“Obama campaigned on the premise that he would close the prison at Guantanamo Bay. But that turned out to be real hard. So instead, Obama’s just taking no prisoners. It’s brilliant. He doesn’t have to worry habeas corups, because after a drone strike, sometimes you can’t even find the corpus.”
~Stephen Colbert
President Obama’s record on civil rights is remarkably poor. Indeed – when talking about drone strikes – there is no Hope and Change. So – basically as the NY Times unveils…we’re just considering all “military age males” as militants despite not having any proof of that conclusion. And so – every time we kill one of these “military age males”….it gets reported as another militant bites the dust. And another generation of non-Americans is radicalized.
The NY Times explains Obama’s “secret kill list” – article HERE:
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.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama’s trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the “single digits” — and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
But in interviews, three former senior intelligence officials expressed disbelief that the number could be so low. The C.I.A. accounting has so troubled some administration officials outside the agency that they have brought their concerns to the White House. One called it “guilt by association” that has led to “deceptive” estimates of civilian casualties.
“It bothers me when they say there were seven guys, so they must all be militants,” the official said. “They count the corpses and they’re not really sure who they are.”
Glenn Greenwald asks questions HERE:
For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them which use the term “militants” to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda. By “militant,” the Obama administration literally means nothing more than: any military-age male whom we kill, even when we know nothing else about them. They have no idea whether the person killed is really a militant: if they’re male and of a certain age they just call them one in order to whitewash their behavior and propagandize the citizenry (unless conclusive evidence somehow later emerges proving their innocence).
Cenk Uygur explains how this behavior radicalizes the people who find themselves getting bombed:
