Obama finally apologizes for murder by drone strike... since it was an American

[Mudhammam]

The flawed assumption in many of the above posts is that every target we bomb is a terrorist, and the civilian casualties are just "collateral damage" (That has a nice ring to it, doesn't it?).

That the U.S. is in a current state of "wartime" is debatable. Congress is usually required to give some sort of authorization for that, per the War Powers Act. That's why there was a big fuss when Obama gave military authorization for campaigns in Libya without seeking support from Congress first. If we were at war with Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Libya, and Afghanistan, the excuse that we're at war so people die (fuck em then) might be more plausible. Rather, the Obama administration, like Bush and probably the future President, thinks he has the authority to bomb whatever country the "terrorists" are in because,as Rumsfeld and Cheney and the neo-cons in power at that time declared, the world is our battlefield.

I think the great Howard Zinn said it best:



The sad truth is how targets are located. The CIA relies on NSA metadata bulk collection. They often don't even determine the "terrorist" by listening to the content of the calls but simply by duration, contacts, etc. So, if you buy a cell phone from your neighbor down the street who has a cache of old phones, you might be a "terrorist."

Jeremy Scahill and Glenn Greenwald did some excellent reporting on this, thanks to the intimate access to NSA programs that exile Edward Snowden gave them.

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2014/...cret-role/