Obama?s role in the selection of drone
missile targets
By
Bill Van Auken
1 June 2012
?We are not ruled by murderers, but only?by their friends,? Rudyard Kipling wrote a century ago. That the poet?s stinging aphorism has become hopelessly outdated is made clear by a
New York Times article detailing the assassination program being run out of the Obama White House.
The lengthy May 29 article in the
Times establishes that personally plotting killings and selecting victims occupies a great deal of President Barack Obama?s time. The process has been organized as a weekly routine,
with Obama heading so-called ?Terror Tuesday? meetings of military and intelligence officials. Each week they assemble in the White House situation room to study mug shots and biographies of those on the ?kill list?, some of them minors and, in one case, ?a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.?
In the end, Obama selects most of the victims. He ?signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan?about a third of the total,? according to the
Times.
Thus, when one sees or hears news accounts of ?suspected militants? being slain in a drone missile strike?or the less frequent follow-up stories revealing that the ?militants? were in fact unarmed men, women and children?it can be assumed that
Obama personally ordered the killings.
The article is not an expos?. It appears to have been commissioned by the administration itself as part of his re-election campaign?s attempt to run Obama as the unflinching commander-in-chief in the ?war on terror,? touting the supposed success of his assassination program and
outflanking the Republicans from the right.
The authors note that the article is based upon interviews with ?three dozen of his [Obama?s] current and former advisers,? who were clearly authorized and encouraged to talk about
the president?s immersion in state murders.
From and continued at:
http://www.wsws.org/articles/2012/jun2012/pers-j01.shtml