New York Times: "Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will"
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1Mr. 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.
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.
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.
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.
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What does he know that WE don't know???
Or, is he a phoney, or is there some OTHER explanation???
If you think a secret kill list, indefinite detentions and secret trials is just "manufactured outrage", you really check yourself.
These are not small things we are talking about.
If you can't see that, you have completely lost sight of things.
I really don't think there is anything to say beyond that.
Either you will get it or you won't.
But... it is really sad to see this defended and not even with reason. Simply with a kind of child-like knee-jerk response ("I told you so/I know you are but what am I"
you're still an idealist; which is wonderful. as for me - i'm getting too old, too tired & too cynical, to bother explaining the obvious to the deliberately obtuse.
I may sound like I still have fire in me, but it is just smoldering coals.
I am not even in the US because I burned up the last of my idealism fighting hard for the election of Obama.
My 8-year fuel had been the Bush Admin -that is when I allowed myself to believe that it was all HIM and not US that was responsible for what America is now.
I no longer think that. I see now, much more clearly, that is deeply endemic and that the majority of both parties are on the same side -with some notable exceptions mostly among the Dems (and one "Socialist" .
I refuse to stop pointing out the evil and the dangers, however. I only joined DU 10 years ago out of a desire to voice my opinion against the growing "wrongness" in America -and I do not have any intention of changing my opinion on what is right and what is wrong simply because OUR side does it.
Either our values are consistent or they or not.
They were only the first edifice to be taken down by those hijackers.
