governments almost always commit the most violence (violence for political means which is terrorism) of any organization in any country
GREENWALD: ...So, imagine if there was any kind of balance whatsoever, where we knew the names of any of the victims of the indiscriminate violence of our own government, let alone the comprehensive coverage of the victims that is devoted when we are the victims of violence, how much that would affect the perception that we have of the violence that our own government perpetrates. We keep it so abstract. We usually just hear 14 people died. The Pentagon claims that it’s militants and terrorists. It’s left at that. At best, we hear they finally acknowledge four civilians are killed, but it’s kept very ethereal, very distant and abstract. We never learn their names, as you said. We never hear from their families. We never hear their life aspirations extinguished. And if there was just some attention paid to telling the stories of the victims of our own government’s violence, I think there would be a radical shift in how we perceive of ourselves, the role we play in the world and who bears blame in this conflict.
JEREMY SCAHILL: Well, I mean, look at how many times we read or hear reports that the United States has bombed a wedding party or a funeral. And there is never a description of, well, who was the bride, who was the groom, you know, who were the people that were killed, and what were their dreams. It’s unfathomable to me that if we had a wedding party in the United States that was somehow bombed in a terrorist incident, that we wouldn’t know the names of every single person who was killed. We would have heard about where the people were going to go on their honeymoon and, you know, the—what the bride looked like when she was preparing for it. We hear nothing about any of these people that are killed, with our tax dollars, in our name.
Trump just inked this deal with the Saudis for well over $100 billion. It could be as much as $400 billion when it’s all said and done. Defense stocks go to record highs. What does that—what are those weapons going to be used for? Well, in the immediate future, they’re going to be used for what they’re being used for now, which is to utterly destroy Yemen, where the United States and Saudi Arabia are absolutely razing to the ground the poorest country in the Arab world and have caused a catastrophic health crisis in that country, which already was facing a total completion of their water supply. We don’t think about victims of war in the same way that we talk about victims of school shootings in this country or victims of terrorism when it’s—when ISIS claims responsibility for it. It’s a problem.