His administration also expanded the drone war: There have been 326 drone strikes in Pakistan, 93 in Yemen, and several in Somalia, compared to a total of 52 under George Bush. Two of those strikes killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki and his American-born 16-year-old son within two weeks. Under Obama U.S. drone operators began practicing signature strikes, a tactic in which targets are chosen based on patterns of suspicious behavior and the identities of those to be killed arent necessarily known. (The administration counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.) Furthermore, the disturbing trend of the double tap — bombing the same place in quick succession and often hitting first responders — has become common practice. Needless to say, a lot of innocent people have been killed. Obama has also embraced the expansion of capture/kill missions by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) after it developed into the primary counterterrorism tool of the Bush administration. One JSOC operator told investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield, that operations became harder, faster, quicker with the full support of the White House under Obama. Scahill, who also made a Dirty Wars documentary, told NBC News that Obama will go down in history as the president who legitimized and systematized a process by which the United States asserts the right to conduct assassination operations around the world. So it is true that President Obama is “really good at killing people,” but he has demonstrated that is not necessarily noble. Read more: businessinsider/obama-said-hes-really-good-at-killing-people-2013-11#ixzz2jYYOUsoC
Posted on: Sun, 03 Nov 2013 05:13:19 +0000
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