A few weeks ago, when information "leaked" from the White House on the subject of drone attacks upon terrorist targets came to light, Americans learned that these strikes against terrorists were being orchestrated by the President of the United States.
Not only did Americans learn that Barack Obama maintains a kill list of his most hated enemies, the citizenry also discovered that the President remains instrumental in picking and choosing who will die next. Contrast this assassination program with the hew and cry which roared up from the liberal left when President George W. Bush and his administration approved some of the aforementioned "enhanced interrogation techniques" to be used to gather information from captured terrorists who are highly placed in terrorist organizations like Al Qaeda.
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During the Bush administration the non-fatal practice of water boarding - which is accomplished by pouring water over a bound prisoner's head and face giving them the sensation of drowning and causing panic - was used on high-value captured terrorists who could give the Federal Government important information on attacks and targets which were in the planning stages. Among the terrorists "tortured" by the Bush administration were sinister figures including Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and others whose valuable information has, according to the CIA and other intelligence sources, thwarted attacks around the globe, saving the lives of countless American citizens.
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Fast forward to 2012: Under the Obama administration unmanned aircraft are dropping smart bombs all over the Middle East picking off the bad guys right and left, one by one. The assassination by drone project is a stunning success.
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This new hawk-ish behavior by the President has many Americans including military veterans and ultra conservatives applauding. Not only does it paint the President in a more aggressive, protective role but it also gives the Commander in Chief more formidable foreign policy credibility - which has been arguably the most dismal failure in his first term.
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Meanwhile, one cannot help but wonder where the outrage from the left has gone.
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To date, Obama's these unmanned assassins have blown at least two American citizens to smithereens. (Anwar Alaki, the Al Qaeda's second in command under the late Osama Bin Laden has been the best known American victim of the President's systematic assassination program but unnamed others have also been "neutralized" after this fashion.) One need not be a constitutional law professor at Harvard to understand that Americans have certain rights under the law. Even bad guys in this country have the right to due process and equal protection under the law. Somehow, though, the President and his left-leaning supporters have forgotten this.
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Robotic assassination may be effective but dead bodies don't talk - particularly those who must be gathered up piece by piece in trash bags. George Bush's enhanced interrogation saved lives. Assassination by unmanned aircraft only takes them.
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Comments: 9
Bottom line, though, I'm a "nuke 'em" kind of gal. I have no problem wiping Tehran off the map. Men, women, children....well, war is an untidy business. It's awful, but the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.
The problem when you go after what I call the bad boys with Drones is that it becomes so easy to target the bad boys that in most cases civilian bystanders will be killed and badly injured because the blast radius from the missile is quite extensive.
Now the Geneva convention says in article 3 Persons taking no active part in the hostilities should be treated with humanity. That means that its an international criminal offense not to take into consideration the proximity of any civilian in the vicinity of an armed person or persons who is waging war.
Of course in Battle this can fly through the window and civilians will get killed and injured. But and its a big but would it not be better to take out these bad boys the old fashioned way. Our Intelligence knows where most of them live and its quite easy to get at them, of course there is always the chance that we could take casualty's by doing it this way but its a far cleaner way than a Drone attack that takes out an apartment block with Innocent children and men and women or a drone attack on the corner of a street as the missile hits a car with the bad boys in it.
When I listened to the audio version of "Fly Boys" and learned about the fire-bombing of Tokyo, I got physically sick. Still, that's how war has always been. What has changed is the fact that we like to look the other way - at some point we even stopped making the mental connection between the herd of beef cattle in the pasture and the steaks in the meat department. As a society we don't want to get our hands dirty.
Do these people honestly think that only soldiers get hurt and killed?