I vote for number 2.
Miriam
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Bob Hachey
Sent: Saturday, October 08, 2016 7:18 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Re: Obama Acknowledges Future Presidents May Wage
Perpetual, Secret Drone War
Wow! Talk about a split personality! Or is it hypocrisy! So, the Prince of
Peace worries about future drone wars while not acknowledging his role in
the proliferation of said wars.
Smatter Barry, getting worried about your legacy?
Will the real Obama please stand up, if there is one.
Here's my take. IT is a case of either:
1. A man of peace was corrupted by the system and should have acted more
like an angry black man than a wimpy professor, or; 2. Obama never really
was a man of peace and the whole peace thing he showed us in 2008 was merely
a façade designed to energize the left during the first election campaign.
Either way, he doesn't come out smelling like a rose.
Bob Hachey
-----Original Message-----
From: blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:blind-democracy-bounce@xxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Miriam Vieni
Sent: Thursday, October 06, 2016 11:28 AM
To: blind-democracy@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: [blind-democracy] Obama Acknowledges Future Presidents May Wage
Perpetual, Secret Drone War
Truthdig
Obama Acknowledges Future Presidents May Wage Perpetual, Secret Drone War
http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/obama_is_worried_future_presiden
ts_will_wage_20161005/
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Posted on Oct 5, 2016
Michael Pittman(https://www.flickr.com/photos/mrlunch/) / CC BY-SA
2.0(https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)
In an
interview(http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2016/10/barack-obama-on-5-day
s-that-shaped-his-presidency.html) with New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait,
President Obama agreed with one of the most significant critiques of his
drone war, that its precedent could encourage future presidents to engage
comfortably in perpetual covert wars "all over the world"-just as he did.
As Obama put it, his precedent risks creating "institutional comfort and
inertia with what looks like a pretty antiseptic way of disposing of
enemies." He said he looked at "the way in which the number of drone strikes
was going up and the routineness with which, early in my presidency, you
were seeing both DOD and CIA and our intelligence teams think about this.
... And it troubled me, because I think you could see, over the horizon, a
situation in which, without Congress showing much interest in restraining
actions with authorizations that were written really broadly, you end up
with a president who can carry on perpetual wars all over the world, and a
lot of them covert, without any accountability or democratic debate."
At The Intercept, Ryan Devereaux and Alex Emmons
report(https://theintercept.com/2016/10/03/obama-worries-future-presidents-w
ill-wage-perpetual-covert-drone-war/) that "the alarming changes that Obama
describes as over the horizon are already here."
"What's so interesting is that President Obama acknowledges this problem -
that future presidents will be empowered to kill globally, and in secret.
What he doesn't acknowledge is how much of a role his administration had in
making that a bizarre normal," Naureen Shah, director of national security
and human rights at Amnesty International, told The Intercept.
"There is something so strange about the person who many would say is very
responsible for this situation actually acknowledging it and saying he tried
to plan for it," Shah added. "What we'll be left with from the Obama
administration is a far more dangerous precedent of secret, global killings
than what we started with."
From the very beginning of his presidency, Obama tightly embraced legal
arguments, including the "state secrets privilege," to deflect inquiries
into the government's use of lethal force in foreign countries; he fought
vigorously for years to keep his rationale for assassinating an American
citizen secret; he never explained how the U.S. came to kill that same
American citizen's 16-year-old son; and he has never once forced his premier
intelligence agency to publicly answer for the deaths of non-Western
civilians - of which there have been many - during an eight-year covert
bombing campaign.
In the New York magazine interview, Obama gave human rights groups and "the
left" credit for pushing him on issues of transparency in targeted killing -
but at the same time indicated they had little impact on his own decisions.
"I'm glad the left pushes me on this," Obama said. "I've said to my staff
and I've said to my joint chiefs, I've said in the Situation Room: I don't
ever want to get to the point where we're that comfortable with killing.
It's not why I wanted to be president, to kill people."
"Do I think that the critiques are fair or fully informed?" the president
went on to say. "Not always. Sometimes they are. Much of the time they're
not. To give you the most basic example: People, I think, don't always
recognize the degree to which the civilian-casualty rate, or the rate at
which innocents are killed, in these precision strikes is significantly
lower than what happens in a conventional war."
Read
more(https://theintercept.com/2016/10/03/obama-worries-future-presidents-wil
l-wage-perpetual-covert-drone-war/) .
-Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly(http://www.truthdig.com/alexander_kelly)
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