Ayatollah Turns the Terrorism Tables

U.S. leaders got a dose of their own medicine Saturday when Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, called them out for supporting and practicing terrorism in the Middle East and beyond.

The official, political designations of such words as “terrorist” and “freedom fighter” given to militants fighting at home and abroad often reflect national interests, of course, with leaders of many countries, including the U.S., speaking and behaving as if their soldiers can do no wrong. Such glaring, self-interested bias naturally merits an examination of the facts. In Pakistan, for instance, research by The New American Foundation, a Washington, D.C., think tank, puts the total number of people killed by U.S. drone attacks between 2004 and 2011 as high as 2,464, with about 20 percent of them thought to have been civilians. –ARK

AP via Salon:

Iran’s supreme leader on Saturday accused the United States of supporting terrorism, pointing to American drone strikes in Pakistan and Afghanistan that he said have killed scores of civilians.

Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said a country whose military forces are responsible for such deaths can’t lecture the world about fighting terror.

… Khamenei said Iran was a victim of what he called U.S. “terrorism” for the 1988 downing of an Iranian passenger plane by the warship USS Vincennes, which killed all 290 people aboard. The U.S. Defense Department said at the time that the crew mistook the plane for a hostile aircraft, which Iran rejects.

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