From ABC via Yahoo! News:
Obama's ‘secret kill list' shows president is final word
When it comes to the "secret kill list"--a regularly updated chart showing the world's most wanted terrorists--President Obama is the "final moral calculation" in the kill or capture debate, according to the third in a series of New York Times articles assessing his record.
Who was the last one we captured? This jug-eared moron is fine with playing the Kill The Goat-Rapist video game, but gets squeamish at the thought of beating useful intelligence out of these murderers. What a real mensch.
And despite his liberal background, Obama has taken an aggressive approach to counterterrorism.
The Times said it interviewed three dozen current and former advisers to
Obama for the article, who described his "evolution since taking on the
role, without precedent in presidential history, of personally
overseeing the shadow war with Al Qaeda":
They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative
deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay
in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was
adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the
Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and
dangerous lands. 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."
Just days after taking office, the president got word that the first
strike under his administration had killed a number of innocent
Pakistanis. "The president was very sharp on the thing, and said, 'I
want to know how this happened,'" a top White House adviser recounted.
"The care that Mr. Obama and his counterterrorism chief take in choosing targets," the Times said, "and their reliance on a precision weapon, the drone, reflect his pledge at the outset of his presidency to reject what he called the Bush administration's 'false choice between our safety and our ideals.'"
And Obama's success limiting civilian deaths in drone strikes is, in
part, due to "a disputed method for counting civilian casualties"
embraced by Obama. According to the Times, the White House
considers "all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants ...
unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them
innocent."
"How old are these people?" Obama asked during his regular Tuesday briefing with intelligence officials--dubbed the "Terror Tuesday" meeting--in the White House Situation Room. "If they are starting to use children, we are moving into a whole different phase."
The White House has also struggled with the so-called "Whac-A-Mole"
approach to counterterrorism--an al-Qaida leader killed in, say, a drone
strike is simply replaced with another.
"One guy gets knocked off, and the guy's driver, who's No. 21, becomes
20?" William M. Daley, Obama's chief of staff in 2011, told the Times.
"At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?"
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