The President’s Kill List

[EFerrari]

Daily Comment

May 30, 2012
The President’s Kill List
Posted by Amy Davidson

What is wrong with the President sitting in a room, looking at lists and portraits of people—a Somali man, a seventeen-year-old girl, an American citizen—and deciding whom to kill? That, according to long and troubling articles in both the Times and Newsweek, is a job Barack Obama has assigned himself. His aides, notably John Brennan, his counter-terrorism adviser, portray it as a matter of taking responsibility—if we are going to assassinate someone, or call in a drone strike to take out a camp in Yemen, the President should make the call—as if our only alternative were some sort of rogue operation, with generals or C.I.A. agents shooting at will. But responsibility involves accountability, which is something, in this case, that appears to be badly lacking. Obama has not taken on a burden, but instead has given the Presidency a novel power.

The “kill list” story is a reminder of how much language matters, and how dangerous it is when the plain meaning of a word is ignored. Each might include a mini-glossary: “baseball cards,” for the PowerPoint slides with the biographies and faces of targets; “Terror Tuesday,” meetings where targets are sorted out; “nominations” for death-marked finalists; “personality strikes” that aimed to kill a person, and “signature strikes” that went after a group of people whose names one didn’t know because of the way they seemed, from pictures in the sky, to be acting. (From the Times piece, written by Jo Becker and Scott Shane: “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.”) Signature strikes were also known as TADS, for terrorist-attack-disruption strikes, or just as “crowd kills.” Both articles explore Obama’s halting efforts to confine signature strikes to Pakistan, rather than Yemen and Somalia, and how he ultimately didn’t, really. This is the kind of attack that, in one incident mentioned by Daniel Klaidman in his Newsweek piece, led to “persuasive” reports of dozens of women and children dying. A lawyer who saw that on “Kill TV,” the feed that let the military and lawyers watch strikes, said later, “If I were Catholic, I’d have to go to confession.”

More disturbing than childish names for brutal things are the absurd meanings ascribed to more sober terms. The key ones are “civilians and combatants,” and “due process.”

How do you minimize civilian casualties in a conflict? Ask a military planner or human-rights organization or just a sensible person and each might come up with a list of tactics, plans, litmus tests. And there were apparently elements of that in the White House’s conversations. But ask a sophist or, as it happens, the C.I.A., and you might get this suggestion: change the definition. As the Times described it, 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.


Read more http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2012/05/the-presidents-kill-list.html#ixzz1wQN0GUM2

[napoleon_in_rags]

1. Okay, so shut down the whole machine.

A unified front against all of it. I'm with that. What I'm not with is the selective reporting, where Bush is a hero for doing this kind of thing and Obama is a villain. I agree the drone strikes, the rest, are playing an immoral tune Americans got sick of a long time ago. But Obama has ended the wars, and we appear to be moving toward peace.

The fundamental manipulation technique of the MSM is distorting proportion. One missing woman is given weeks of coverage, while many get none at all. However in proper proportion, all things become clear: Obama's record isn't perfect, I hate all of this. But he ended the wars, and that is a HEAVY weight on the side of the scale supporting him. All this other business is a weight against him, but its proportion is smaller than the good deeds. So while I am against it, I hope we can see it in context of a president who seems to be honestly working toward peace.

[AnotherMcIntosh]

2. "he ended the wars"? Then what are our troops doing in the Middle-East?

And why are drones continuing to be used?

[EFerrari]

3. Obama has not ended the wars. He shut down Iraq

Last edited Thu May 31, 2012, 09:53 AM - Edit history (1)

and is more active in Pakistan than Little Boots, plus he's in Yemen and Somalia. Let's not commit the selective sin ourselves.

I don't think you can find Amy Davidson distorting anything, much less praising Bush.

[Fumesucker]

4. The US is out of Iraq because the Iraqi government threw them out..

The US was still trying to renegotiate a status of forces agreement right up to the last minute..

[napoleon_in_rags]

5. I'll give you that its 60 40.

There is plenty not to like, but the direction things are moving seems slow but positive. Of course we will see.

It was interesting to see Bush 43 again. I kind of saw him through a new lens today on TV: so little has changed, its hard to see him like the devil I used to. The problems we face seem to be deep, and systemic. That means any president is a bit limited in what he can do, something we should probably remember.

[EFerrari]

6. Yep. The presidency is only one piece of this. n/t

[sad sally]

7. Doesn't it make ya' feel all secure, warm and fuzzy to know that the President and his

drone kill advisers, er Executive Branch, can protect and even guarantee a dead person's Fifth Amendment rights by having a lengthly discussion about how to kill that person?

Sure makes me a lot more comfortable knowing before a drone blows an American citizen to bits, all that's needed it a long talk by the Prez' and his kill team - this talk was/is due process - you bet - American justice at its best.

"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? 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."

Oh, and doesn't the idea of a kill list, which includes undesirable Americans, plus super-secret special operations killing suspected terrorists all over the globe just prove that our President - a Democrat - is just as tough on national "security" as those rotten Republicans?

[EFerrari]

8. What's funny to me is that Kennedy ran more or less as a hawk

and he handled the whole Cuban missile crisis with less bs than these people going after what amount to gang members.