This will not go over well for the
.
According to the new book “
Double Down,” in which journalists
Mark Halperin and
John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he’s “really good at killing people” while discussing drone strikes.
Peter Hamby of The Washington Post noted the moment in
his review of the book.
The reported claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.
Obama oversaw the
2009 surge in Afghanistan,
145 Predator drone strikes in NATO’s 2011 Libya operations, the May 2011 raid that
killed Osama bin Laden, and drone strikes that
killed the Pakistani Taliban leader and
a senior member of the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab this week.
His administration also
expanded the drone war: There have been
326 drone strikes in Pakistan,
93 in Yemen, and
several in Somalia under Obama, compared to a total of
52 under George Bush.
In 2011 two of those strikes killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandist
Anwar al-Awlaki and his American-born,
16-year-old son within two weeks.
Under Obama U.S.
drone operators began practicing “signature strikes,” a tactic in which targets are chosen based on
patterns of suspicious behavior and the identities of those to be killed aren't necessarily known. (The administration counts all “
military-age males” in a strike zone as combatants.)
Furthermore, the
disturbing trend of the “double tap” — bombing the same place in quick succession and often
hitting first responders — has become
common practice.
Obama has also embraced the expansion of capture/kill missions by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) after it developed into the
primary counterterrorism tool of the Bush administration.
One JSOC operator told investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of “
Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield,” that global operations under Obama became “harder, faster, quicker — with the full support of the White House.”
Scahill, who also
made a “Dirty Wars” documentary, told
NBC News that Obama will “go down in history as the president who legitimized and systematized a process by which the United States asserts the right to conduct assassination operations around the world.”
Needless to say, a lot of
innocent people have
been killed along with combatants.
So although President Obama has proven to be “really good at killing people,” the demonstration has not necessarily been noble.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/last-p...024401509.html