Our President is a War Criminal, Just Like the Last One

Now that an OLC memo has been released detailing the Obama administration's justification for murdering American citizens who may be members of Al Qaeda, it seems there's little doubt that this administration is guilty of war crimes.  The Bush administration was clearly guilty of them too, specifically because they initiated a torture regime with ludicrous legal reasoning from their version of the OLC.  While Obama's apparent ending of the torture program is an unalloyed good thing, he seems to have replaced that with targeted drone killings that are arguably even worse.

I'm no lawyer, but this is just as outrageous as anything coming out of John Woo's office:

The condition that an operational leader present an ‘imminent’ threat of violent attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future,” the memo states.
 

So the US can kill anyone it sees as an operational leader of a terrorist organization, based on whatever intelligence it chooses to believe.  And we've seen over the years how reliable foreign intelligence is.

And let's keep in mind how far the administration has taken this.  They targeted and killed the 16 year old son of Anwar Al-Awaki, who had himself beeen killed by a drone two weeks earlier.  Think about that for a moment- a separate drone strike targeted a 16 year old boy who had been born in America and who had not himself committed any crime whatsoever.  That's a criminal act by the US government, and by its President, who reportedly approves all "targeted killings".

So how could I vote for Barack Obama for president, knowing he's a war criminal?  Well, it didn't help that his opponent's main criticism of the president's foreign policy was that he was insufficiently tough on the Bad Guys.  Didn't leave me many choices outside of a write-in for Ron Paul.

Anyway, Glenn Greenwald has the defnitive rant on this issue, as he always does on stuff like this.