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Obama personally oversees Al-Qaeda 'kill list': report
Yahoo ^
Posted on May 29, 2012 6:37:17 AM EDT by Sub-Driver
Obama personally oversees Al-Qaeda 'kill list': report AFPAFP – 56 mins ago
US President Barack Obama has personally overseen a top-secret process for determining which Al-Qaeda suspects should be placed on a "kill list," the New York Times reported Tuesday.
The Times, citing dozens of top officials and former advisers, said the administration had developed what it termed the "kill list" as part of a stepped-up drone war against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen.
"He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go," it quoted National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon as saying.
"His view is that he's responsible for the position of the United States in the world... He's determined to keep the tether pretty short."
The Times described the top-secret process, which begins with some 100 counter-terrorism officials sifting through biographies and "nominating" suspects in Yemen and Somalia to be added to the kill list during a secure video conference run by the Pentagon.
The CIA carries out a separate process for suspects in Pakistan, it said.
The nominations then go to Obama, who signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on especially complex and risky strikes in Pakistan -- about a third of the total, the Times said.
Obama personally approves the killing of top suspects, such as Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaqi -- a US citizen -- who was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
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Skip to comments.
Obama personally oversees Al-Qaeda 'kill list': report
Yahoo ^
Posted on May 29, 2012 6:37:17 AM EDT by Sub-Driver
Obama personally oversees Al-Qaeda 'kill list': report AFPAFP – 56 mins ago
US President Barack Obama has personally overseen a top-secret process for determining which Al-Qaeda suspects should be placed on a "kill list," the New York Times reported Tuesday.
The Times, citing dozens of top officials and former advisers, said the administration had developed what it termed the "kill list" as part of a stepped-up drone war against Al-Qaeda and its affiliates in Pakistan and Yemen.
"He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go," it quoted National Security Adviser Thomas Donilon as saying.
"His view is that he's responsible for the position of the United States in the world... He's determined to keep the tether pretty short."
The Times described the top-secret process, which begins with some 100 counter-terrorism officials sifting through biographies and "nominating" suspects in Yemen and Somalia to be added to the kill list during a secure video conference run by the Pentagon.
The CIA carries out a separate process for suspects in Pakistan, it said.
The nominations then go to Obama, who signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on especially complex and risky strikes in Pakistan -- about a third of the total, the Times said.
Obama personally approves the killing of top suspects, such as Qaeda preacher Anwar al-Awlaqi -- a US citizen -- who was killed by a US drone strike in Yemen last year.
(Excerpt) Read more at news.yahoo.com ...
Ugh... I get really worried anytime a President becomes determined to make decisions regarding military strategy.....
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You are really underestimating the left's ability to spin this and make it acceptable to them, 3333.
They will tell you that somehow it is more humane to kill these terrorists by firing hell fire missiles from a drone than to waterboard them and keep them alive in order to get information.
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You are really underestimating the left's ability to spin this and make it acceptable to them, 3333.
They will tell you that somehow it is more humane to kill these terrorists by firing hell fire missiles from a drone than to waterboard them and keep them alive in order to get information.
Its not more humane but its way more effecient.
Obama knows how to win wars the repub dont
The repub are weak and pathetic
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Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will
By JO BECKER and SCOTT SHANE
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=2&partner=MYWAY&ei=5065&pagewanted=print
WASHINGTON — This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.
President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.
“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”
It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”
Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.
In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s evolution since taking on the role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda.
They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”
His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.
The administration’s failure to forge a clear detention policy has created the impression among some members of Congress of a take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said.
Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.
But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda — just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan — have also tested both men’s commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”
Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.
Mr. Blair’s criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personal pique, nonetheless resonates inside the government.
William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough.
“One guy gets knocked off, and the guy’s driver, who’s No. 21, becomes 20?” Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. “At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?”
‘Maintain My Options’
A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind Mr. Obama on the second day of his presidency, providing martial cover as he signed several executive orders to make good on campaign pledges. Brutal interrogation techniques were banned, he declared. And the prison at Guantánamo Bay would be closed.
What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a few subtle loopholes. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.
It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, to his acceptance of the C.I.A.’s method for counting civilian casualties in drone strikes.
The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. The order prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closing once and for all the secret overseas “black sites” where interrogators had brutalized terrorist suspects.
“The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the rendition business,” Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that the C.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight. The order appeared to outlaw that.
Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of “detention facility” was inserted, excluding places used to hold people “on a short-term, transitory basis.” Problem solved — and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obama’s celebration.
“Pragmatism over ideology,” his campaign national security team had advised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.
Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Obama’s advisers had warned him against taking a categorical position on what would be done with Guantánamo detainees. The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.
Some detainees would be transferred to prisons in other countries, or released, it said. Some would be prosecuted — if “feasible” — in criminal courts. Military commissions, which Mr. Obama had criticized, were not mentioned — and thus not ruled out.
As for those who could not be transferred or tried but were judged too dangerous for release? Their “disposition” would be handled by “lawful means, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States and the interests of justice.”
A few sharp-eyed observers inside and outside the government understood what the public did not. Without showing his hand, Mr. Obama had preserved three major policies — rendition, military commissions and indefinite detention — that have been targets of human rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.
But a year later, with Congress trying to force him to try all terrorism suspects using revamped military commissions, he deployed his legal skills differently — to preserve trials in civilian courts.
It was shortly after Dec. 25, 2009, following a close call in which a Qaeda-trained operative named Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab had boarded a Detroit-bound airliner with a bomb sewn into his underwear.
Mr. Obama was taking a drubbing from Republicans over the government’s decision to read the suspect his rights, a prerequisite for bringing criminal charges against him in civilian court.
The president “seems to think that if he gives terrorists the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights, we won’t be at war,” former Vice President Dick Cheney charged.
Sensing vulnerability on both a practical and political level, the president summoned his attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., to the White House.
F.B.I. agents had questioned Mr. Abdulmutallab for 50 minutes and gained valuable intelligence before giving him the warning. They had relied on a 1984 case called New York v. Quarles, in which the Supreme Court ruled that statements made by a suspect in response to urgent public safety questions — the case involved the location of a gun — could be introduced into evidence even if the suspect had not been advised of the right to remain silent.
Mr. Obama, who Mr. Holder said misses the legal profession, got into a colloquy with the attorney general. How far, he asked, could Quarles be stretched? Mr. Holder felt that in terrorism cases, the court would allow indefinite questioning on a fairly broad range of subjects.
Satisfied with the edgy new interpretation, Mr. Obama gave his blessing, Mr. Holder recalled.
“Barack Obama believes in options: ‘Maintain my options,’ “ said Jeh C. Johnson, a campaign adviser and now general counsel of the Defense Department.
‘They Must All Be Militants’
That same mind-set would be brought to bear as the president intensified what would become a withering campaign to use unmanned aircraft to kill Qaeda terrorists.
Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent Pakistanis. “The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, ‘I want to know how this happened,’ “ a top White House adviser recounted.
In response to his concern, the C.I.A. downsized its munitions for more pinpoint strikes. In addition, the president tightened standards, aides say: If the agency did not have a “near certainty” that a strike would result in zero civilian deaths, Mr. Obama wanted to decide personally whether to go ahead.
The president’s directive reinforced the need for caution, counterterrorism officials said, but did not significantly change the program. In part, that is because “the protection of innocent life was always a critical consideration,” said Michael V. Hayden, the last C.I.A. director under President George W. Bush.
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.
“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”
‘A No-Brainer’
About four months into his presidency, as Republicans accused him of reckless naïveté on terrorism, Mr. Obama quickly pulled together a speech defending his policies. Standing before the Constitution at the National Archives in Washington, he mentioned Guantánamo 28 times, repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison.
But it was too late, and his defensive tone suggested that Mr. Obama knew it. Though President George W. Bush and Senator John McCain, the 2008 Republican candidate, had supported closing the Guantánamo prison, Republicans in Congress had reversed course and discovered they could use the issue to portray Mr. Obama as soft on terrorism.
Walking out of the Archives, the president turned to his national security adviser at the time, Gen. James L. Jones, and admitted that he had never devised a plan to persuade Congress to shut down the prison.
“We’re never going to make that mistake again,” Mr. Obama told the retired Marine general.
General Jones said the president and his aides had assumed that closing the prison was “a no-brainer — the United States will look good around the world.” The trouble was, he added, “nobody asked, ‘O.K., let’s assume it’s a good idea, how are you going to do this?’ “
It was not only Mr. Obama’s distaste for legislative backslapping and arm-twisting, but also part of a deeper pattern, said an administration official who has watched him closely: the president seemed to have “a sense that if he sketches a vision, it will happen — without his really having thought through the mechanism by which it will happen.”
In fact, both Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and the attorney general, Mr. Holder, had warned that the plan to close the Guantánamo prison was in peril, and they volunteered to fight for it on Capitol Hill, according to officials. But with Mr. Obama’s backing, his chief of staff, Rahm Emanuel, blocked them, saying health care reform had to go first.
When the administration floated a plan to transfer from Guantánamo to Northern Virginia two Uighurs, members of a largely Muslim ethnic minority from China who are considered no threat to the United States, Virginia Republicans led by Representative Frank R. Wolf denounced the idea. The administration backed down.
That show of weakness doomed the effort to close Guantánamo, the same administration official said. “Lyndon Johnson would have steamrolled the guy,” he said. “That’s not what happened. It’s like a boxing match where a cut opens over a guy’s eye.”
The Use of Force
It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.
This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.
The video conferences are run by the Pentagon, which oversees strikes in those countries, and participants do not hesitate to call out a challenge, pressing for the evidence behind accusations of ties to Al Qaeda.
“What’s a Qaeda facilitator?” asked one participant, illustrating the spirit of the exchanges. “If I open a gate and you drive through it, am I a facilitator?” Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the official said. A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.
The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.
Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.
“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.”
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But the control he exercises also appears to reflect Mr. Obama’s striking self-confidence: he believes, according to several people who have worked closely with him, that his own judgment should be brought to bear on strikes.
Asked what surprised him most about Mr. Obama, Mr. Donilon, the national security adviser, answered immediately: “He’s a president who is quite comfortable with the use of force on behalf of the United States.”
In fact, in a 2007 campaign speech in which he vowed to pull the United States out of Iraq and refocus on Al Qaeda, Mr. Obama had trumpeted his plan to go after terrorist bases in Pakistan — even if Pakistani leaders objected. His rivals at the time, including Mitt Romney, Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Mrs. Clinton, had all pounced on what they considered a greenhorn’s campaign bluster. (Mr. Romney said Mr. Obama had become “Dr. Strangelove.”)
In office, however, Mr. Obama has done exactly what he had promised, coming quickly to rely on the judgment of Mr. Brennan.
Mr. Brennan, a son of Irish immigrants, is a grizzled 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration made him a target of fierce criticism from the left. He had been forced, under fire, to withdraw his name from consideration to lead the C.I.A. under Mr. Obama, becoming counterterrorism chief instead.
Some critics of the drone strategy still vilify Mr. Brennan, suggesting that he is the C.I.A.’s agent in the White House, steering Mr. Obama to a targeted killing strategy. But in office, Mr. Brennan has surprised many former detractors by speaking forcefully for closing Guantánamo and respecting civil liberties.
Harold H. Koh, for instance, as dean of Yale Law School was a leading liberal critic of the Bush administration’s counterterrorism policies. But since becoming the State Department’s top lawyer, Mr. Koh said, he has found in Mr. Brennan a principled ally.
“If John Brennan is the last guy in the room with the president, I’m comfortable, because Brennan is a person of genuine moral rectitude,” Mr. Koh said. “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”
The president values Mr. Brennan’s experience in assessing intelligence, from his own agency or others, and for the sobriety with which he approaches lethal operations, other aides say.
“The purpose of these actions is to mitigate threats to U.S. persons’ lives,” Mr. Brennan said in an interview. “It is the option of last recourse. So the president, and I think all of us here, don’t like the fact that people have to die. And so he wants to make sure that we go through a rigorous checklist: The infeasibility of capture, the certainty of the intelligence base, the imminence of the threat, all of these things.”
Yet the administration’s very success at killing terrorism suspects has been shadowed by a suspicion: that Mr. Obama has avoided the complications of detention by deciding, in effect, to take no prisoners alive. While scores of suspects have been killed under Mr. Obama, only one has been taken into American custody, and the president has balked at adding new prisoners to Guantánamo.
“Their policy is to take out high-value targets, versus capturing high-value targets,” said Senator Saxby Chambliss of Georgia, the top Republican on the intelligence committee. “They are not going to advertise that, but that’s what they are doing.”
Mr. Obama’s aides deny such a policy, arguing that capture is often impossible in the rugged tribal areas of Pakistan and Yemen and that many terrorist suspects are in foreign prisons because of American tips. Still, senior officials at the Justice Department and the Pentagon acknowledge that they worry about the public perception.
“We have to be vigilant to avoid a no-quarter, or take-no-prisoners policy,” said Mr. Johnson, the Pentagon’s chief lawyer.
Trade-Offs
The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets, and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration’s “false choice between our safety and our ideals.”
But he has found that war is a messy business, and his actions show that pursuing an enemy unbound by rules has required moral, legal and practical trade-offs that his speeches did not envision.
One early test involved Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The case was problematic on two fronts, according to interviews with both administration and Pakistani sources.
The C.I.A. worried that Mr. Mehsud, whose group then mainly targeted the Pakistan government, did not meet the Obama administration’s criteria for targeted killing: he was not an imminent threat to the United States. But Pakistani officials wanted him dead, and the American drone program rested on their tacit approval. The issue was resolved after the president and his advisers found that he represented a threat, if not to the homeland, to American personnel in Pakistan.
Then, in August 2009, the C.I.A. director, Leon E. Panetta, told Mr. Brennan that the agency had Mr. Mehsud in its sights. But taking out the Pakistani Taliban leader, Mr. Panetta warned, did not meet Mr. Obama’s standard of “near certainty” of no innocents being killed. In fact, a strike would certainly result in such deaths: he was with his wife at his in-laws’ home.
“Many times,” General Jones said, in similar circumstances, “at the 11th hour we waved off a mission simply because the target had people around them and we were able to loiter on station until they didn’t.”
But not this time. Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.
The attempted bombing of an airliner a few months later, on Dec. 25, stiffened the president’s resolve, aides say. It was the culmination of a series of plots, including the killing of 13 people at Fort Hood, Tex. by an Army psychiatrist who had embraced radical Islam.
Mr. Obama is a good poker player, but he has a tell when he is angry. His questions become rapid-fire, said his attorney general, Mr. Holder. “He’ll inject the phrase, ‘I just want to make sure you understand that.’ “ And it was clear to everyone, Mr. Holder said, that he was simmering about how a 23-year-old bomber had penetrated billions of dollars worth of American security measures.
When a few officials tentatively offered a defense, noting that the attack had failed because the terrorists were forced to rely on a novice bomber and an untested formula because of stepped-up airport security, Mr. Obama cut them short.
“Well, he could have gotten it right and we’d all be sitting here with an airplane that blew up and killed over a hundred people,” he said, according to a participant. He asked them to use the close call to imagine in detail the consequences if the bomb had detonated. In characteristic fashion, he went around the room, asking each official to explain what had gone wrong and what needed to be done about it.
“After that, as president, it seemed like he felt in his gut the threat to the United States,” said Michael E. Leiter, then director of the National Counterterrorism Center. “Even John Brennan, someone who was already a hardened veteran of counterterrorism, tightened the straps on his rucksack after that.”
David Axelrod, the president’s closest political adviser, began showing up at the “Terror Tuesday” meetings, his unspeaking presence a visible reminder of what everyone understood: a successful attack would overwhelm the president’s other aspirations and achievements.
In the most dramatic possible way, the Fort Hood shootings in November and the attempted Christmas Day bombing had shown the new danger from Yemen. Mr. Obama, who had rejected the Bush-era concept of a global war on terrorism and had promised to narrow the American focus to Al Qaeda’s core, suddenly found himself directing strikes in another complicated Muslim country.
The very first strike under his watch in Yemen, on Dec. 17, 2009, offered a stark example of the difficulties of operating in what General Jones described as an “embryonic theater that we weren’t really familiar with.”
It killed not only its intended target, but also two neighboring families, and left behind a trail of cluster bombs that subsequently killed more innocents. It was hardly the kind of precise operation that Mr. Obama favored. Videos of children’s bodies and angry tribesmen holding up American missile parts flooded You Tube, fueling a ferocious backlash that Yemeni officials said bolstered Al Qaeda.
The sloppy strike shook Mr. Obama and Mr. Brennan, officials said, and once again they tried to impose some discipline.
In Pakistan, Mr. Obama had approved not only “personality” strikes aimed at named, high-value terrorists, but “signature” strikes that targeted training camps and suspicious compounds in areas controlled by militants.
But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.
Now, in the wake of the bad first strike in Yemen, Mr. Obama overruled military and intelligence commanders who were pushing to use signature strikes there as well.
“We are not going to war with Yemen,” he admonished in one meeting, according to participants.
His guidance was formalized in a memo by General Jones, who called it a “governor, if you will, on the throttle,” intended to remind everyone that “one should not assume that it’s just O.K. to do these things because we spot a bad guy somewhere in the world.”
Mr. Obama had drawn a line. But within two years, he stepped across it. Signature strikes in Pakistan were killing a large number of terrorist suspects, even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence. And in Yemen, roiled by the Arab Spring unrest, the Qaeda affiliate was seizing territory.
Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know. Officials say the criteria are tighter than those for signature strikes, requiring evidence of a threat to the United States, and they have even given them a new name — TADS, for Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes. But the details are a closely guarded secret — part of a pattern for a president who came into office promising transparency.
The Ultimate Test
On that front, perhaps no case would test Mr. Obama’s principles as starkly as that of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American-born cleric and Qaeda propagandist hiding in Yemen, who had recently risen to prominence and had taunted the president by name in some of his online screeds.
The president “was very interested in obviously trying to understand how a guy like Awlaki developed,” said General Jones. The cleric’s fiery sermons had helped inspire a dozen plots, including the shootings at Fort Hood. Then he had gone “operational,” plotting with Mr. Abdulmutallab and coaching him to ignite his explosives only after the airliner was over the United States.
That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.
Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him.
If the president had qualms about this momentous step, aides said he did not share them. Mr. Obama focused instead on the weight of the evidence showing that the cleric had joined the enemy and was plotting more terrorist attacks.
“This is an easy one,” Mr. Daley recalled him saying, though the president warned that in future cases, the evidence might well not be so clear.
In the wake of Mr. Awlaki’s death, some administration officials, including the attorney general, argued that the Justice Department’s legal memo should be made public. In 2009, after all, Mr. Obama had released Bush administration legal opinions on interrogation over the vociferous objections of six former C.I.A. directors.
This time, contemplating his own secrets, he chose to keep the Awlaki opinion secret.
“Once it’s your pop stand, you look at things a little differently,” said Mr. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s former general counsel.
Mr. Hayden, the former C.I.A. director and now an adviser to Mr. Obama’s Republican challenger, Mr. Romney, commended the president’s aggressive counterterrorism record, which he said had a “Nixon to China” quality. But, he said, “secrecy has its costs” and Mr. Obama should open the strike strategy up to public scrutiny.
“This program rests on the personal legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable,” Mr. Hayden said. “I have lived the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos, and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of legal memos locked in a D.O.J. safe.”
Tactics Over Strategy
In his June 2009 speech in Cairo, aimed at resetting relations with the Muslim world, Mr. Obama had spoken eloquently of his childhood years in Indonesia, hearing the call to prayer “at the break of dawn and the fall of dusk.”
“The United States is not — and never will be — at war with Islam,” he declared.
But in the months that followed, some officials felt the urgency of counterterrorism strikes was crowding out consideration of a broader strategy against radicalization. Though Mrs. Clinton strongly supported the strikes, she complained to colleagues about the drones-only approach at Situation Room meetings, in which discussion would focus exclusively on the pros, cons and timing of particular strikes.
At their weekly lunch, Mrs. Clinton told the president she thought there should be more attention paid to the root causes of radicalization, and Mr. Obama agreed. But it was September 2011 before he issued an executive order setting up a sophisticated, interagency war room at the State Department to counter the jihadi narrative on an hour-by-hour basis, posting messages and video online and providing talking points to embassies.
Mr. Obama was heartened, aides say, by a letter discovered in the raid on Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. It complained that the American president had undermined Al Qaeda’s support by repeatedly declaring that the United States was at war not with Islam, but with the terrorist network. “We must be doing a good job,” Mr. Obama told his secretary of state.
Moreover, Mr. Obama’s record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced. John B. Bellinger III, a top national security lawyer under the Bush administration, said that was because Mr. Obama’s liberal reputation and “softer packaging” have protected him. “After the global outrage over Guantánamo, it’s remarkable that the rest of the world has looked the other way while the Obama administration has conducted hundreds of drone strikes in several different countries, including killing at least some civilians,” said Mr. Bellinger, who supports the strikes.
By withdrawing from Iraq and preparing to withdraw from Afghanistan, Mr. Obama has refocused the fight on Al Qaeda and hugely reduced the death toll both of American soldiers and Muslim civilians. But in moments of reflection, Mr. Obama may have reason to wonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences.
His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.
Justly or not, drones have become a provocative symbol of American power, running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents. With China and Russia watching, the United States has set an international precedent for sending drones over borders to kill enemies.
Mr. Blair, the former director of national intelligence, said the strike campaign was dangerously seductive. “It is the politically advantageous thing to do — low cost, no U.S. casualties, gives the appearance of toughness,” he said. “It plays well domestically, and it is unpopular only in other countries. Any damage it does to the national interest only shows up over the long term.”
But Mr. Blair’s dissent puts him in a small minority of security experts. Mr. Obama’s record has eroded the political perception that Democrats are weak on national security. No one would have imagined four years ago that his counterterrorism policies would come under far more fierce attack from the American Civil Liberties Union than from Mr. Romney.
Aides say that Mr. Obama’s choices, though, are not surprising. The president’s reliance on strikes, said Mr. Leiter, the former head of the National Counterterrorism Center, “is far from a lurid fascination with covert action and special forces. It’s much more practical. He’s the president. He faces a post-Abdulmutallab situation, where he’s being told people might attack the United States tomorrow.”
“You can pass a lot of laws,” Mr. Leiter said, “Those laws are not going to get Bin Laden dead.”
________________________ ________________________ __
again - i am not bashing obama for this - i am bashing the leftist communist anti-war pofs liars.
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It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
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So obama is doing the same thing in his murders that he does with the unemployment numbers? Just make it up!
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Its not more humane but its way more effecient.
Obama knows how to win wars the repub dont
The repub are weak and pathetic
What WARS did he win? Please tell me. Because withdrawing from Iraq is on Bush's time table. Afghanistan is still a mess. Withdrawing doesn't even mean that we won. In these cases, it just means we are tired.
And as far as terrorism, was USA ever attacked after 9/11? Answer is no. Who was president? Bush He put this little thing together called the Patriot Act, which lil Barry supported. HEHEHEHEH!! In fact, lil Barry has mosty followed Bush's blueprint.
Democrats know how to fight wars? Does Vietnam ring any bells? The worst military defeat ever is contributed to the clueless democratic party.
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That record, and Mr. Awlaki’s calls for more attacks, presented Mr. Obama with an urgent question: Could he order the targeted killing of an American citizen, in a country with which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the benefit of a trial?
The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.
Mr. Obama gave his approval, and Mr. Awlaki was killed in September 2011, along with a fellow propagandist, Samir Khan, an American citizen who was not on the target list but was traveling with him.
________________________ _______________________
Nobel Peace Prize right there!
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What WARS did he win? Please tell me. Because withdrawing from Iraq is on Bush's time table. Afghanistan is still a mess. Withdrawing doesn't even mean that we won. In these cases, it just means we are tired.
And as far as terrorism, was USA ever attacked after 9/11? Answer is no. Who was president? Bush He put this little thing together called the Patriot Act, which lil Barry supported. HEHEHEHEH!! In fact, lil Barry has mosty followed Bush's blueprint.
Democrats know how to fight wars? Does Vietnam ring any bells? The worst military defeat ever is contributed to the clueless democratic party.
And who started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? ::)
And Vietnam? Seriously its decades ago. How about the civil war? ::)
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And who started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? ::)
And Vietnam? Seriously its decades ago. How about the civil war? ::)
Remember 911 you stupid c unt?
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Remember 911 you stupid c unt?
Its was a reference to Darios post where he blames Obama for the wars
Im not against the war in Afghanistan
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And who started the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq? ::)
And Vietnam? Seriously its decades ago. How about the civil war? ::)
Who started it? Both parties. That is who. Or should I put up the list of all the democrats that VOTED FOR BOTH WARS. Biden and Clinton voted for the Iraq war. I have only put that list up 2034823048204 times. I would have figured that by now you would realize the Dems, as well as Republicans were in favor of both conflicts.
It doesn't matter if Vietnam was decades ago. You claimed Dems know how to fight wars. Vietnam was a disgrace and Democrats were in charge. A democrat was also president when the Korean War began and a Republican was elected to end it and keep it from being an embarrassing defeat.
Yeah, how about that Civil War? Ended slavery and preserved the union. You consider that a failure?
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Ugh... I get really worried anytime a President becomes determined to make decisions regarding military strategy.....
the alternative is to let the military run things.
that is a very BAD thing when the generals (whose business is war) make the decisions.
it's a tricky balance. ANy prez who says "I'd let the generals make those decisions" is a fcking idiot, a tool.
THe prez needs to let them do their job, but control when they do their job.
THis is just repubs crying about obama personally choosing which bad guys to kill, cause they know romney will look dickless and weak saying "obama doesn't know how to keep us safe, but i do!" hahahahazers
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the alternative is to let the military run things.
that is a very BAD thing when the generals (whose business is war) make the decisions.
it's a tricky balance. ANy prez who says "I'd let the generals make those decisions" is a fcking idiot, a tool.
THe prez needs to let them do their job, but control when they do their job.
THis is just repubs crying about obama personally choosing which bad guys to kill, cause they know romney will look dickless and weak saying "obama doesn't know how to keep us safe, but i do!" hahahahazers
LOL - LBJ and Hitler ring a bell how well that worked out?
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LOL - LBJ and Hitler ring a bell how well that worked out?
youre acting like the only options are
1) let the military control everything and call every shot
2) an incompetent president micromanaging every inch of things
There is a middle, ya know.
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youre acting like the only options are
1) let the military control everything and call every shot
2) an incompetent president micromanaging every inch of things
There is a middle, ya know.
I am not attacking obama on this - but I am attacking the hypocritical leftists and phoney anti-war movement, the incompetent msm, who would be melting down everywhere if Bush did this shit.
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the alternative is to let the military run things.
that is a very BAD thing when the generals (whose business is war) make the decisions.
it's a tricky balance. ANy prez who says "I'd let the generals make those decisions" is a fcking idiot, a tool.
THe prez needs to let them do their job, but control when they do their job.
THis is just repubs crying about obama personally choosing which bad guys to kill, cause they know romney will look dickless and weak saying "obama doesn't know how to keep us safe, but i do!" hahahahazers
I like how one post down, your critisizing him as thinking in black and white - when you just said the only alternative is to let the military run things 100%.
Derp derpity derp.
Anyway, I just get wary anytime a President starts getting into the military decision making process. Its never been a good thing. Ever.
Him personally choosing who gets killed and who doesnt.... it isnt necessarily a bad thing. But if its a sign of things to come, then yeah. No good.
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I am not attacking obama on this - but I am attacking the hypocritical leftists and phoney anti-war movement, the incompetent msm, who would be melting down everywhere if Bush did this shit.
Your attacking the leftists and anti-war pricks means you still assign some value to them.
Seeing as Obama is officially Bush2 when it comes to war (and maybe more intense, more spending, more dead bad guys, drone hits)...
The leftist protesters are ireelevant now. Celebrating them now is like dancing on the grave of Mussolini... he's dead, you didn't destroy him, his own people did, and you're still living in the past.
The war movement has won now. The anti-war relics don't have any credibility. Gloating over an already defeated force here.
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Obama's 'kill list' revealed: How President uses Al Qaeda 'baseball cards' to decide who will live
dailymail.co.uk ^ | 5/29/12 | Daniel Bates
Obama's 'kill list' revealed: How President uses Al Qaeda 'baseball cards' to decide who will live and who will die ......Full Title
Barack Obama has insisted on personally approving a 'kill list' of Al Qaeda terrorists who should be hunted down and executed, according to reports.
The U.S. president requests that his advisers draw up 'baseball cards' with pictures and biographies that he pores over to see who should live and who should die.
As part of the bizarre ‘nomination’ process he then retires for personal reflection to work out whether or not to order a drone strike to take them out.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
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Obama's 'kill list' revealed: How President uses Al Qaeda 'baseball cards' to decide who will live
dailymail.co.uk ^ | 5/29/12 | Daniel Bates
Obama's 'kill list' revealed: How President uses Al Qaeda 'baseball cards' to decide who will live and who will die ......Full Title
Barack Obama has insisted on personally approving a 'kill list' of Al Qaeda terrorists who should be hunted down and executed, according to reports.
The U.S. president requests that his advisers draw up 'baseball cards' with pictures and biographies that he pores over to see who should live and who should die.
As part of the bizarre ‘nomination’ process he then retires for personal reflection to work out whether or not to order a drone strike to take them out.
(Excerpt) Read more at dailymail.co.uk ...
that's some seriously Cheney Level II type shit right there.
you repubs should be jacking off in your gunpowder, not crying about how mean obama is to those poor terr'ists.
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Who started it? Both parties. That is who. Or should I put up the list of all the democrats that VOTED FOR BOTH WARS. Biden and Clinton voted for the Iraq war. I have only put that list up 2034823048204 times. I would have figured that by now you would realize the Dems, as well as Republicans were in favor of both conflicts.
It doesn't matter if Vietnam was decades ago. You claimed Dems know how to fight wars. Vietnam was a disgrace and Democrats were in charge. A democrat was also president when the Korean War began and a Republican was elected to end it and keep it from being an embarrassing defeat.
Yeah, how about that Civil War? Ended slavery and preserved the union. You consider that a failure?
Obama knows how to win wars the repub dont
Was my statement
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Obama knows how to win wars the repub dont
Was my statement
Lol.
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Judge Napolitano on Obama’s “Kill List”: ‘Congress Should Do Something About It’
by Studio B Posted in: "Kill List", Congress, Constitution, Judge Napolitano, New York Times
On today’s Studio B, Judge Napolitano broke down the New York Times’ release of President Obama’s so-called “kill list.” He expressed discomfort at Obama’s newly revealed list of alleged Al Qaeda suspects, saying, “Look, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison would be turning in their graves if they thought that the Constitution that they brought forth permitted the president to become a killer.”
He added, “It doesn’t, it’s wrong, it’s against our values, it’s unlawful and it’s unconstitutional. Congress should do something about it!”
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Krauthammer: Obama Denounced Enhanced Interrogation; Now He's Judge, Jury And Executioner
"We can understand why Obama is doing this," syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer said about the president's 'kill list.' "Why they clearly leaked this to the press. They want obama to look tough, hawkish and part of that is what is happening around the world. You look at massacres in Syria, he is standing by. You look at negotiations with Iran over it nukes, they're going nowhere. There is a collapse in Baghdad. Look at the way that the Russians are treating the United States. Putin dissing Obama personally by not showing up at the G8 summit or the NATO summit as a kind of way to slap Obama in the face and he does this without any reaction."
"So here's a story that shows he is a tough guy, he kills by remote control. There are a few problem with this. Number one, is as a military strategy, we aren't getting any intelligence, this is the past of least resistance. And some of the intelligence people are telling you we are living off the intelligence of the Bush years and soon it will not be useful because it will be outdated. Second is a moral argument. Obama went around preening, particularly in '08 and even after he's elected he went around the world preening about how there is a new direction and a moral direction of the United States. How we had lost our way with Iraq with these enhanced interrogations and he's going around and killing people where he is judge, jury and executioner," Krauthammer said on FOX News' "Special Report" tonight.
"I'm not against it, but if you take the moral argument and the preening that the Democrats did, about how terrible the Bush administration was for enhanced interrogation, well they didn't go around killing people from the air, and if necessary and often happens, the families as well. So they kind of lost the moral high ground here. But I understand why he is doing it. It makes him look tough," Krauthammer said.
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Krauthammer: Obama Denounced Enhanced Interrogation; Now He's Judge, Jury And Executioner
there's a big difference between torture, which is against geneva...
and a president choosing which of the high valued targets - all universally accepted as guilty of terror acts - should be addressed first.
To put these very differing categories into one chum-filled swimming pool is beneath Krauthammer... I like his work but I'm a little disappointed there. It's apples and oranges. Comparing illegal techniques with legal techniques. It's like saying rape is okay because TX executes murderers. But I suppose some ignorant ppl will buy in...
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there's a big difference between torture, which is against geneva...
and a president choosing which of the high valued targets - all universally accepted as guilty of terror acts - should be addressed first.
To put these very differing categories into one chum-filled swimming pool is beneath Krauthammer... I like his work but I'm a little disappointed there. It's apples and oranges. Comparing illegal techniques with legal techniques. It's like saying rape is okay because TX executes murderers. But I suppose some ignorant ppl will buy in...
LOL!!!!!!
Your kneepadding has now reached new heights!!!
Pour water over someone - illegal
Kill them for being a suspected terrorist, or even being near one - legal.
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No, I'm right here, 33.
We're killing guys that the US Govt has deemed terrorists. It's legal.
We're waterboarding people in violation of Geneva - well, we were. Not legal.
You can try to mix legal and moral if you want to - but really, we're an imperialist republic who manipulates every country on earth for resource and advantage - put in a tampon if you have an issue there.
but legally, waterboarding you can't do. Assasinate terrorists, you can. Weird, but that's how it is.
To me, this is just another example of the continued VICTIMHOOD of the right, of FOX news, of the ousted republican party who can't tell us theyre rinos or tea partiers. But but but obama is killing bad guys and the left was mad when cheney waterboarded them.
Obama is legally killing a fckload of bad guys. Cheney illegally tortured. Take your summers eve and admit the libshit dem is going more to stop terrorism than the neocon crew that let 911 happen.
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fuck off.
You and the rest of the clown show will do anything to defend obama doing shit you people wanted bush imprisoned for.
No, I'm right here, 33.
We're killing guys that the US Govt has deemed terrorists. It's legal.
We're waterboarding people in violation of Geneva - well, we were. Not legal.
You can try to mix legal and moral if you want to - but really, we're an imperialist republic who manipulates every country on earth for resource and advantage - put in a tampon if you have an issue there.
but legally, waterboarding you can't do. Assasinate terrorists, you can. Weird, but that's how it is.
To me, this is just another example of the continued VICTIMHOOD of the right, of FOX news, of the ousted republican party who can't tell us theyre rinos or tea partiers. But but but obama is killing bad guys and the left was mad when cheney waterboarded them.
Obama is legally killing a fckload of bad guys. Cheney illegally tortured. Take your summers eve and admit the libshit dem is going more to stop terrorism than the neocon crew that let 911 happen.
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fuck off.
You and the rest of the clown show will do anything to defend obama doing shit you people wanted bush imprisoned for.
it's legal to kill bad guys.
It's not legal to torture them.
It's the geneva convention, the law of the world, and repub and dem leaders alike have agreed to it.
Obama should be ousted to kenya because he's illegally president. hilary should run against Romney/RandPaul in 2012 and america should start healing.
But really, repubs getting mad that obama is being involved in the selection of which terrorists are targeted first? Shit, yall have your priorities all mixed up. And tell mark levin that 90 minutes listening to al sharpton speeches might be great for riling up ratings, but does nothing to address the larger problems facing america. he did the same thing yesterday - "why is there no outrage about what sharpton said about some of the right..."
he has one of the biggest voices to conservatives, and he's not talking about solutions to our problems - he's playing up the VICTIMHOOD.
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Whatever - fuck off with your bullshit. other than a few obamabots grasping at anything to prop up obama with, no one buys your lies any more.
it's legal to kill bad guys.
It's not legal to torture them.
It's the geneva convention, the law of the world, and repub and dem leaders alike have agreed to it.
Obama should be ousted to kenya because he's illegally president. hilary should run against Romney/RandPaul in 2012 and america should start healing.
But really, repubs getting mad that obama is being involved in the selection of which terrorists are targeted first? Shit, yall have your priorities all mixed up. And tell mark levin that 90 minutes listening to al sharpton speeches might be great for riling up ratings, but does nothing to address the larger problems facing america. he did the same thing yesterday - "why is there no outrage about what sharpton said about some of the right..."
he has one of the biggest voices to conservatives, and he's not talking about solutions to our problems - he's playing up the VICTIMHOOD.
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Whatever - fuck off with your bullshit. other than a few obamabots grasping at anything to prop up obama with, no one buys your lies any more.
What am I lying about there?
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Some of these posters have no clue as to what this means.
Obama took the moral high ground against interrogation tactics, yet he is killing every terrorists that comes into view. How is it anymore moral to kill a person than to waterboard them? Obama and the left criticized the Bush administration for "torturing" those poor terrorists. But, Obama is killing them. It seems that they are doing that in order to prevent interrogating them or sticking them in Guantanamo. This is utter hypocrisy.
Krauthammer is right. Obama lost the moral high ground on this issue.
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Some of these posters have no clue as to what this means.
Obama took the moral high ground against interrogation tactics, yet he is killing every terrorists that comes into view. How is it anymore moral to kill a person than to waterboard them? Obama and the left criticized the Bush administration for "torturing" those poor terrorists. But, Obama is killing them. It seems that they are doing that in order to prevent interrogating them or sticking them in Guantanamo. This is utter hypocrisy.
Krauthammer is right. Obama lost the moral high ground on this issue.
this whole argument - isn't about repubs being mad about the killing of bad guys..
only that He has lost his 2008 ability to criticize? That's the issue?
I've yet to hear any repubs, including krauthammer, complaining about all the dead bad guys. Only thing they're mad about is "but obama was mean to cheney and now he's doing the same thing... morral high ground, moral high ground!"
Theyre gonna have to be a little tougher if they want his job. What's romney's campaign going to be? "I wont change a thing about obama's military approach - but he doesn't have the moral high ground, nah nah nah..."
weak shit right there.
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STFU troll. Its about Obama and the hypocritical leftists like yourself who attacked bush daily, marched in the streets, wanted cheney and bush in jail for 7 years, and now are cheering on your lord messiah and savior when he does exactly thwe same thing.
this whole argument - isn't about repubs being mad about the killing of bad guys..
only that He has lost his 2008 ability to criticize? That's the issue?
I've yet to hear any repubs, including krauthammer, complaining about all the dead bad guys. Only thing they're mad about is "but obama was mean to cheney and now he's doing the same thing... morral high ground, moral high ground!"
Theyre gonna have to be a little tougher if they want his job. What's romney's campaign going to be? "I wont change a thing about obama's military approach - but he doesn't have the moral high ground, nah nah nah..."
weak shit right there.
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STFU troll. Its about Obama and the hypocritical leftists like yourself who attacked bush daily, marched in the streets, wanted cheney and bush in jail for 7 years, and now are cheering on your lord messiah and savior when he does exactly thwe same thing.
make the election about hypocritical leftists - I'm sure that'll play great with moderate soccer moms you need to win the white house.
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make the election about hypocritical leftists - I'm sure that'll play great with moderate soccer moms you need to win the white house.
::) ::)
whatever - you can't even bring yourself to admit you and the rest of the obamabots cheering obama for doing exactly the same shit bush did are a bunch of hypocrites and liars.
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In Yemen, U.S. airstrikes breed anger, and sympathy for al-Qaeda
By Sudarsan Raghavan, Published: May 29
Aden, Yemen — Across the vast, rugged terrain of southern Yemen, an escalating campaign of U.S. drone strikes is stirring increasing sympathy for al-Qaeda-linked militants and driving tribesmen to join a network linked to terrorist plots against the United States.
After recent U.S. missile strikes, mostly from unmanned aircraft, the Yemeni government and the United States have reported that the attacks killed only suspected al-Qaeda members. But civilians have also died in the attacks, said tribal leaders, victims’ relatives and human rights activists.
“These attacks are making people say, ‘We believe now that al-Qaeda is on the right side,’ ” said businessman Salim al-Barakani, adding that his two brothers — one a teacher, the other a cellphone repairman — were killed in a U.S. strike in March.
Since January, as many as 21 missile attacks have targeted suspected al-Qaeda operatives in southern Yemen, reflecting a sharp shift in a secret war carried out by the CIA and the Joint Special Operations Command that had focused on Pakistan.
But as in the tribal areas of Pakistan, where U.S. drone strikes have significantly weakened al-Qaeda’s capabilities, an unintended consequence of the attacks has been a marked radicalization of the local population.
The evidence of radicalization emerged in more than 20 interviews with tribal leaders, victims’ relatives, human rights activists and officials from four provinces in southern Yemen where U.S. strikes have targeted suspected militants. They described a strong shift in sentiment toward militants affiliated with the transnational network’s most active wing, al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, or AQAP.
“The drone strikes have not helped either the United States or Yemen,” said Sultan al-Barakani, who was a top adviser to former president Ali Abdullah Saleh. “Yemen is paying a heavy price, losing its sons. But the Americans are not paying the same price.”
In 2009, when President Obama was first known to have authorized a missile strike on Yemen, U.S. officials said there were no more than 300 core AQAP members. That number has grown in recent years to 700 or more, Yemeni officials and tribal leaders say. In addition, hundreds of tribesmen have joined AQAP in the fight against the U.S.-backed Yemeni government.
As AQAP’s numbers and capabilities have grown, so has its reach and determination. That was reflected in a suicide bombing last week in the capital, Sanaa, that killed more than 100 people, mostly Yemeni soldiers.
On their Web sites, on their Facebook pages and in their videos, militants who had been focused on their fight against the Yemeni government now portray the war in the south as a jihad against the United States, which could attract more recruits and financing from across the Muslim world. Yemeni tribal Web sites are filled with al-Qaeda propaganda, including some that brag about killing Americans.
“Every time the American attacks increase, they increase the rage of the Yemeni people, especially in al-Qaeda-controlled areas,” said Mohammed al-Ahmadi, legal coordinator for Karama, a local human rights group. “The drones are killing al-Qaeda leaders, but they are also turning them into heroes.”
An escalated campaign
Obama’s top counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, has publicly defended the use of drone strikes, arguing that their precision allows the United States to limit civilian casualties and lessen risks for U.S. military personnel. The decision to fire a missile from a drone, he said, is taken with “extraordinary care and thoughtfulness.”
National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor said the administration’s counterterrorism strategy in Yemen is “guided by the view that we must do what is necessary to disrupt AQAP plots against U.S. interests” and to help the Yemeni government build up its capabilities to fight AQAP.
“While AQAP has grown in strength over the last year, many of its supporters are tribal militants or part-time supporters who collaborate with AQAP for self-serving, personal interests rather than affinity with al-Qaeda’s global ideology,” Vietor said. “The portion of hard-core, committed AQAP members is relatively small.”
The dramatic escalation in drone strikes in Yemen followed foiled plots by AQAP to bomb a U.S. airliner headed to Detroit in 2009 and to send parcel bombs via cargo planes to Chicago the following year. In April, Saudi intelligence agents helped foil an AQAP plot to plant a suicide bomber on a U.S.-bound plane.
On May 6, a U.S. drone strike killed Fahd al-Quso, a senior al-Qaeda leader who was on the FBI’s most-wanted list for his role in the 2000 bombing of the USS Cole in Aden, an attack that killed 17 American sailors. The drone strike in Shabwa province also killed a second man, whom U.S. and Yemeni officials described as another al-Qaeda militant.
But according to his relatives, the man was a 19-year-old named Nasser Salim who was tending to his farm when Quso arrived in his vehicle. Quso knew Salim’s family and was greeting him when the missiles landed.
“He was torn to pieces,” said Salim’s uncle, Abu Baker Aidaroos, 30, a Yemeni soldier. “He was not part of al-Qaeda. But by America’s standards, just because he knew Fahd al-Quso, he deserved to die with him.”
Out of anger, Aidaroos said, he left his unit in Abyan province, the nexus of the fight against the militants. Today, instead of fighting al-Qaeda, he sympathizes with the group — not out of support for its ideology, he insists, but out of hatred for the United States.
‘More hostility’ toward U.S.
The U.S. strikes, tribal leaders and Yemeni officials say, are also angering powerful tribes that could prevent AQAP from gaining strength. The group has seized control of large swaths of southern Yemen in the past year, while the government has had to counter growing perceptions that it is no more than an American puppet.
“There is more hostility against America because the attacks have not stopped al-Qaeda, but rather they have expanded, and the tribes feel this is a violation of the country’s sovereignty,” said Anssaf Ali Mayo, Aden head of al-Islah, Yemen’s most influential Islamist party, which is now part of the coalition government. “There is a psychological acceptance of al-Qaeda because of the U.S. strikes.”
Quso and Salim are from the Awlak tribe, one of the most influential in southern Yemen. So was Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni American preacher who was thought to be a senior AQAP leader and was killed in September by a U.S. strike. The following month, another U.S. strike killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, also an American citizen, generating outrage across Yemen.
Awlak tribesmen are businessmen, lawmakers and politicians. But the strikes have pushed more of them to join the militants or to provide AQAP with safe haven in their areas, said tribal leaders and Yemeni officials.
“The Americans are targeting the sons of the Awlak,” Aidaroos said. “I would fight even the devil to exact revenge for my nephew.”
In early March, U.S. missiles struck in Bayda province, 100 miles south of Sanaa, killing at least 30 suspected militants, according to Yemeni security officials. But in interviews, human rights activists and victims’ relatives said many of the dead were civilians, not fighters.
Villagers were too afraid to go to the area. Al-Qaeda militants took advantage and offered to bury the villagers’ relatives. “That made people even more grateful and appreciative of al-Qaeda,” said Barakani, the businessman. “Afterwards, al-Qaeda told the people, ‘We will take revenge on your behalf.’ ”
In asserting responsibility for last week’s bombing in Sanaa, Ansar al-Sharia — the name by which AQAP goes in southern Yemen — declared that the attack was revenge for what it called the U.S. war on its followers.
The previous week, al-Qaeda’s supreme leader, Ayman al-Zawahiri, released a video portraying Yemeni President Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, who took office in February and vowed to fight AQAP, as an “agent” of the United States.
In some cases, U.S. strikes have forced civilians to flee their homes and have destroyed homes and farmland. Balweed Muhammed Nasser Awad, 57, said he and his family fled the city of Jaar last summer after his son, a fisherman, was killed in a U.S. strike targeting suspected al-Qaeda militants. Today, they live in a classroom in an Aden school, along with hundreds of other refugees from the conflict.
“Ansar al-Sharia had nothing to do with my son’s death. He was killed by the Americans,” Awad said. “He had nothing to do with terrorism. Why him?”
No Yemeni has forgotten the U.S. cruise missile strike in the remote tribal region of al-Majala on Dec. 17, 2009 — the Obama administration’s first known missile strike inside Yemen. The attack killed dozens, including 14 women and 21 children, and whipped up rage at the United States.
Today, the area is a haven for militants, said Abdelaziz Muhammed Hamza, head of the Revolutionary Council in Abyan province, a group that is fighting AQAP. “All the residents of the area have joined al-Qaeda,” he said.
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U.S. Labels ALL Young Men In Battle Zones As “Militants” … And American Soil Is Now Considered a Battle Zone
Submitted by George Washington on 05/31/2012 21:20 -0400
Preface: If this is too intense for you, look at this instead.
Glenn Greenwald has two must-read posts on the reason that virtually everyone the U.S. kills is called a “militant” or “suspected militant”.
He wrote Monday:
Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true.
This practice continues even though key Obama officials have been caught lying, a term used advisedly, about how many civilians they’re killing. I’ve written and said many times before that in American media discourse, the definition of “militant” is any human being whose life is extinguished when an American missile or bomb detonates (that term was even used when Anwar Awlaki’s 16-year-old American son, Abdulrahman, was killed by a U.S. drone in Yemen two weeks after a drone killed his father, even though nobody claims the teenager was anything but completely innocent: “Another U.S. Drone Strike Kills Militants in Yemen”).
This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.
“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”
The next day, Greenwald noted:
In 2006, the pro-Israel activist Alan Dershowitz created a serious scandal when he argued – mostly in order to justify Israeli aggression — that “civilian causalties” are a “gray area” because many people in close proximity to Terrorists — even if not Terrorists themselves — are less than innocent (“A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis of current events in the Middle East: ‘the continuum of civilianality’ . . . . Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others”).
Even more repellent was John Podhoretz’s argument in 2006 that “the tactical mistake” which “we made in Iraq was that we didn’t kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything,” specifically that the real error was that the U.S. permitted “the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35.” In other words, “all military-age males” in Sunni areas should have been deemed “combatants” and thus killed. Podhoretz’s argument created all sorts of outrage in progressive circles: John Podhoretz is advocating genocide!
But this is precisely the premise that President Obama himself has now adopted in order to justify civilian deaths and re-classify them as “militants.” Here is the rationale of Obama officials as described by the NYT: “people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good.” Probably up to no good. That’s a direct replica of Dershowitz’s argument, and is closely related to Podhoretz’s. They count someone as a “militant” — worthy of death — based purely on the happenstance of where they are and the proximity they’re in to someone else they suspect is a Bad Person. If such a person is killed by a U.S. missile, then, by definition, they are “militants,” not “civilians” — even if we don’t know the first thing about them, including their name.
Will This Policy Apply to Americans On U.S. Soil?
This may sound like something far away which won’t directly affect Americans.
But the military now considers the U.S. homeland to be a battlefield. As we noted in March:
Fox News reports:
FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday said he would have to go back and check with the Department of Justice whether Attorney General Eric Holder’s “[criteria] for the targeted killing of Americans also applied to Americans inside the U.S.
***
“I have to go back. Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not,” Mueller said when asked by Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., about a distinction between domestic and foreign targeting
Graves followed up asking whether “from a historical perspective,” the federal government has “the ability to kill a U.S. citizen on United States soil or just overseas.”
“I’m going to defer that to others in the Department of Justice,” Mueller replied.
Indeed, Holder’s Monday speech at Northwestern University seemed to leave the door open.
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley writes:
One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.
***
He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power. For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”
***
The claim that they are following self-imposed “limits” which are meaningless — particularly in a system that is premised on the availability of judicial review. The Administration has never said that the [Law Of Armed Conflicts] does not allow the same powers to be used in the United States. It would be an easy thing to state. Holder can affirmatively state that the President’s inherent power to kill citizens exists only outside of the country. He can then explain where those limits are found in the Constitution and why they do not apply equally to a citizen in London or Berlin. Holder was not describing a constitutional process of review. They have dressed up a self-imposed review of a unilateral power as due process. Any authoritarian measure can be dressed up as carefully executed according to balancing tests, but that does not constitute any real constitutional analysis. It is at best a loose analogy to constitutional analysis.
When reporters asked the Justice Department about Mueller’s apparent uncertainty, they responded that the answer is “pretty straightforward.” They then offered an evasive response. They simply said (as we all know) that “[t]he legal framework (Holder) laid out applies to U.S. citizens outside of U.S.” We got that from the use of the word “abroad.” However, the question is how this inherent authority is limited as it has been articulated by Holder and others. What is the limiting principle? If the President cannot order the killing of a citizen in the United States, Holder can simply say so (and inform the FBI Director who would likely be involved in such a killing). In doing so, he can then explain the source of that limitation and why it does not apply with citizens in places like London. What we have is a purely internal review that balances the practicality of arrest and the urgency of the matter in the view of the President. Since the panel is the extension of his authority, he can presumably disregard their recommendations or order a killing without their approval. Since the Administration has emphasized that the “battlefield” in this “war on terror” is not limited to a particular country, the assumption is that the President’s authority is commensurate with that threat or limitless theater of operation. Indeed, the Justice Department has repeatedly stated that the war is being fought in the United States as well as other nations.
Thus, Mueller’s uncertainty is understandable . . . and dangerous. The Framers created a system of objective due process in a system of checks and balances. Obama has introduced an undefined and self-imposed system of review ….
Before you assume that Mueller’s comments are being blown out of proportion, remember that it has been clear for some time that Obama has claimed the power to assassinate U.S. citizens within the U.S. As we pointed out in December:
I’ve previously noted that Obama says that he can assassinate American citizens living on U.S. soil.
This admittedly sounds over-the-top. But one of the nation’s top constitutional and military law experts – Jonathan Turley – agrees.
***
Turley said [on C-Span]:
President Obama has just stated a policy that he can have any American citizen killed without any charge, without any review, except his own. If he’s satisfied that you are a terrorist, he says that he can kill you anywhere in the world including in the United States.
Two of his aides just … reaffirmed they believe that American citizens can be killed on the order of the President anywhere including the United States.
You’ve now got a president who says that he can kill you on his own discretion. He can jail you indefinitely on his own discretion
Remember, government officials have said that Americans can be targets in the war on terror.
And Northwestern University’s law school professor Joseph Margulies said:
Obama and Bush … both say we are in a war not confined to particular battlefield. … Both say we can target citizens without judicial oversight and that can happen anywhere in the world.
Indeed, the Army is already being deployed on U.S. soil, and the military is conducting numerous training exercises on American streets. And see this.
And the numerous drones flying over American soil – projected by the FAA to reach 30,000 drones by 2020 – are starting to carry arms.
Remember, the Department of Justice attorney who wrote the memo "justifying" torture - John Yoo - also recently said that drones could be used against Americans living on U.S. soil in time of war:
Of course, America has been in a continuous declared state of national emergency since 9/11, and we are in a literally never-ending state of perpetual war. See this, this, this and this.
And the government has basically announced that it can label any American citizen a terrorist for no reason whatsoever.
So if a military-age man is killed in a U.S. city because he happens – even unknowingly – to be near a suspected bad guy, will the report simply read “another militant killed”?
Average:
4.923075
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::) ::)
whatever - you can't even bring yourself to admit you and the rest of the obamabots cheering obama for doing exactly the same shit bush did are a bunch of hypocrites and liars.
Something so simple just went right over their heads.
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LOL - LBJ and Hitler ring a bell how well that worked out?
I don't get it... LBJ went to the South Pacific... What did he have to do with Hitler?
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I don't get it... LBJ went to the South Pacific... What did he have to do with Hitler?
LBj and hitler both got involved in day to day minutea of the wars.
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LBj and hitler both got involved in day to day minutea of the wars.
Ah... I see... I have no first hand knowledge of this with LBJ. I don't know enough about his day to day operational involvement in Vietnam and what not.
Hitler being involved militarily was only a problem because he had to fight a 2 front war... Ridiculous.
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Ah... I see... I have no first hand knowledge of this with LBJ. I don't know enough about his day to day operational involvement in Vietnam and what not.
Hitler being involved militarily was only a problem because he had to fight a 2 front war... Ridiculous.
They said LBJ actually decided of certain bombing raids out of the WH and went over all the maps, etc.
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http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/02/jeremy-scahill-says-drone-strikes-murders_n_1565441.html
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Drone strikes are not nearly as surgical or efficient as they want you to believe.
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Drone strikes are not nearly as surgical or efficient as they want you to believe.
It's all relative.
Kind of hard to be surgical when using several hundred or even thousands of pounds of high explosive.
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Bam-bo shoots off his mouth
New York Post ^ | 6-3-12 | Michael Goodwin
Posted on Sunday, June 03, 2012 10:51:21 AM by afraidfortherepublic
Panic is never pretty. When it involves a politician scrambling desperately to stay afloat, it is ugly. When it involves a president of the United States trading national-security secrets for political gain, it is obscene.
Twice last week, The New York Times published insider accounts of Obama-administration decisions. One involved “kill lists” of terrorists targeted by drones. The other described cyberwarfare attacks against Iran.
The articles revealed details of top-level meetings and quoted the president’s comments. They were so gushingly favorable to him that it’s clear they were based on authorized leaks by the White House designed to make Obama look tough against terror. Flattery was part of the bargain.
So we learned the president insists on giving final approval to each target, a “grim debating society” that tests his “principles.” We learned he “is a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas” and follows the “just war theories of Christian philosophers.” Adviser John Brennan, described as a “grizzled” son of Irish immigrants, is compared “to a priest whose blessing has become indispensable” to Obama.
Naturally, campaign guru David Axelrod attends these “Terror Tuesday” meetings. Not that politics is involved, of course.
This is more than an unseemly spiking of the football. This is reckless politicking that reflects an his “anything goes” approach to November: Nothing is sacred except four more years.
The Times also outed Israel as our partner in launching the Stuxnet virus against Iran’s nuclear computers. While the United States and Israel were long suspected, the article shredded any deniability.
The Allies broke German military codes in World War II, but it remained secret until the 1970s. Now our president leaks secrets in real time.
(Excerpt) Read more at nypost.com ...
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O’s assassinations
By RICH LOWRY
Last Updated: 12:35 AM, June 2, 2012
Posted: 10:38 PM, June 1, 2012
Killing has never been so discriminating, so urbane, so cool.
The New York Times and Newsweek both ran long, largely admiring articles on how President Obama selects individual terrorists to terminate with extreme prejudice. The administration’s “smart power” isn’t working out so well, but smart killing is a smash success.
Obama’s national-security team — as well as his top political adviser, David Axelrod — gather on “Terror Tuesdays” to go over an expanding “kill list” that the president examines with the aid of capsule biographies of the terrorists, or “baseball cards.” Then the president decides who lives and who — if we get him in our sights — dies.
Needless to say, had Dick Cheney consulted “baseball cards” to decide in weekly meetings attended by Karl Rove who deserved to have close encounters with drone-fired missiles, Nancy Pelosi would have drafted the articles of impeachment herself.
The Obama killings vindicate the core premises of the Bush War on Terror: This is a war, and the protections of our criminal-justice system don’t apply to the enemy.
In light of the kill list, it’s a wonder anyone ever objected to Bush-era detentions or interrogations. If we can pick someone off a roster of names and sentence him to death without due process, surely we can capture and hold that same person.
If we can execute someone — and any of his associates who happen to be in the vicinity — from on high, surely we can keep him awake at night and otherwise discomfit him should he fall into our hands.
The Times notes that “Obama’s record has not drawn anything like the sweeping criticism from allies that his predecessor faced.” True enough. It hasn’t been subjected to a highly politicized assault at home and abroad by people desperate to put it in the worst possible light and even make it a war crime.
With a few exceptions, the left has retired from the field when it comes to smearing the executive branch for prosecuting the war. If the left was still in the game, it would insist on always calling the actions assassinations, demand congressional authorization and judicial sign-off, excoriate the secret proceedings and pour scorn on the entire notion of enemy combatants standing outside the criminal-justice system. It would call the assassinations a “terrorist-recruiting tool” — as indeed they are, since almost anything we do to combat al Qaeda will offend some sympathizers of al Qaeda.
For most of the left, the highest principle of just war theory is licet si Obama id faciat — it’s OK if Obama does it. This is how Gitmo, formerly a standing repudiation of all that we hold dear as a nation, becomes an afterthought when it is owned and operated by one Barack H. Obama.
As it happens, the president holds exactly the same Obama-centric view. So long as the kill list is overseen by him as judge and executioner, it’s beyond reproach.
The press tends to agree. Newsweek reports, “The choices he faces are brutally difficult, and he has struggled with them — sometimes turning them over in his mind again and again.”
Really? He thinks about who he is deciding to kill? The nation is blessed to have such a scrupulous leader.
The Times maintains that the president parses the kill list as “a student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas.” If no anecdotes have yet emerged about Obama justifying a particular kill with reference to the Summa Theologica, it’s probably only a matter of time.
In authorizing the strikes, Obama is to be commended for his coldbloodedness, although no tactic is perfect or without costs. The war in Yemen is sliding the wrong way’ relations with target-rich Pakistan are at a low ebb. But there should be no doubt now that the commander in chief possesses fearsome powers in the War on Terror. All it took for Democrats to accept that was for President Obama to begin exercising them.
comments.lowry@nationalreview.com
Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/opinion/opedcolumnists/assassinations_a2tC2odBZzJ7J70nsMvOVO#ixzz1wrHFya6E
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EPA Using Drones to Spy on Cattle Ranchers in Nebraska and Iowa
Kurt Nimmo
Infowars.com
June 4, 2012
Obama’s Environmental Protection Agency is using aerial drones to spy on farmers in Nebraska and Iowa. The surveillance came under scrutiny last week when Nebraska’s congressional delegation sent a joint letter to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson.
On Friday, EPA officialdom in “Region 7” responded to the letter.
“Courts, including the Supreme Court, have found similar types of flights to be legal (for example to take aerial photographs of a chemical manufacturing facility) and EPA would use such flights in appropriate instances to protect people and the environment from violations of the Clean Water Act,” the agency said in response to the letter.
“They are just way on the outer limits of any authority they’ve been granted,” said Mike Johanns, a Republican senator from Nebraska.
In fact, the EPA has absolutely zero authority and is an unconstitutional entity of an ever-expanding and rogue federal government. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution does not authorize Congress to legislate in the area of the environment. Under the Tenth Amendment, this authority is granted to the states and their legislatures, not the federal government.
The EPA has not addressed the constitutional question, including its wanton violation of probable cause under the Fourth Amendment. It merely states that it has authority to surveil the private property of farmers and ranchers. It defends its encroaching behavior as “cost-efficient.”
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Assassin-in-Chief in the Oval Office
Tom Engelhardt
June 5, 2012
This article originally appeared at TomDispatch.com. To stay on top of important articles like these, sign up to receive the latest updates from TomDispatch.com. To listen to Timothy MacBain's latest Tomcast audio interview in which Engelhardt discusses drone warfare and the Obama administration, click here or download it to your iPod here.
Be assured of one thing: whichever candidate you choose at the polls in November, you aren’t just electing a president of the United States; you are also electing an assassin-in-chief. The last two presidents may not have been emperors or kings, but they—and the vast national security structure that continues to be built up and institutionalized around the presidential self—are certainly one of the nightmares the founding fathers of this country warned us against. They are one of the reasons those founders put significant war powers in the hands of Congress, which they knew would be a slow, recalcitrant, deliberative body.
About the Author
Tom Engelhardt
Tom Engelhardt created and runs the Tomdispatch.com website, a project of The Nation Institute of which he is a Fellow...
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Thanks to a long New York Times piece by Jo Becker and Scott Shane, “Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will,” we now know that the president has spent startling amounts of time overseeing the “nomination” of terrorist suspects for assassination via the remotely piloted drone program he inherited from President George W. Bush and which he has expanded exponentially. Moreover, that article was based largely on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” In other words, it was essentially an administration-inspired piece—columnist Robert Scheer calls it “planted”—on a “secret” program the president and those closest to him are quite proud of and want to brag about in an election year.
The language of the piece about our warrior president was generally sympathetic, even in places soaring. It focused on the moral dilemmas of a man who—we now know—has personally approved and overseen the growth of a remarkably robust assassination program in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan based on a “kill list.” Moreover, he’s regularly done so target by target, name by name. (The Times did not mention a recent US drone strike in the Philippines that killed fifteen.) According to Becker and Shane, President Obama has also been involved in the use of a fraudulent method of counting drone kills, one that unrealistically deemphasizes civilian deaths.
Historically speaking, this is all passing strange. The Times calls Obama’s role in the drone killing machine “without precedent in presidential history.” And that’s accurate.
It’s not, however, that American presidents have never had anything to do with or been in any way involved in assassination programs. The state as assassin is hardly unknown in our history. How could President John F. Kennedy, for example, not know about CIA-inspired or -backed assassination plots against Cuba’s Fidel Castro, the Congo’s Patrice Lumumba and South Vietnamese autocrat (and ostensible ally) Ngo Dinh Diem? (Lumumba and Diem were successfully murdered.) Similarly, during Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, the CIA carried out a massive assassination campaign in Vietnam, Operation Phoenix. It proved to be a staggeringly profligate program for killing tens of thousands of Vietnamese, both actual enemies and those simply swept up in the process.
In previous eras, however, presidents either stayed above the assassination fray or practiced a kind of plausible deniability about the acts. We are surely at a new stage in the history of the imperial presidency when a president (or his election team) assembles his aides, advisors and associates to foster a story that’s meant to broadcast the group’s collective pride in the new position of assassin-in-chief.
Religious Cult or Mafia Hit Squad?
Here’s a believe-it-or-not footnote to our American age. Who now remembers that, in the early years of his presidency, George W. Bush kept what the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward called "his own personal scorecard for the war" on terror? It took the form of photographs with brief biographies and personality sketches of those judged to be the world's most dangerous terrorists, each ready to be crossed out by Bush once captured or killed. That scorecard was, Woodward added, always available in a desk drawer in the Oval Office.
Such private presidential recordkeeping now seems penny-ante indeed. The distance we’ve traveled in a decade can be measured by the Times' description of the equivalent of that “personal scorecard” today (and no desk drawer could hold it):
It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die. This secret 'nominations' process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases, and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia. The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by [counterterrorism ‘tsar’ John O.] Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name.
In other words, thanks to such meetings—on what insiders have labeled “terror Tuesday”—assassination has been thoroughly institutionalized, normalized and bureaucratized around the figure of the president. Without the help of or any oversight from the American people or their elected representatives, he alone is now responsible for regular killings thousands of miles away, including those of civilians and even children. He is, in other words, if not a king, at least the king of American assassinations. On that score, his power is total and completely unchecked. He can prescribe death for anyone “nominated,” choosing any of the “baseball cards” (PowerPoint bios) on that kill list and then order the drones to take them (or others in the neighborhood) out.
He and he alone can decide that assassinating known individuals isn’t enough and that the CIA’s drones can instead strike at suspicious “patterns of behavior” on the ground in Yemen or Pakistan. He can stop any attack, any killing, but there is no one, nor any mechanism that can stop him. An American global killing machine (quite literally so, given that growing force of drones) is now at the beck and call of a single, unaccountable individual. This is the nightmare the founding fathers tried to protect us from.
In the process, as Salon’s Glenn Greenwald has pointed out, the president has shredded the Fifth Amendment, guaranteeing Americans that they will not “be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel produced a secret memo claiming that, while the Fifth Amendment’s due process guarantee does apply to the drone assassination of an American citizen in a land with which we are not at war, “it could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.” (That, writes Greenwald, is “the most extremist government interpretation of the Bill of Rights I’ve heard in my lifetime.”) In other words, the former Constitutional law professor has been freed from the law of the land in cases in which he “nominates,” as he has, US citizens for robotic death.
There is, however, another aspect to the institutionalizing of those “kill lists” and assassination as presidential prerogatives that has gone unmentioned. If the Times article—which largely reflects how the Obama administration cares to see itself and its actions—is to be believed, the drone program is also in the process of being sanctified and sacralized.
You get a sense of this from the language of the piece itself. (“A parallel, more cloisteredselection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan…”) The president is presented as a particularly moral man, who devotes himself to the "just war" writings of religious figures like Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine, and takes every death as his own moral burden. His leading counterterrorism advisor Brennan, a man who, while still in the CIA, was knee-deep in torture controversy, is presented, quite literally, as a priest of death, not once but twice in the piece. He is described by the Times reporters as “a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama.” They then quote the State Department’s top lawyer, Harold H. Koh, saying, “It’s as though you had a priest with extremely strong moral values who was suddenly charged with leading a war.”
In the Times telling, the organization of robotic killing had become the administration’s idée fixe, a kind of cult of death within the Oval Office, with those involved in it being so many religious devotees. We may be, that is, at the edge of a new state-directed, national-security-based religion of killing grounded in the fact that we are in a “dangerous” world and the “safety” of Americans is our preeminent value. In other words, the president, his apostles and his campaign acolytes are all, it seems, praying at the Church of St. Drone.
Of course, thought about another way, that “terror Tuesday” scene might not be from a monastery or a church synod, but from a Mafia council directly out of a Mario Puzo novel, with the president as the Godfather, designating “hits” in a rough-and-tumble world.
How far we’ve come in just two presidencies! Assassination as a way of life has been institutionalized in the Oval Office, thoroughly normalized, and is now being offered to the rest of us as a reasonable solution to American global problems and an issue on which to run a presidential campaign.
Downhill All the Way on Blowback Planet
After 5,719 inside-the-Beltway (largely inside-the-Oval-Office) words, the Times piece finally gets to this single outside-the-Beltway sentence: “Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.”
Arguably, indeed! For the few who made it that far, it was a brief reminder of just how narrow, how confining the experience of worshiping at St. Drone actually is. All those endless meetings, all those presidential hours that might otherwise have been spent raising yet more money for campaign 2012, and the two countries that have taken the brunt of the drone raids are more hostile, more dangerous and in worse shape than in 2009. (And one of them, keep in mind, is a nuclear power.) News articles since have only emphasized how powerfully those drones have radicalized local populations—however many “bad guys” (and children) they may also have wiped off the face of the Earth.
And though the Times doesn’t mention this, it’s not just bad news for Yemen or Pakistan. American democracy, already on the ropes, is worse off, too.
What should astound Americans—but seldom seems to be noticed—is just how into the shadows, how thoroughly military-centric and how unproductive has become Washington's thinking at the altar of St. Drone and its equivalents (including special operations forces, increasingly the president’s secret military within the military). Yes, the world is always a dangerous place, even if far less so now than when, in the Cold War era, two superpowers were a heartbeat away from nuclear war. But—though it’s increasingly heretical to say this—the perils facing Americans, including relatively modest dangers from terrorism, aren’t the worst things on our planet.
Electing an assassin-in-chief, no matter who you vote for, is worse. Pretending that the Church of St. Drone offers any kind of reasonable or even practical solutions on this planet of ours, is worse yet. And even worse, once such a process begins, it’s bound to be downhill all the way. As we learned last week, again in the Times, we not only have an assassin-in-chief in the Oval Office, but a cyberwarrior, perfectly willing to release a new form of weaponry, the most sophisticated computer “worm” ever developed, against another country with which we are not at war.
This represents a breathtaking kind of rashness, especially from the leader of a country that, perhaps more than any other, is dependent on computer systems, opening the United States to potentially debilitating kinds of future blowback. Once again, as with drones, the White House is setting the global rules of the road for every country (and group) able to get its hands on such weaponry and it’s hit the highway at 140 miles per hour without a cop in sight.
James Madison, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington and the rest of them knew war and yet were not acolytes of the eighteenth-century equivalents of St. Drone, nor of presidents who might be left free to choose to turn the world into a killing zone. They knew at least as well as anyone in our national security state today that the world is always a dangerous place—and that that’s no excuse for investing war powers in a single individual. They didn’t think that a state of permanent war, a state of permanent killing, or a president free to plunge Americans into such states was a reasonable way for their new republic to go. To them, it was by far the more dangerous way to exist in our world.
The founding fathers would surely have chosen republican democracy over safety. They would never have believed that a man surrounded by advisors and lawyers, left to his own devices, could protect them from what truly mattered. They tried to guard against it. Now, we have a government and a presidency dedicated to it, no matter who is elected in November.
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What WARS did he win? Please tell me. Because withdrawing from Iraq is on Bush's time table. Afghanistan is still a mess. Withdrawing doesn't even mean that we won. In these cases, it just means we are tired.
And as far as terrorism, was USA ever attacked after 9/11? Answer is no. Who was president? Bush He put this little thing together called the Patriot Act, which lil Barry supported. HEHEHEHEH!! In fact, lil Barry has mosty followed Bush's blueprint.
Democrats know how to fight wars? Does Vietnam ring any bells? The worst military defeat ever is contributed to the clueless democratic party.
Agreed. Democrats are weak and worthless. Pray that Romney wins, because Obama will ruin this country forever.
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dont worry, yall will think this is a great idea when president romney sells it ;)
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dont worry, yall will think this is a great idea when president romney sells it ;)
STFU. I didn't attack Obama for this. I attacked leftists like yourself who bashed bush for doing that which. You cheer Obama for.
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STFU. I didn't attack Obama for this. I attacked leftists like yourself who bashed bush for doing that which. You cheer Obama for.
link to me 'cheering on' obama for this like this?
Stop making shit up, dog.
I never said walker woudl lose. I never said it's cool for obama to use predators in nebraska.
I think you see what you wanna see.