The Murderous Presidency of Barack Obama

Sure, we as a nation have always killed people. A lot of people. But no president has ever waged war by killing enemies one by one, targeting them individually for execution, wherever they are. The Obama administration has taken pains to tell us, over and over again, that they are careful, scrupulous of our laws, and determined to avoid the loss of collateral, innocent lives. They’re careful because when it comes to waging war on individuals, the distinction between war and murder becomes a fine one. Especially when, on occasion, the individuals we target are Americans and when, in one instance, the collateral damage was an American boy.

The Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama
July 9, 2012 – By Tom Junod – Esquire Magazine

Anwar al-Awlaki was nowhere near his son. He was in the mountains of Jawf province, hundreds of miles away. Over the previous year and a half he had survived two drone attacks that had killed thirty-two of the wrong people. Now he was with Samir Khan, another American citizen who’d betrayed his country and was working as an Al Qaeda propagandist. He was not on a kill list, but it didn’t matter. On September 30, Khan was riding in a convoy taking al-Awlaki and others down a mountain road. They had heard and seen Predator drones scouring their refuges before. They probably didn’t hear the one that killed them … or maybe they did. “They fired seven rockets into those cars,” Nasser al-Awlaki says. “They destroyed the cars and everything of the car and the people in the car. The people there told us they were all cut to pieces. They collected their remains and put them in two graves. At least they were given a proper Muslim funeral.”

The next day, Abdulrahman called his mother from the ancestral village near the Arabian Sea. He had heard about what happened to his father. He was coming home.

You were proud that you were able to kill Anwar al-Awlaki. You were proud because his death marked “another significant milestone in the broader effort to defeat Al Qaeda and its affiliates”; because by killing him you almost certainly saved American lives; and because you obeyed the law.

This is the consuming irony of the Lethal Presidency. You have become the Lethal President because you are also the Rule-of-Law President. You have been able to kill our enemies because you have forsworn waterboarding them. You have become the first president to execute without trial an American citizen because you hired David Barron and Martin Lederman — the constitutional lawyers renowned for their blistering attacks on the legal memos that justified the Bush administration’s use of torture — to write the legal memos that justified the execution without trial of an American citizen.

“President Bush would never have been able to scale this up the way President Obama has because he wouldn’t have had the trust of the public and the Congress and the international community,” says the former administration official familiar with the targeting process. “That trust has been enabling.”

There have been thousands killed as the result of direct orders of the Lethal Presidency. How can each death be said to be the end product of rigorous review when there are so many of them? And most importantly, how can the care given to the inclusion of individual terrorists on CIA and DOD kill lists be extended to those who are killed without the administration ever knowing their names — those who are killed in “signature strikes,” based on data, rather than “personality strikes,” based on human intelligence?

The simple answer: It can’t, especially when, in the words of a former senior CIA official, “the increase in signature strikes is what accounts for most of the increased activity.” The Lethal Presidency is using intelligence to put people to death, but when the official familiar with targeting is asked about the quality of the information, there is a long pause before the answer.
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