Looking at Foreign Policy‘s recommendation of a book titled “Confront and Conceal: Obama’s Secret Wars and Surprising Use of American Power,” I’m reminded of something I read in the WSJ this morning.
It was an op-ed piece by John Yoo. You know, the Torture Memos guy.
The administration has made little secret of its near-total reliance on drone operations to fight the war on terror. The ironies abound. Candidate Obama campaigned on narrowing presidential wartime power, closing Guantanamo Bay, trying terrorists in civilian courts, ending enhanced interrogation, and moving away from a wartime approach to terrorism toward a criminal-justice approach. Mr. Obama has avoided these vexing detention issues simply by depriving terrorists of all of their rights—by killing them…
This is kind of like Luca Brasi saying that Michael’s even tougher than the old Don. He should know.
Of course, he goes on to criticize, likening Obama’s personal selection of enemies to kill to LBJ’s micromanagement of bombing targets in Vietnam. He also accuses the administration of politically motivated intelligence leaks way worse than those laid at Scooter Libby’s feet.
So he didn’t mean it in a nice way.
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I think it’s worth noting that the criticism of the selective leaking is not strictly partisan in nature.
Curiously, Islamist militants are more strident against drone attacks (with which Obama has fulfilled a campaign promise, by the way) than water boarding.
Keep up the drones, Obama!
However, despite the late Christopher’s Hitchen’s personal testimony, the real reason water boarding was scorned by libs is that it would eventually have been used against too many lawyer-politicians.
The standard definition of chutzpah used to be somebody killing his parents and then asking the court for mercy because he was now an orphan.
I think we’ve found a new definition of chutzpah.
By the way, have y’all read the recent New York Times story about the president and his “kill list”? Here’s an excerpt:
“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.”
If Obama has a kill list it’s just fine, but let a regular joe have a kill list, post just ONE blog comment about it and the police show up at his house. Sheesh.
I’ve read the NY Time article and President Obama, in my opinion, in deliberate, methodical, and determined to destroy al-Qaeda.
To me, that is a good thing.
It is also noteworthy to note on this anniversary of Woodward and Bernstein, that while another lawyer that was President, Richard Nixon, tried to do things outside the legal arena, President Obama is a stickler for doing things within the law.
Okay, the economy still sucks, but the decimation and emasculation of al-Qaeda has been effective.
A Think Geek T-shirt that I bought shortly after 9/11:
rm -rm /bin/laden
Mission Accomplished: May 2, 2011. Congrats to President Obama for sending boots instead of drones for killing the snake.
I’m ok with the kill lists because I know that the President is a patriotic, God-fearing Christian man cool, urbane, handsome scholar and he will do the right, decent thing.
President Obama is a stickler for doing things within the law.
LOL
The president has stepped way over the line with the kill list. American citizens have even been targeted.