MERCHANTS OF DEATH

Why do they hate us? In the novel "Bloodmoney" a young man in mountainous Pakistan near the Afghan border survives a U.S. drone strike on his house, in which the rest of his family is killed. So begins a tale in which a new breed of CIA operatives in the Mideast become the mysterious victims of assassination. These new spies are loaded with money, not appropriated by Congress, but gained through crooked dealing with compromised financial partners. They are able to buy their way into positions of influence in the Middle East. Pilot-less aircraft have been around a long time. For decades kids with model airplanes flew them, and aboard ship we trained our anti-aircraft guns on radio-controlled fighters from World War II. In today's War On Terror the Air Force has gone farther. From a base in Utah, halfway round the globe, technicians, plugged in to the latest intelligence, are targeting sites where suspected Al Qaida members live and travel. Of course in war, mistakes are made, and collateral damage occurs. This week we learned how the President, on Terror Tuesdays, chooses which suspects will be killed in this manner. Indeed, why do they hate us? Men from Saudi Arabia were outraged that the U.S. had placed Air Force fighter aircraft and pilots in their sacred land. Osama bin Laden was one, and 15 of the 19 attackers on September 11 were Saudis. Our Congressional-Military-Industrial Complex creates and supplies weapons from most of the fifty states where disarmament would be an economic disaster. Whether it is the Rocket-Propelled Grenade (RPG), the Stinger anti-aircraft missle, the IED (Improvised Explosive Device), or the Land Mine, it was invented and manufactured in the USA. We are killing our own - and thousands of others - with our exports to a weaponized world.