Dubious Kill Lists Started Long Before Drones and Included States

The White House’s “kill list” (a regularly updated chart of the world’s most wanted terrorists used by President Barack Obama and the CIA during kill or capture debates) is not new. Indeed, such breaches of international laws, illegitimate actions, and horrific war crimes against humanity were actually mundane, having occurred for decades. In addition, not only have the secretive kill lists included suspected terrorists but American citizens and sovereign states which have not submitted to American Exceptionalism.

For example, Ben Linder, who was born on around this same time (July 7) in 1959, brought electricity to El Cua, a small city in the mountains of Nicaragua. As an American citizen, he decided to trade-in his affluent lifestyle to participate in Nicaragua’s 1979 democratic revolution. After assisting with plumbing and sanitation and small industries in El Cua for one year, he decided to stay longer. In fact, and despite the White House’s Contra terrorists who threatened him and roamed Nicaragua massacring villagers, he had never been happier.

Above all, Linder could not bear to leave the children of El Cua. Because he turned “I” into “We,” children’s bellies were no longer bloated. Neither were they infected with deadly parasites. Many also recovered from Malaria, their bodies no longer covered with fleas or horsefly bites, their eyes no longer hollow from chronic hunger. The long nights punctuated by gunfire, though, still troubled him and villagers. To protect their rural farms and families from Contra terrorists, village men and boys started to carry guns.

In 1987, the White House ordered a Contra leader to dispatch another terrorist gang to where Linder and his Nicaraguan co-workers were beginning to work on another hydro-plant, even mining roads with explosives. (U.S. claymore and tank mines were always used to cover Contra retreats while sending messages of fear and death to those who tried to follow, a kind of psychological warfare.) As the sun rose, Linder and his unarmed crew were ambushed and gunned down by Contra thugs. Linder was outright executed.

While Ben Linder left the world at only age twenty-seven, face down in a shallow grave with the back of his skull blasted away by a U.S. manufactured automatic rifle, four years after dedicating his life to serve the oppressed, a young democracy was also murdered, assassinated by the White House. Although the Sandinistas had won a popular election and improved Nicaragua’s literacy rate (40-90%), its transportation and infrastructure, and its employment opportunities, President Ronald Reagan still labeled them a threat.

After ten years of White House and Contra terrorist attacks, like blowing up bridges, mining harbors, destroying oil refineries, torpedoing fishing fleets, randomly massacring villagers, imposing a punitive blockade, torturing and executing thousands of innocent Nicaraguans, assassinating government officials and labor activists, slashing open pregnant bellies with bayonets, jamming guns in peasant’s mouths and then killing them, the Sandinistas were forced to ration food and impose conscription.

There was no end to the White House’s and Contra’s kill list. In fact, 60,000 Nicaraguans were killed. A sovereign state, Nicaragua, was murdered, too, as the U.S. spent millions of dollars in engineering elections, threatening the nation with preemptive wars, and by finally militarily occupying the nation with terrorists. Exhausted, Nicaraguans eventually voted for the U.S.-backed centre-right National Opposition Union. They had had enough. Physically and psychologically terrorized, they wanted the White House’s kill list to end.

Even though Contra strikes have now become drone strikes, the “final moral calculation“ and overseeing the “kill list” remains the same: an illegal act of physical and psychological terrorism. Neither should there ever be a rule book for killing others, especially since the act of killing itself is an unruly action, an uncalculated risk that carries many unknown unknowns. Meanwhile, and almost thirty-years later, the power to curb the U.S. executive and its many rogue organizations have changed little.

Arguably, kill lists regarding both American citizens and sovereign states started many years ago. But then again, a remote world manufactures a remote past filled with murders and genocidal killings. Just as culpable are remote citizens who neglect their civic duties to engage in participatory democracy. But at least one American citizen, Ben Linder, decided to choose a different path than the mundane. In other words, Linder’s list consisted of life and revolutionary hope instead of killing and dystopian fatalism.

Note: See Michael K. Smith’s, “Portrait’s Of Empire: Unmasking Imperial Illusions from the ‘American Century’ to the ‘War on Terror,’” for the life and work and death of Ben Linder, pages 258-259.

Dallas Darling is the author of Politics 501: An A-Z Reading on Conscientious Political Thought and Action, Some Nations Above God: 52 Weekly Reflections On Modern-Day Imperialism, Militarism, And Consumerism in the Context of John‘s Apocalyptic Vision, and The Other Side Of Christianity: Reflections on Faith, Politics, Spirituality, History, and Peace. He is a correspondent for www.worldnews.com. You can read more of Dallas’ writings at www.beverlydarling.com and wn.com//dallasdarling.

(Note: See Michael K. Smith’s, “Portrait’s Of Empire: Unmasking Imperial Illusions from the ‘American Century’ to the ‘War on Terror,’” for the life and work and death of Bin Linder, pages 258-259.)