Did We Did Drone Murder You by Mistake? — Oops — Says the Commander-in-Chief

24 April 2015

From this sadness . . .

From The Guardian:

The White House was forced to concede on Thursday that it killed two innocent hostages – one American, one Italian – in a drone strike that targeted an al-Qaida compound despite officials not knowing precisely who was in the vicinity.

The deaths of Dr Warren Weinstein, a US government aid worker, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian aid worker, who were being held captive in the Afghanistan and Pakistan border region, have placed unprecedented pressure on Barack Obama’s secret program of targeted drone killings.

. . . to this ridiculousness

Caught with its profligately murderous pants down, the Obama Administration had to come up with something.

So, it chose a policy review:

The targets of the deadly drone strikes that killed two hostages and two suspected American members of al-Qaida were “al-Qaida compounds” rather than specific terrorist suspects, the White House disclosed on Thursday.

The lack of specificity suggests that despite a much-publicized 2013 policy change by Barack Obama restricting drone killings by, among other things, requiring “near certainty that the terrorist target is present”, the US continues to launch lethal operations without the necessity of knowing who specifically it seeks to kill, a practice that has come to be known as a “signature strike”.

Josh Earnest, the White House spokesman, acknowledged that the January deaths of hostages Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto might prompt the tightening of targeting standards ahead of lethal drone and other counter-terrorism strikes. A White House review is under way.

We all know how policy reviews work. We yap and yap, until everyone forgets what the question was.

Murder by exceptionalists is mostly okay with our Commander in Chief

From my perspective, having watched his statement, the President’s callous tone matched his reported words:

[T]he president struck a surprisingly defiant tone, insisting that his administration had acted on the best intelligence available at the time and claiming that his decision to declassify the operation and initiate a review was a sign of American exceptionalism.

He said he had decided to make the existence of the operation public because Weinstein and Lo Porto’s families “deserve to know the truth” and “the United States is a democracy, committed to openness, in good times and in bad”.

To penetrate the White House’s self-righteous BS

One need only consider how the United States would respond to China, Russia or Iran drone murdering alleged “militants” outside their borders.

Of course, in the Obamanator’s defense, no one else on the planet is as exceptionally good and all-knowing as we Americans are. Angels don’t need law.

The moral? — If history is a guide, you can bet that the drone policy review is going to concentrate on not getting caught . . .

Rather than on doing something morally and legally elevated:

Human-rights observers see little indication, two years after Obama’s [2013] speech, that the US meets its own stated standards on preventing civilian casualties in counter-terrorism operations. Reprieve, looking at US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan, concluded last year that the US killed nearly 1,150 people while targeting 41 individuals.

“The White House is setting a dangerous precedent - that if you are western and hit by accident we’ll say we are sorry, but we’ll put up a stone wall of silence if you are a Yemeni or Pakistani civilian who lost an innocent loved one. Inconsistencies like this are seen around the world as hypocritical, and do the United States’ image real harm,” [Reprieve lawyer Alka] Pradhan said in a statement.

No shit. And we wonder why Islamic militant recruitment is so easy.

PeteFree.com

Did We Did Drone Murder You by Mistake? — Oops — Says the Commander-in-Chief