Left I on the News

Baitullah Mehsud was almost certainly a nasty piece of work, described as "Pakistan's Taliban commander" responsible for many suicide bombings and assassinations, and a suspect in the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. So what do you do with suspected assassins? Why, you assassinate them, of course. Naturally you do so in a way that won't lead corporate media to describe you as an assassin; instead of using a gun at close range, you use a drone firing missiles, a drone operated by someone thousands of miles away. How utterly civilized.

Of course, when you assassinate someone in this way, there is always "collateral damage." If you read The New York Times, you'll find this rather clinical description of the murder:

The strike took place as Mr. Mehsud, a diabetic in his late 30s who had been sick for some time, was on a drip infusion for a kidney ailment. He was being tended by his wife at the time. Pakistani security officials, who had viewed American video of the attack, said they were together in an upstairs bedroom.

They were both at the house of his father-in-law, Mulvi Ikramuddin, in the village of Zanghara, in South Waziristan. Mr. Ikramuddin’s brother, a medical practitioner, was treating him, the Taliban fighters said.

Now you can assume from this that Mehsud's wife was killed in the attack, and possibly the brother-in-law as well, although there's no explicit statement of that. The AP mentions that murder (of course without using that word) of the wife, but no one else, although in the print edition of the San Jose Mercury News that I read, even that minor mention was cut. Only the Washington Post brings us the full report: "Mehsud, along with his wife and seven guards, was killed in Wednesday's airstrike."

Note one other thing. Mehsud and the other eight were killed by the United States government. Why is that significant? Because, as AP notes, "Mehsud has no record of attacking targets in the West." He has done nothing to Americans, not killed or attempted to kill a single one as far as we can tell. Nevertheless, it was Americans that killed him. Legal basis? We don't need no steenkin' legal basis. We're the U.S. Might makes right, and we don't care who gets in the way. Especially because we know that we'll never be called murderers, or assassins, or terrorists. Not by anyone to whom 99.9% of Americans ever listen, anyway.