‘The Machines Did The Killing’: Obama Awkwardly Defends Drone Kill List In New Memoir
By Tyler Durden – Zero Hedge – 11/24/2020
Former President Barack Obama still can’t shake his legacy as the “drone president” given he still holds the record for number of ordered covert assassination strikes via drones.
“There were ten times more air strikes in the covert war on terror during President Barack Obama’s presidency than under his predecessor, George W. Bush,” one prior human rights study found.
“Obama embraced the US drone program, overseeing more strikes in his first year than Bush carried out during his entire presidency. A total of 563 strikes, largely by drones, targeted Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen during Obama’s two terms, compared to 57 strikes under Bush,” the study said.
This infamously included not only the killing of Yemeni-American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki due to his suspected al-Qaeda links, but also his son, 16-year-old US citizen and Colorado native Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki, by a drone airstrike ordered by Obama on October 14, 2011. The boy was not even suspected of a crime upon his death while he had been casually eating dinner with this friends at a cafe in Yemen.
The Obama administration later claimed the teen’s death was “collateral damage” and despite lawsuits related to the CIA operation, no US official has ever been held accountable for literally assassinating two US citizens without trial or so much as filing official charges.
“The machinery…had me killing them.”
This, from Obama’s memoir, is pretty pathetic from a president who, for example, slashed economic assistance to Iraq and then ramped up military involvement while lying about it. pic.twitter.com/PYI5kTSph7
— Phil Klay (@PhilKlay) November 23, 2020
In his new 768-page memoir out this month, A Promised Land, there’s scant mention of the massively expanded secret drone ‘targeted killing’ program under his watch, however, when it does receive brief attention, it’s merely in passing but is still filled with cringeworthy level of self-justification and rationalization:
“… the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead,” he wrote.
Clearly he and the editor (and his ghostwriters) took pains to twist the limits of grammar and bizarre sentence structure to create as much distance as possible between the former president and owning up to the killings.
Here’s the section in full from the book, where he actually attempts to present himself as the ‘savior’ of those victims he ordered killed:
In places like Yemen and Afghanistan, Pakistan and Iraq, the lives of millions of young men like those three dead Somalis (some of them boys, really, since the oldest pirate was believed to be nineteen) had been warped and stunted by desperation, ignorance, dreams of religious glory, the violence of their surroundings, or the schemes of older men. I wanted somehow to save them—send them to school, give them a trade, drain them of the hate that had been filling their heads. And yet the world they were a part of, and the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.
Under Obama estimates of the number of victims that were a result of the White House’s secretive “Kill List” often range from 300 to over 500 civilians killed, including over 60 children.
Just looks like Obama’s attempt to build a sentence that says everything except the simple reality: “I killed them.” https://t.co/FT96VRwPlE
— Thomas Gibbons-Neff (@Tmgneff) November 24, 2020
But that’s just a snapshot of a few years out his total two terms, and the true numbers remain classified.
The New York Times would report in 2012 that Obama began to designate “all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
Obama adviser Robert Gibbs previously said when asked point blank about the ordered killing of a 16-year old American citizen: He should’ve “had a more responsible father.”
So it seems years later Obama’s justification is now essentially ‘the machines did it’.
Or again in his own bizarre and twisted words, “… the machinery I commanded, more often had me killing them instead.”
Abdulrahman Awlaki, the 16-year old American-born son of Anwar al-Awlaki, was ordered killed by Obama in 2011.
And let’s not forget, this is the man awarded the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, and who is still heralded by Liberals as the most enlightened leader this country has ever had.
Ex-spooks again join for an anti-Trump missive, demanding Republican leaders pressure president to concede to Biden
RT | November 23, 2020
President Donald Trump has again inspired former US spy bosses and national security bureaucrats to get together for a joint letter – this time to demand that GOP leaders urge him to concede the election to Democrat Joe Biden.
Trump’s legal challenges to election results in several key states, more than two weeks on from media outlets declaring Biden the winner, represent “a serious threat to America’s democratic process and to our national security,” signatories to the letter said on Monday.
“It is now time for the rest of the Republican leadership to put politics aside and insist that President Trump cease his dilatory and anti-democratic efforts to undermine the result of the election and begin a smooth and orderly transition of power to President-elect Biden,” the Washington insiders said.
More than 100 former security and intelligence agency officials signed the letter. Many of the same names were on an October letter that sought – without any evidence – to dismiss reporting by the New York Post on the Biden family’s alleged influence-peddling in China and Ukraine. Team spook also came together for a collaborative letter in August to allege that Trump had “imperiled America’s security” by firing certain officials in his administration.
Much the same cast of characters highlighted the list of names on Monday’s letter, including former Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, former CIA and NSA director General Michael Hayden, ex-national intelligence director John Negroponte and Ronald Reagan-era FBI and CIA director William Webster.
The group apparently aims through a large number of names to carry more influence than might be achieved by individuals. Some of those individuals have credibility issues, such as Hayden, who was never held accountable for lying to Congress about the CIA torture program. Hayden also is a paid contributor for anti-Trump media outlet CNN. Negroponte was accused of supporting Contra death squads in Honduras.
More than 100 chief executives, concerned that the president’s refusal to accept the election results is hurting the U.S., plan to ask the administration on Monday to immediately acknowledge Joe Biden as the winner and begin a transfer of power. https://t.co/O8XnGPQF1j
— The New York Times (@nytimes) November 23, 2020
Mainstream media outlets in recent days have posted stories suggesting growing momentum to speak out against Trump’s election challenges, including such Republicans as former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie and US Senator Pat Toomey (R-Pennsylvania) calling on the president to quit his fight. The New York Times on Monday promoted a story about more than 100 corporate CEOs urging Trump to concede defeat to Biden.
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Book Review
The Greatest Threat to World Peace? A Review of Daniele Ganser’s ‘USA: The Ruthless Empire’
Review by Marilyn Langlois | November 10, 2023
If you regard the United States as perhaps flawed but overall a force for good in the world . . .
If you scoff at the notion that the US, a republic founded on principles of freedom and democracy, has morphed into a world empire, perpetrating assassinations, coups d’état, acts of terror and illegal warfare . . .
If you want to promote peace but haven’t yet explored deceptive events that precipitate US warmongering . . .
. . . here is a volume that will clear the air and paint an honest picture of the significant, not-so-rosy impact US foreign policy and actions have had in the world around us.
USA: The Ruthless Empire, by Swiss historian and peace researcher Daniele Ganser, is the newly published English language translation of his book Imperium USA, originally written in German and published in 2020. Here is a summary of key points — including some lesser-known ones — along with remedies for a more peaceful future, that are covered in the book. … continue
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