obama had a secret hit list that included a couple of American teenagers

[bigrebnc1775]

No trial, just suspected terrorist. Their is something wrong with this piture

Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will


WASHINGTON — This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/w...r-on-al-qaeda.html?_r=4&partner=MYWAY&ei=5065

 

[bigrebnc1775]

No cricket's?

 

[strollingbones]

you have to be logged in to read that article.....that is why no one is commenting....

 

[strollingbones]

obama is taking civil liberties faster than bush ....i object to targeting any american citizen who has not had a trial but obama has signed into law.....allowing americans to be detained without trial....

 

[LogikAndReazon]

The Code Pink lesbians, femi-nazi's, and communists must have their boxers all knotted up over this...............

 

[bigrebnc1775]

The Code Pink lesbians, femi-nazi's, and communists must have their boxers all knotted up over this...............

I have a feeling they don't.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

you have to be logged in to read that article.....that is why no one is commenting....

WASHINGTON — This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.
A Measure of Change


President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.

“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”

It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.

Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.

“He is determined that he will make these decisions about how far and wide these operations will go,” said Thomas E. Donilon, his national security adviser. “His view is that he’s responsible for the position of the United States in the world.” He added, “He’s determined to keep the tether pretty short.”

Nothing else in Mr. Obama’s first term has baffled liberal supporters and confounded conservative critics alike as his aggressive counterterrorism record. His actions have often remained inscrutable, obscured by awkward secrecy rules, polarized political commentary and the president’s own deep reserve.

In interviews with The New York Times, three dozen of his current and former advisers described Mr. Obama’s 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.”

His first term has seen private warnings from top officials about a “Whac-A-Mole” approach to counterterrorism; the invention of a new category of aerial attack following complaints of careless targeting; and presidential acquiescence in a formula for counting civilian deaths that some officials think is skewed to produce low numbers.

The administration’s failure to forge a clear detention policy has created the impression among some members of Congress of a take-no-prisoners policy. And 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.

Beside the president at every step is his counterterrorism adviser, John O. Brennan, who is variously compared by colleagues to a dogged police detective, tracking terrorists from his cavelike office in the White House basement, or a priest whose blessing has become indispensable to Mr. Obama, echoing the president’s attempt to apply the “just war” theories of Christian philosophers to a brutal modern conflict.

 

[Katzndogz]

Maybe this will help understand what he's doing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all

 

[bigrebnc1775]

But the strikes that have eviscerated Al Qaeda — just since April, there have been 14 in Yemen, and 6 in Pakistan — have also tested both men’s commitment to the principles they have repeatedly said are necessary to defeat the enemy in the long term. Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants; in his 2010 guilty plea, Faisal Shahzad, who had tried to set off a car bomb in Times Square, justified targeting civilians by telling the judge, “When the drones hit, they don’t see children.”

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.

Mr. Blair’s criticism, dismissed by White House officials as personal pique, nonetheless resonates inside the government.

William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough.

“One guy gets knocked off, and the guy’s driver, who’s No. 21, becomes 20?” Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. “At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?”

‘Maintain My Options’

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. They reflected a still unfamiliar Barack Obama, a realist who, unlike some of his fervent supporters, was never carried away by his own rhetoric. Instead, he was already putting his lawyerly mind to carving out the maximum amount of maneuvering room to fight terrorism as he saw fit.

It was a pattern that would be seen repeatedly, from his response to Republican complaints that he wanted to read terrorists their rights, to his acceptance of the C.I.A.’s method for counting civilian casualties in drone strikes.

The day before the executive orders were issued, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, John A. Rizzo, had called the White House in a panic. The order prohibited the agency from operating detention facilities, closing once and for all the secret overseas “black sites” where interrogators had brutalized terrorist suspects.

“The way this is written, you are going to take us out of the rendition business,” Mr. Rizzo told Gregory B. Craig, Mr. Obama’s White House counsel, referring to the much-criticized practice of grabbing a terrorist suspect abroad and delivering him to another country for interrogation or trial. The problem, Mr. Rizzo explained, was that the C.I.A. sometimes held such suspects for a day or two while awaiting a flight. The order appeared to outlaw that.

Mr. Craig assured him that the new president had no intention of ending rendition — only its abuse, which could lead to American complicity in torture abroad. So a new definition of “detention facility” was inserted, excluding places used to hold people “on a short-term, transitory basis.” Problem solved — and no messy public explanation damped Mr. Obama’s celebration.

“Pragmatism over ideology,” his campaign national security team had advised in a memo in March 2008. It was counsel that only reinforced the president’s instincts.

Even before he was sworn in, Mr. Obama’s advisers had warned him against taking a categorical position on what would be done with Guantánamo detainees. The deft insertion of some wiggle words in the president’s order showed that the advice was followed.

Some detainees would be transferred to prisons in other countries, or released, it said. Some would be prosecuted — if “feasible” — in criminal courts. Military commissions, which Mr. Obama had criticized, were not mentioned — and thus not ruled out.

As for those who could not be transferred or tried but were judged too dangerous for release? Their “disposition” would be handled by “lawful means, consistent with the national security and foreign policy interests of the United States

 

[strollingbones]

you need to do a lot of editing to that last post ....

but yes ...we should all object to killing people with drones who have not come to trial....

drones will soon be used to control the masses...shades of future shock

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Maybe this will help understand what he's doing.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all

Thanks that keeps me from cutting and pasting all 8 pages

 

[strollingbones]

okay let me read this...it will take a few

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

Yep, waterboarding them was terrible huh?

Fucking liberal mentality.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

you need to do a lot of editing to that last post ....

but yes ...we should all object to killing people with drones who have not come to trial....

drones will soon be used to control the masses...shades of future shock

Katsndogs link allows you too read the whole story.

 

[LogikAndReazon]

Terrorists deserve drones , not "trials"............................

That is, if they cant be harshly interrogated first

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Terrorists deserve drones , not "trials"............................

That is, if they cant be harshly interrogated first

Who's to say they are terrorist? Who makes that call?

 

[LogikAndReazon]

Terrorists deserve drones , not "trials"............................

That is, if they cant be harshly interrogated first

Who's to say they are terrorist? Who makes that call?

Im thinking our best intelligence................

And if there is a bit of collateral damage, those folks can blame their bloodthirsty brethren for the favor................

 

[Katzndogz]

In a war, there are bombings and attacks and a lot of people get killed. This is not that same kind of action. This is the president making list of people marked for assassination. It is a war of assassination with who lives and who dies dependent entirely on obama's personal judgment. It includes American Citizens and children. Entirely based on what obama feels, in his sole and absolute discretion. Whether the country they are in is a friend, an ally or an enemy, their citizens and/or guests are subject to how obama feels that day.

I am a bit surprised that some nation hasn't stepped up and told him to knock it off or they will make him knock it off.

 

[bigrebnc1775]

Terrorists deserve drones , not "trials"............................

That is, if they cant be harshly interrogated first

Who's to say they are terrorist? Who makes that call?

Im thinking our best intelligence................

And if there is a bit of collateral damage, those folks can blame their bloodthirsty brethren for the favor................

Our intelligence got us into IRAQ, were they right for the reason they we went too Iraq?

And that collateral damage that you speak of some of it is American citizens, who according too our laws have due process coming to them, not a bullet.

 

[Remodeling Maidiac]

I'm not really feeling the outrage. It does seem a bit questionable but I'm sure much intelligence was gathered before the names ever made it to Obama's desk. His first priority as president is to protect the American people. Therefore I won't jump to conclusions.

I would like to note the two faces of a lot of liberals though who condemned Bush for similar and less deadly tactics.