A long piece in the NYT covers Obama's record of killing by drones.
It is headlined Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will. But as the URL reveals the original title was the rather sycophantic "Obama's leadership in the war on Al Qaida". Despite some seriously troublesome issue reported in it the piece, as the original title, is quite sympathetic to his policies and avoids the difficult questions. And contradicting its new headline the piece shows that Obama has no principles at all but is moving those he purports to have whenever he deems that convenient. Here are some excerpts from the long piece to demonstrate that.
Obama is bending the law to fit his agenda:
When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”
While claiming to be against some Bush policies he is giving himself loopholes to continue them:
A phalanx of retired generals and admirals stood behind 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.
The CIA is still in the "rendition" business of illegal detention, Guantanamo is still open and from those facts we can guess about the torture issue.
Now on to drone strikes which, according to the piece, get Obama's personal sign off. Here is how he avoids his alleged prinicple of not killing innocent people:
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.
…
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths.
And who would ever care to "posthumously prove" that the "militants" killed, i.e. any military-age male, were indeed innocent? No one.
Yet that immense killing by drone campaign, in which Obama – we are to believe – makes a personal decision about most of them, is only to avoid the inconveniences of capturing people and to prove that they are guilty:
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.”
Obama does not care about "collateral damaged" corpses even when they are women and children:
[I]n 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.
…
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.
And this is what troubles me most:
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.
These "Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes" are on people who likely have neither the means nor the motive to attack the United States. While the administration has claimed that they were only some 20 or so higher ranking Al-Qaeda people in Yemen it has bombed, by jets and drones, far more often without even knowing who it bombs.
In both, Pakistan and Yemen, U.S. increased drone strikes correlate with increased interior political violence. They are obviously very destabilizing but Obama keeps enlarging their number. He is increasing the problem instead of solving it.
The most open administration ever that principled Obama promised in his campaign is, of course, no such thing:
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.
Obamas great talk in Egypt about the U.S. friendliness to the Muslim world was also unprincipled:
His focus on strikes has made it impossible to forge, for now, the new relationship with the Muslim world that he had envisioned. Both Pakistan and Yemen are arguably less stable and more hostile to the United States than when Mr. Obama became president.
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.
The few critics of his policies within the administrated get shafted.
Mr. Obama’s ambassador to Pakistan, Cameron P. Munter, has complained to colleagues that the C.I.A.’s strikes drive American policy there, saying “he didn’t realize his main job was to kill people,” a colleague said.
Two weeks ago Munter resigned as ambassador.
Dennis C. Blair, director of national intelligence until he was fired in May 2010, said that discussions inside the White House of long-term strategy against Al Qaeda were sidelined by the intense focus on strikes. “The steady refrain in the White House was, ‘This is the only game in town’ — reminded me of body counts in Vietnam,” said Mr. Blair, a retired admiral who began his Navy service during that war.
Blair is right. The drone war is now a body-count war. Counting bodies deceives as those killed were likely not the real problem and killing them is not the solution.
But as Obama has not principles. He is mudeling through avoiding this or that political problem by always taking the easiest way out. Be that by bowing to Wall Street, appeasing a republican congress or killing by drones.
Here are two question the NYT piece avoids to ask. Trying to answer them shows the problem of such behavior.
- Why are the AQAP in Yemen and the Taliban in Pakistan growing stronger despite more and more U.S. strikes?
- What happens if the recent rapid increase of strikes in Pakistan and Yemen turn out to not solve the problem. What then? More strikes?
Judging from his behavior as described in the NYT piece Obama's answer to the last question is sounding principled "Yes!"