The guy who has killed 200 children in drone strikes laments the mistreatment of a few truly evil people

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obama drones peace prize

One of Barack Obama’s first acts as President was to go on a tour apologizing for America:

President Barack Obama has finished the second leg of his international confession tour. In less than 100 days, he has apologized on three continents for what he views as the sins of America and his predecessors.

Mr. Obama told the French (the French!) that America “has shown arrogance and been dismissive, even derisive” toward Europe. In Prague, he said America has “a moral responsibility to act” on arms control because only the U.S. had “used a nuclear weapon.” In London, he said that decisions about the world financial system were no longer made by “just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy” — as if that were a bad thing. And in Latin America, he said the U.S. had not “pursued and sustained engagement with our neighbors” because we “failed to see that our own progress is tied directly to progress throughout the Americas.”

By confessing our nation’s sins, White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that Mr. Obama has “changed the image of America around the world” and made the U.S. “safer and stronger.” As evidence, Mr. Gibbs pointed to the absence of protesters during the Summit of the Americas this past weekend.

Included in the apologia:

1. Apology to France and Europe (“America Has Shown Arrogance”). Speech by President Obama, Rhenus Sports Arena, Strasbourg, France, April 3, 2009.

2. Apology to the Muslim World (“We Have Not Been Perfect”). President Obama, interview with Al Arabiya, January 27, 2009.

3. Apology to the Summit of the Americas (“At Times We Sought to Dictate Our Terms”). President Obama, address to the Summit of the Americas opening ceremony, Hyatt Regency, Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, April 17, 2009.

4. Apology at the G-20 Summit of World Leaders (“Some Restoration of America’s Standing in the World”). News conference by President Obama, ExCel Center, London, United Kingdom, April 2, 2009.

5. Apology for the War on Terror (“We Went off Course”). President Obama, speech at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., May 21, 2009.

6. Apology for Guantanamo in France (“Sacrificing Your Values”). Speech by President Obama, Rhenus Sports Arena, Strasbourg, France, April 3, 2009.

7. Apology before the Turkish Parliament (“Our Own Darker Periods in Our History”). Speech by President Obama to the Turkish Parliament, Ankara, Turkey, April 6, 2009.

8. Apology for U.S. Policy toward the Americas (“The United States Has Not Pursued and Sustained Engagement with Our Neighbors”).

9. Apology for the Mistakes of the CIA (“Potentially We’ve Made Some Mistakes”). Remarks by the President to CIA employees, CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia, April 20, 2009. The remarks followed the controversial decision to release Office of Legal Counsel memoranda detailing CIA enhanced interrogation techniques used against terrorist suspects.

10. Apology for Guantanamo in Washington (“A Rallying Cry for Our Enemies”). President Obama, speech at the National Archives, Washington, D.C., May 21, 2009.

In the 2012 campaign Obama was chided by Mitt Romney about Obama’s incessant apologizing:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5-eBCmANk5s[/youtube]

It’s begun again. Now Obama is muttering about “torture.”

“Even before I came into office, I was very clear that in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, we did some things that were wrong,” Obama said in a last-minute news conference in the White House briefing room. “We did a lot of things that were right, but we tortured some folks. We did some things that were contrary to our values. I understand why it happened.”

It wasn’t classified as torture back then. And one needs to remember that all Congressional leaders were briefed about EIT’s contemporaneously. No one raised any objections, although Nancy Pelosi tried subsequently to skirt responsibility. To the surprise of no one, she lied:

The document appears to conflict with recent statements from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who was then the top Democrat on the House intelligence committee. Ms. Pelosi has said she hadn’t been told that the CIA was using the technique known as waterboarding, or simulated drowning. According to the document, Ms. Pelosi was one of the first lawmakers briefed on the interrogations in 2002.

The gauge on the Barack Obama tank of self righteousness never, ever falls below the full level. Those who were “tortured” are very much alive. Not so for many of the victims of Obama’s drone program. Barack Obama has his own personal kill list.

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.

The death toll of this personally directed kill list has reached 2400. As many as 200 of them were children. The man who pompously proclaimed that this country had lost its “moral bearings” maintains a personal kill list and has killed 200 children.

Barack Obama famously asserted that senior Bush administration figures could be prosecuted for torture:

Senior members of the Bush administration who approved the use of waterboarding and other harsh interrogation measures could face prosecution, President Obama disclosed today .

He said the use of torture reflected America “losing our moral bearings”.

He said his attorney general, Eric Holder, was conducting an investigation and the decision rested with him. Obama last week ruled out prosecution of CIA agents who carried out the interrogation of suspected al-Qaida members at Guantánamo and secret prisons around the world.

But for the first time today he opened up the possibility that those in the administration who gave the go-ahead for the use of waterboarding could be prosecuted.

Bush lawyers wrote memos that determined EIT’s were not torture. It was Obama who, despite being the beneficiary of the Bush policies and national security, unilaterally decided that EIT’s were indeed torture. The man so harshly judgmental of the Bush EIT policy has no problem killing Americans without so much as an arraignment. Obama’s pre-emptive assassination policy says that if you’re dead in a drone strike, you were guilty. The deaths of children don’t even appear on the Barack Obama concern radar. They’re not even bumps in the road. Apparently when Obama kills children it’s not “contrary to our values.”

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Barack Obama famously asserted that senior Bush administration figures could be prosecuted for torture….

2009.

Thank goodness we have the US Constitution with it’s response to England’s use of prosecution of OLD acts via NEW laws.
It is the ”ex post facto,” clause.
In the United States, the Congress is prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 3 of Article I, Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
The states are prohibited from passing ex post facto laws by clause 1 of Article I, Section 10.

Since Obama is NOT even allowed to make laws he can’t do this either.
No twisting of legal reality made it possible for Holder to follow through.
Obama really is an empty suit.
Words, just words is all he has.

Officially authorizing the torture of captives is beneath us. We’re a better people and a better nation than that. Giving deliberate torment a euphemistic name doesn’t change what it is.

@Greg: You’re stupid if you think we didn’t “torture” people before 9-11, and if you think we aren’t torturing people now.

We . . . and will continue to. This was and always has been a ploy by the Libs/Dems to use public outrage to get votes.

It worked, true, but how stupid do you have to be to think our military/intelligence community doesn’t regularly do things one could consider torture?

Idiot.

@Greg: The Dems pretended to take the high road because it was politically advantageous, but now we have Obama killing civilians with drones.

So:

Killing 200 innocents with drones is a much, much worse offense than using a torture-training technique (given to thousands of DoD members prior to 9-11) on 3 terrorists in a two-week span to prevent another mass attack.

Killing 200 innocents with drones is a much, much worse offense than using a torture-training technique (given to thousands of DoD members prior to 9-11) on 3 terrorists in a two-week span to prevent another mass attack.

Killing 200 innocents with drones is a much, much worse offense than using a torture-training technique (given to thousands of DoD members prior to 9-11) on 3 terrorists in a two-week span to prevent another mass attack.

Killing 200 innocents with drones is a much, much worse offense than using a torture-training technique (given to thousands of DoD members prior to 9-11) on 3 terrorists in a two-week span to prevent another mass attack.

Killing 200 innocents with drones is a much, much worse offense than using a torture-training technique (given to thousands of DoD members prior to 9-11) on 3 terrorists in a two-week span to prevent another mass attack.

Relativistic idiocy in justification of one’s voting choice should be beneath an American citizen too, but . . .

Wow! Greggie defends Obama for killing 200 people, including children, with drones but on another thread praised Clinton for not taking out Osama bin Laden because the strike would have killed 200 people?

Is there any doubt Greggie has scrambled eggs for brains?

@Nathan Blue, #4:

The hard truth is that unintentional civilian casualties tend to be an unavoidable consequence of modern warfare. In every war undertaken there will be a body count of innocent civilians. We like to pretend otherwise, but when we do we’re kidding ourselves.

There’s no moral consistency here that I can discern. On the one hand, Clinton is condemned for not taking a shot at Osama bin Laden 3 years before 9/11 because he didn’t want to risk killing 200-300 civilians in the process. Then we turn around and damn Obama for killing 200 civilians over the course of a prolonged drone campaign that has been very successful at taking out important members of al Qaeda’s leadership structure and other assorted terrorist threats—apparently out of anger that Obama has consistently stated that officially condoning the torment of captives is beneath our standards. I agree with him. To have made this a part of official U.S. policy is appalling. He was completely right in reversing it.

I think people need to sort out their own issues and find some internal consistency in their own positions before they begin proclaiming others to be idiots.

@Greg:

Do you think both parties have to agree to go to war before war can be started?

Or is that another one of the dozens of questions I have asked you that won’t be answered?

@Greg: You’re opinion about the “torture” is politically based, not one of reason or conscience.

I’d suggest you sort out your own internal cognitive distortions before deciding that you’re not an idiot.

@Greg: Understand I’m not using the term “idiot” simply as invective. I find you to be an idiot in the classical sense of the word. In short, I find your opinions to be in bad judgement of public and political matters, which is why I encourage you to read/learn/experience more and post/talk less. You are either an active Dem Party member volunteering to troll and thus help squash sensible public opinion, or you really have become a disciple of a dated and historically ignorant political movement. Either way, you’re polluting the airwaves.

From wikipedia:

An idiot in Athenian democracy was someone who was characterized by self-centeredness and concerned almost exclusively with private—as opposed to public—affairs.[6] Idiocy was the natural state of ignorance into which all persons were born and its opposite, citizenship, was effected through formalized education.[6] In Athenian democracy, idiots were born and citizens were made through education (although citizenship was also largely hereditary). “Idiot” originally referred to “layman, person lacking professional skill”, “person so mentally deficient as to be incapable of ordinary reasoning”. Declining to take part in public life, such as democratic government of the polis (city state), was considered dishonorable. “Idiots” were seen as having bad judgment in public and political matters. Over time, the term “idiot” shifted away from its original connotation of selfishness and came to refer to individuals with overall bad judgment–individuals who are “stupid”.

I find you posts to be idiotic in the true sense of the term. While I’m not sure I’d call you “mentally impaired”, you do suffer from cognitive distortions so deep, that your incessant babble here at FA is tolerated as if you were mentally handicapped. You can play at seeming to write rational material, but at it’s heart, it’s simply childish sentiment and covertly violent.

@Greg: we turn around and damn Obama for killing 200 civilians over the course of a prolonged drone campaign that has been very successful at taking out important members of al Qaeda’s leadership structure and other assorted terrorist threats—apparently out of anger that Obama has consistently stated that officially condoning the torment of captives is beneath our standards.

I recall the opposition to Obama killing all those leaders in Islamism was that they would have been quite valuable in terms of intel had they been captured as opposed to being killed.
Their wives and children and guards deaths were not surprising.
It was the killing at all that was the odd thing.
Our military has such restrictive Rules Of Engagement that they could not go in and get such leaders without masses of casualties on OUR side.
Obama never loosened those ROEs.
He made it impossible to capture Islamist leaders alive.
Why?
Is he afraid of what they would say?
We know he armed Muslim Brotherhood and ISIL (via arms to weak moderates).
We know he aided Iran who aids Hamas.
ISIS has captured tons of American armaments.
Why won’t he drone them out of all their leadership?

@Nanny G, #10:

ISIS has captured tons of American armaments.
Why won’t he drone them out of all their leadership?

I’m not entirely sure that he won’t. At some point a charred heap may be identified as the remains of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi based on a smoking Rolex.

That’s not necessarily the best option, however, based on a totally coldblooded calculation of what’s in our own best interests. There seems to be no end to the evil bastards that this area of the world is cranking out, and no limit to the horrors and butchery that they’re capable of. Allowing opposing factions of such people to focus their psychotic attentions on one another might be the best course for the West, and in the long run for the Muslim world itself. Maybe the lunatics could reduce their numbers and power to a point where saner Muslims might purge the remainder themselves.

@Greg:

So then you support Israel’s current military action against Hamas terrorists launching rockets against Israeli civilian targets, right? If you are focused on internal consistency of your position…

And for the record, the ONLY thing I agree with that Obama has done – or allowed to be done – in his entire presidency is the drone strikes. My only complaint is he has not done enough of them, but I’ll take what I can get….

@Pete, #12:

So then you support Israel’s current military action against Hamas terrorists launching rockets against Israeli civilian targets, right?

Have I said something recently that indicates otherwise? Being unhappy about the rising number of civilian casualties doesn’t mean anyone is a supporting member of the Hamas Preservation Society. I hope the results prove to be worth the cost.

@Greg:

Fair enough. We seem to agree on something…for the first time.

I will be watching for the Four Horsemen now……

@Greg: Being unhappy about the rising number of civilian casualties doesn’t mean anyone is a supporting member of the Hamas Preservation Society.

You’ll be happy to learn that Hamas has been playing the Western media for fools and dupes, then, Greg.
Israel claims to have evidence that 47% of Gaza dead were combatants

Only after researching the names (and all variant spellings) and gathering evidence could they glean this, however.
So, it took time.
See, Hamas stopped naming any ADULT males after people checked and learned they were Hamas fighters.
(Even many dead ”boys” as young as 16 were shown to be proud, professionally photographed uniformed members of Hamas!)
Then Hamas stopped naming children after getting caught triple-counting many of them (through their multiple names).
Finally, Hamas started telling the ”humanitarian” organizations just to take their word for it: all these dead are civilians.
Now, lists are getting into the hands of IDF through their occupation and, lo and behold, a lot more of the dead are Hamas (and a few other) Islamic fighters.
So, as of today 1830 people in Gaza are dead.
Almost 900 of them are Hamas and other organized fighters.
Of the civilians…..
MANY of them were killed by Hamas’ own rockets which fall short of hitting Israel 43% of the time!
Also many of them were killed as IDF pinpointed a legitimate military target only to have a hidden cache of Hamas weapons inside that caused a much bigger secondary explosion, killing many more than the small initial IDF missile would have.
Then there are the FORCED human shields Hamas makes go up on roofs so as to try to protect their own (Hamas’) homes.
And, lest we forget, there were also over 150 children killed by Hamas while carving tunnels for them.
So, it looks like IDF did pretty well in avoiding targeting civilians.
Hamas, not so well.