Mr. Obama has placed himself “at the helm of a top-secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, for which the capture part has become largely theoretical.” He “signs off on every [drone] strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.”
...Mr. Obama wants to authorize every drone strike...but even the president requires oversight (remember checks and balances?) which he won’t allow. The administration refuses to accept judicial review (from a FISA-style court, say) prior to a strike directed at an American citizen, and won’t deign to release the legal documents written to justify the targeted killing program. The Times and the ACLU have both sued to force disclosure of these documents. No luck yet.
...it turns out that even this hey-it’s-better-than-carpet-bombing justification is rather flimsy. The Times article says “Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”
The logic, such as it is, is that people who hang around places where Qaeda operatives hang around must be up to no good. That’s the sort of approach that led to the false imprisonment of thousands of Iraqis, including the ones tortured at Abu Ghraib. Mr. Obama used to denounce that kind of thinking
http://takingnote.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/president-obamas-kill-list/
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