Kevin_Kennedy
Defend Liberty
- Aug 27, 2008
- 18,519
- 1,895
- 245
It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. 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.
Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization innocent neighbors dont hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs, said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.
This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths. In a speech last year Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obamas trusted adviser, said that not a single noncombatant had been killed in a year of strikes. And in a recent interview, a senior administration official said that the number of civilians killed in drone strikes in Pakistan under Mr. Obama was in the single digits and that independent counts of scores or hundreds of civilian deaths unwittingly draw on false propaganda claims by militants.
Secret Kill List Proves a Test of Obamas Principles and Will - NYTimes.com
So these people are essentially deemed guilty until proven innocent, and even if proven innocent they're still dead. This is how the Obama Administration keeps their "Official" account of civilians killed by their drone program so low: Anybody killed by a drone is automatically defined as a combatant.
Glenn Greenwald sums it up nicely.
Just to underscore the level of right-wing extremism which Obama has normalized, consider his deceitful re-definition of the term militant to encompass all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, which I wrote about earlier today. In 2006, the pro-Israel activist Alan Dershowitz created a serious scandal when he argued mostly in order to justify Israeli aggression that civilian causalties are a gray area because many people in close proximity to Terrorists even if not Terrorists themselves are less than innocent (A new phrase should be introduced into the reporting and analysis of current events in the Middle East: the continuum of civilianality . . . . Every civilian death is a tragedy, but some are more tragic than others).
Even more repellent was John Podhoretzs argument in 2006 that the tactical mistake which we made in Iraq was that we didnt kill enough Sunnis in the early going to intimidate them and make them so afraid of us they would go along with anything, specifically that the real error was that the U.S. permitted the survival of Sunni men between the ages of 15 and 35. In other words, all military-age males in Sunni areas should have been deemed combatants and thus killed. Podhoretzs argument created all sorts of outrage in progressive circles: John Podhoretz is advocating genocide!
But this is precisely the premise that President Obama himself has now adopted in order to justify civilian deaths and re-classify them as militants. Here is the rationale of Obama officials as described by the NYT: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. Probably up to no good. Thats a direct replica of Dershowitzs argument, and is closely related to Podhoretzs. They count someone as a militant worthy of death based purely on the happenstance of where they are and the proximity theyre in to someone else they suspect is a Bad Person. If such a person is killed by a U.S. missile, then, by definition, they are militants, not civilians even if we dont know the first thing about them, including their name.
Thats official Obama policy. It wont even be reported on most MSNBC shows, and wont even be acknowledged, let alone denounced, by the vast majority of Democrats, including progressives. Thats the Obama legacy.
Obama the Warrior - Salon.com