Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Somalia. Show all posts

Sunday, July 1, 2012

The curious case of the penitent president. II

Obama's other little signal to the beleaguered but believing left came in an earlier, and more famous Times article, this one by Scott Shane and Jo Becker, portraying the president as he agonizes over his "nominations" to the Kill List of people to be drone-bombed in Afghanistan, Yemen, and Somalia.

Because he doesn't just kill people, we learned*; he has a very thorough and responsible procedure for making sure he only kills the right people. It's not quite due process the way we studied it in middle school, where they never mentioned this extrajudicial type of due process, but it's extremely due, so to speak. He studies their portraits and biographies, flanked by
"I'll be judge, I'll be jury," said cunning old Fury...
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. [jump]
 *It's the CIA in Pakistan that does that, not to mention going after those who try to rescue the victims, or march in their funerals. Whatever you say about the president, he clearly does a better job in his three countries than they do in their one.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

A little intelligence

As we know, President Obama's counterterrorism adviser, John Brennan, has backed down a little from his claim a year ago that there had been no civilian deaths in drone strikes since 2010:
Brennan was asked about his claim last June that for almost a year “there hasn’t been a single collateral death because of the exceptional proficiency, precision of the capabilities we’ve been able to develop.”

On Sunday, he appeared to qualify his statement. "Well, what I said was that over a period of time before my public remarks that we had no information about a single civilian, a noncombatant, being killed," he said. (Los Angeles Times, April 29, 2012)
Now we've learned from the New York Times how they manage to avoid the information: [jump]
Water-ordeal. From Wikipedia.