right this time."
"And so, too, does the fear."

Will Nabeela Rehman of North Waziristan, Pakistan, be next?
"Getting it right this time."
"And so, too, does the fear."
Will her brother Zubair be next?
"Getting it right this time."
"And so, too, does the fear."
Another member of the Rehman family, will they be next?
"Getting it right this time."
"And so, too, does the fear."
Who will be next? That is, who from what The Universal Declaration of Human Rights calls "the human family"—a family that includes all human beings—will be next?

"Look! Up in the sky! " It's a V-shaped flight formation of America's political hawks and political doves. That "V" stands for "Versus" …as stated by former President George W. Bush during a meeting with his national security advisers on September 12, 2011: "America is united. The freedom-loving nations of the world stand by our side. This will be a monumental struggle of good versus evil, but good will prevail."

That "V" also stands for "Values" …as stated by President Barack Obama during his State of the Union Address on January 20, 2015: "There's one last pillar to our leadership—and that's the example of our values. As Americans, we respect human dignity, even when we're threatened, which is why I've prohibited torture, and worked to make sure our use of new technology like drones is properly constrained."

A struggle. An example. A policy to fly with the "freedom-lovers" whose "freedoms" fly with America. In other words, to borrow timeless scrutiny from birdwatcher (watchdog) Noam Chomsky's lecture The New War Against Terror, delivered at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on October 18, 2001: "The hawks said, 'ok, let's bomb 'em.' The doves said, 'wait a minute, let's see if the rumors are true. And if the rumors are true, then let's bomb them. Because they are a threat to the United States.'"

The civilians, trying to make sense of rumor and truth, will say: "Look! Up in the sky!" "It's a hawk!" "It's a dove!" "It's a plane!" "It's a drone?" "It's a world superpower!" Thirteen-year-old Zubair Rehman of North Waziristan, Pakistan, will add to this concatenation: "I no longer love blue skies."

On October 24, 2012, two Hellfire missiles, under the direction of the covert CIA program of targeted killings, murdered Zubair's grandmother, Mamana Bibi, 68, outside of her North Waziristan home. "She was standing in our family fields gathering okra to cook that evening," Zubair recalled. He and his sisters, then eight-year-old Nabeela and seven-year-old Asma, were in the same field as their grandmother at the time of the strike. "I saw her shoes," Nabeela recalled. "We found her mutilated body a short time afterwards. It had been thrown quite a long distance away by the blast and it was in pieces."

On October 29, 2013, the Rehman family travelled over 7,000 miles to Capitol Hill, and Zubair testified before American lawmakers at a congressional briefing: "I no longer love blue skies. In fact, I now prefer gray skies. The drones do not fly when the skies are gray. And for a short period of time, the mental tension and fear eases. When the skies brighten, though, the drones return, and so, too, does the fear."

What's rumor, and what's truth? Zubair has made sense of what he can: "My grandmother was nobody's enemy." A reminder to the V-formations of a world superpower, on behalf of the human family, that perhaps a "suspected militant" is "nobody's enemy." That "suspected militant," she was "nobody's enemy."

Zubair, Nabeela and Asma each sustained shrapnel injuries during the strike and were consequently hospitalized. Additionally, three-year-old Safdar, brother of Zubair, Nabeela and Asma, four of their cousins and a friend—all but one of them children—were injured. With respect to the consequences of the hawkish "let's bomb 'em" and the dovish "then let's bomb them" mentalities, Nabeela testified on Capitol Hill: "I wasn't scared of drones before, but now when they fly overhead I wonder, 'Will I be next?'"

And a year later, there it was, a possible answer to Nabeela's legitimate question, not from the American lawmakers to whom she testified, but rather from the front cover of the August 16, 2014 issue of The Economist. Now let me explain: this is the kind of cover that alludes to, and even flaunts, an "operations without borders" type of policy across the board. It makes sense of these dark, blue-sky days of security concerns and security-with-impunity concerns.

So, what did The Economist say? "Back to Iraq" was the headline, its cover story an evaluation of American military action against the Islamic State. It's not the bold, movie-sequel-evoking headline to which I'd like to focus our attention but its bolded tagline, down in the bottom right-hand corner of the page, which reads: "Getting it right this time."

Article by Elle Kurancid
www.ellekurancid.com

Note: For more on the topic of permanent war discourse and targeted killings, please refer to Glenn Greenwald's recent article for The Intercept titled "Burning Victims to Death: Still a Common Practice" (https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/02/04/burning-victims-death-still-common-practice/), in addition to Amnesty International's 2013 report titled "'Will I be Next?' US Drone Strikes in Pakistan" (http://www.amnesty.org/ar/library/asset/ASA33/013/2013/en/041c08cb-fb54-47b3-b3fe-a72c9169e487/asa330132013en.pdf )