The most detailed look ever into Obama’s assassination program and reveals the program has turned into a horrifying quagmire unjustified civilian slaughter.
Following the backlash over Obama’s recent appoint of John Brennan as a the first ever Assassination Czar new details have been ‘leaked’ to justify the program.
Recently I wrote an article on the appointment of the shady character known as John Brennan in a role I dubbed as America’s first ever Assassination Czar.
Media Blackout As Obama Appoints First Ever Assassination Czar
John Brennan, Obama’s chief counterterrorism advisor was a name that you did not see on the Mainstream media today as they continue to run stories that serve to distract the masses from stories that matter.
Most recently he publicly spoke about the drone program calling it moral and ethical and just.
According to reports from the Associated Press, John Brennan has now seized the lead in choosing who will be targeted for drone attacks and raids after Obama delegated him as the sole authority to designate people for assassination under the United States top-secret assassination program.
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That immediately sent shock waves across social media networks as millions of people were soon made aware of the news using my coined phrase ‘Assassination Czar’.
Obama Yes We Can Murder Whoever, Whenever, Wherever
The outage has apparently forced Obama’s hand in revealing long kept secrets about the program his administration has fought long and hard to keep as a top-secret matter of national insecurity.
The revelations come through a long NY Times article which provides the first and ever detailed look into how the program has works.
Not surprisingly, the article an attempt to do damage control which is done by presenting the program from the watered down non-critical perspective of beltway insiders.
Regardless of the attempt to mitigate the harsh realities of the program the revelations are so shocking that should have every single American unnerved and completely outraged.
For starters Obama has admitted that teenagers, including a 17 year-old girl, and several American citizens are potential targets for the secret assassination list.
According to the report President Obama personally approves all drone strike conducted, including an admission that he authorized at least one strike knowing beforehand that innocent civilians including woman were present and would be killed.
Even worse, is the assassination was done not because the target posed a threat to the United States but just because another government wanted that person assassinated.
The article also admits that the CIA is conducting what is known as “signature strikes” which kill entire groups of innocent people when we don’t even know who we are killing.
Computer algorithms monitoring that have been taught using machine learning that certain behaviors or actions detected across a sophisticated network of high tech-surveillance equipment constitute probable terrorist activity are used to flag targets.
Such signatures include traveling in area where militants are known to travel or along paths militants are known to travel, conducting group exercise in public, walking in a small a group or as the article reveals “3 or more people doing jumping jacks” in an known area of militant activity.
Recently reported drone strikes tell of entire groups of innocent people, such as a group of farmers herding mules and cows, being assassinated by these signature strikes.
Perhaps even more alarming is such signature strikes are now being conducted by non-military US government agencies on this side of the Atlantic to identify and target drug traffickers.
The article then reveals that innocent people assassinated like this are merely labeled as enemy combatants by the government while the corporate media echoes the government’s claim without verifying the identities of those killed.
Meanwhile, the US government has implied in statements those who report that these casualties are innocent civilian casualties and not militant combatants, such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, are providing support to Al Qaeda.
In fact, in the recent court decision that temporarily revoked certain NDAA provision as being unconstitutional, the government could have had the case against them dismissed entirely if they would have assert to the courts the NDAA wouldn’t be used to target government critical journalists who are engaging in First amendment protected activities.
The government refused and instead chose to fight the case and lost – for the time being.
This is all unnerving as the US government is now arming drones operating at military bases inside the United States with missiles to help train for the deployment of 30,000 drones over U.S. skies.
At the same time tens of thousands of sophisticated discrete solar powered and other ground censors which are used to feed information to the drones, similar to those already deployed throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan, are being deployed inside of the United States as the NSA continues building a $2 billion dollar quantum computing data center.
Excerpts from the New York Times article with the blatant repeated propaganda and lies removed:
Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will
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 […] meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces.
[…]
“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 […] kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.
[…]
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,”
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When a rare opportunity for a drone strike […] arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
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“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.
[…]
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 […]
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
[…]
His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach […]; 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 […] of a take-no-prisoners policy. And Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan […] has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy […] saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” […]
Beside the president at every step is […] John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective […]
But the strikes that have eviscerated [opposing forces] — just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan —[…] Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice [..]; 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.”
[Former director of national intelligence Dennis C. Blair] said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy [have been] sidelined by the intense focus on [drone] strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” […]
[…]
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 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’
[…] 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 […] carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room […]
It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read [suspects] 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[…] 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 […] suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial […]
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.
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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 […]
I love this part – removing the fluff from the article and you get because the republicans didn’t want to allow Obama to read people their rights and Obama refused to charge people without reading them their rights Obama decided he would just detain them indefinitely because he could do so without reading them their rights.
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.
[…]
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 [ to detain suspects indefinitely without reading them their rights, providing access to a lawyer or even charging them with a crime] , Mr. Holder recalled.
[…]
‘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 […].
These next paragraphs are more B.S. to convince the reader Obama is running the assassination program while exercising the utmost degree of caution. The truth is the program has morphed from targeted strikes based on human verified intelligence into attacks on entire groups whose identity we don’t even know.
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, […] officials said, but did not significantly change the program
[…]
Here is the secret to their success “a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that […] in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants […] unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
[…] 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.
So unless someone proves an assassination victim was in no way a ‘terrorist’ they are counted as a ‘terrorist’.
Hmmm…
The Girl Killed By Barack Obama – She Never Saw It Coming
President Obama caught on video deliberately spreading misinformation about murder being carried out on his orders to conduct targeted assassinations.
Remain Silent And This Will Soon Be Our Daughters
Watch this video exposing the truth behind the lies and spread it far and wide.
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Back to the NY Times article:
[…]
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 […] standing before the Constitution at the National Archives in Washington, he mentioned Guantánamo 28 times, repeating his campaign pledge to close the prison.
[…]
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.
[….] 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.
[…]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 […]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.
I left Al Qaeda and Shabab in here to make a point. Somolia’s Shabab is fighting a civil war and is not Al Qaeda – In fact the ‘Islamist’ there had finally brought peace after years of bloody civil war and the US would not accept an Islamic government so they had Somalia’s neighbor to the north invade the country which is the ongoing cause of the Somalia conflict.
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.
First, the times just admitted in he previous paragraph that people not affiliated with Al Qaeda are being targeted and then claim officials push for evidence of ties to Al Qaeda. Furthermore, this statement misleads the reader into thinking everyone assassinated is fully vetted for targeting when ‘signature strikes’ provide clear evidence that in many cases no one is pushing for evidence of anyone’s ties to Al Qaeda. How could they when they are killing civilians whose identities they don’t even know?
“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.
“What’s a Qaeda facilitator?” asked one participant – Someone sitting in on a meeting deciding to assassinate someone should already know the answer to this. That question would indicate this entire meeting is staged fanfare being done because member of the press is present and doing an article or this is the first time this meeting has ever even occurred.
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.
[…]
“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.”
[…]
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.”
[…]
These next statements are absurd, comparing a Chief U.S. torture chief who has been caught lying to the media about many things, including several lies about the raid on the Bin Laden compound and that civilians are not being killed, to a Priest with very strong moral values. Give me a break.
Mr. Brennan [a] 25-year veteran of the C.I.A. whose work as a top agency official during the brutal interrogations of the Bush administration […] 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 […]
[…]
“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.
More propaganda about a rigorous checklist that doesn’t exist.
“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.”
1) The infeasibility of capture – Yes, it would have been impossible to capture a group of men and woman herding livestock or that poor little girl in the photo above.
2) Certainty of the intelligence based – How can you have a ‘certainty of the intelligence base’ when you are killing people whose identities you don’t even know?
3) The imminence of the threat – yes the group of men and woman herding livestock or that poor little girl in the photo above once again were posing an imminent threat.
4) All of these things? More like none of these things but instead more corporate media stenography of government propaganda.
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.”
The next paragraph is more hogwash. The US government has no problem capturing people in other locations around the world were there is rough terrain such as the Canyons immigrants use to cross the Mexico border.
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.
Here we go. So much for that checklist. Obama admits to assassinating someone because another nation wanted him dead. Even worse, is Obama knew that innocent civilians including woman and children were at home and still ordered the assassination.
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.
[…]
Another attack, this one took out the target and with the use of cluster bombs two neighboring families which led to the bodies of dead children ending up on YouTube.
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.
[…]
Finally we get to the signature strikes only to have the Times claim they are targeting “training camps and suspicious compounds” which is clearly a lie and even the CIA “jokes” is defined as three guys doing jumping jacks.
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.”
How Orwellian “Signature strikes were killing a large number of terrorist suspects even when C.I.A. analysts were not certain beforehand of their presence.” Again refer to Obama’s definition above that anyone assassinated is automatically presumed to be a terrorist unless intelligence from a US government source proves their innocence.
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.
Here is the admission that all of the qualifying and tales of extreme caution mentioned above are lies – “Today, the Defense Department can target suspects in Yemen whose names they do not know.” Which of course is followed by more doublespeak by claiming that these signature strikes require ‘more evidence of a threat to the United States’. Does such rhetoric admit that the burden of evidence in non-signature, aka “personality” strikes, is sub standard?
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.
Crossing the rubicon – assassinating a US citizens – no jury, no judge, no executioner just straight to trial.
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.
[…]
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?
Justified by another twisted secret Obama interpretation, which in effect is Obama creating laws, ruling them constitutional and executing them without the involvement of the Congress or a chance for them to be challenged in the courts. In every other civilization in history governments who committed such acts were known as totalitarian dictatorships.
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 approval for a law he created out thin air to allowing the constitution to be sidestepped altogether to deny an American citizens (followed by two others) of his life without due process. Sorry, just because you wake up one day and decide you want to give due process any entirely different definition does change the definition. Due process without Judicial oversight is not Due Process.
And along with fellow “propagandist”, so does this set the precedent for other propagandists – known as the under the constitution as someone exercising freedom of speech rights – to be unilaterally assigned to some secret government kill list by a President asserting dictatorial powers and assassinated along with any other innocent man, woman or child who is unfortunate enough to be in the vicinity? All of this done while the government has not been required to provide one ounce of evidence to substantiate their allegations claiming the evidence doesn’t need to be released due to national insecurity reasons. Sorry for all of those who somehow believe the government because the media has echoed over and over again this guy surely as a terrorist when the media hasn’t seen any evidence either.
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.
[…]“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.
[…]
Mr. Obama may have reason to wonder about unfinished business and unintended consequences.
[…]
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.”
[…]
Source: New York Times
Notes:
- The article repeatedly uses Al Qaeda as a reference when many of the activities don’t even target Al Qaeda yet other groups that aren’t even connected to Al Qaeda. Hence this bias has been removed.
- The article makes it clear that it is not just terrorists being targeted pointing out that innocents including woman and children and even “person’s of unknown identity” are approved to be assassinate. so it is clearly and unfair bias to repeatedly claim that “militants”, “Al Qaeda”, or “terrorists” are being targeted. As such I removed such claims.
- The article also repeatedly refers to unjust or unconstitutional treatment toward ‘terrorists’ – such as torture, being denied a lawyer, a trial, or being subject to indefinite detention without charge – while the assertion is false because these are accused or alleged terrorists often with no evidence what so ever many of which have been released with no charges ever even being filed only to have the courts to deny their right to seek retribution for their mistreatment. Again using the term “militants”, “Al qaeda”, or “terrorists” without qualifying them as “alleged” presents a bias that misleads the reader.
- The article qualified or provided an excuse after just about every statement. Ones that could not be qualified use the technique of applying to the readers sense of compassion by presenting situations as moral dilemmas where tough decisions needed to be made that turned out to be the wrong choice. Again, these were removed from the article.