America's Ongoing Shame

Every once in a while, when I'm feeling ready for some self-flagellation, I read me some Glenn Greenwald.  This week's post reminds us again about the Obama administration's use of extra-judicial killings in the War on Terror.

There are many evils in the world, but extinguishing people’s lives with targeted, extra-judicial killings, when you don’t even know their names, based on “patterns” of behavior judged from thousands of miles away, definitely ranks high on the list.

The Obama administration claims the right to use drones to kill people, even American citizens, in faraway places based on intelligence gathered by the CIA and NSA, subject to no review whatsoever.  The logical extension of this argument is that an American administration can kill any person at any time that it believes is a threat.  How do we know they're a threat?  We just have to trust the government to decide.

And on this topic there's no meaningful debate in the US at all.  As Greenwald reminds us, liberals and Democrats support this policy too.  Obama has taken Bush's evisceration of civil liberties in the War on Terror and doubled down on them in a rank display of presidential power.  And there's no opposition except on the fringes of American politics.

Since I'm easily accused of being an Obama toady, let me just say that on the topic of drone attacks and military actions in the Global War on Terror, the administration is outrageously and sickeningly wrong.  It's too bad there's no way to express that in our current system, in which Obama's opposition criticize his actions..... as being too peacenik.