Secret "Kill Lists"

The Great Liberal's Other Side

The New York Times has written an article about President Obama that is both chilling and risible at the same time.  First, the chilling aspect.

Obama and his Justice Department have "discovered" a new federal government power: the right to execute American citizens abroad, without any due process, checks and balances, or judicial review.  Obama reserves the right and power to make every "kill" decision.  He personally reviews all "candidates" and makes a selection.

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. . . . 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.  

A second chilling aspect is the active dissembling used by Obama and his advisers on whether innocent people are getting killed in drone strikes--euphemistically called collateral damage.  Obama had actively encouraged at policy of all killed to be combatants, unless there is hard forensic evidence to the contrary.

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.”

All of this will cause painful conniptions amongst members of Obama's left-wing, liberal base.   It will sour liberals in Hollywood. 

For our part, we have no objections whatsoever with the government of a sovereign state, by means of a preventive strike, executing people conspiring to murder citizens.  But we object strongly to the decisions being made without due process, without judicial review, without checks and balances. 

And now the risible aspect.  The article points out Obama's fundamental incompetence as a President.  His aides and associates have found at times he believes his rhetorical pronouncements have the efficacy and power of God Himself.  Merely to pronounce is to bring things into being. 

One example was his loudly pronounced intention to close Guantanamo Bay.  Obama never had even the remotest idea how it could or should be done.

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.”

This vignette explains why Obama spends most of his time campaigning, pronouncing what will be.  It also explains why he is so ineffectual and feckless when it comes to working with Congress.  He pronounces and expects Congress to reify his words.  This is why, twice, he has presented a budget to Congress, and suffered  the ignominy of them being voted down unanimously.

Nevertheless he gravely tells us that he ranks right up there with the greatest and most effective presidents the United States has ever had.