President Obama: I'm no Dick Cheney on drones

[Kevin_Kennedy]

President Barack Obama’s defense to Democratic senators complaining about how little his administration has told Congress about the legal justifications for his drone policy: Dick Cheney was worse.

That’s part of what two senators in the room recounted of Obama’s response when, near the outset of his closed-door session with the Senate Democratic conference on Tuesday, Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) confronted the president over the administration’s refusal for two years to show congressional intelligence committees Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memos justifying the use of lethal force against American terror suspects abroad.

President Obama: I'm no Dick Cheney on drones - Josh Gerstein and Manu Raju - POLITICO.com

He's right, of course, but only because he's worse. The Bush administration never claimed the right to assassinate U.S. citizens while arguing that they can't allow any oversight of these actions on the basis that it would impact national security, and then have officials anonymously leak nonsense to the New York Times to make the administration look good.

The president noted that he would have “probably objected” over the White House’s handling of this issue if he were still a senator, they said. But, according to the sources, he noted his viewpoint changed now that he occupies the Oval Office — not a room in a Senate office building.

According to Glenn Greenwald this begs an important question:

To justify his conduct, Obama "tried to assure his former colleagues that his administration is more open to oversight than that of President George W. Bush", saying: "This is not Dick Cheney we're talking about here." This excuse Obama used - I used to object to these things when I was a Senator but see it differently now that I'm president - is one that is frequently heard from his followers, but more important, is what Bush supporters always said would happen once a Democrat became president: that, with the secret information you get in the Oval Office and the need to Keep Us Safe™, a Democratic president would realize that Bush and Cheney were right all along about many of the policies which Democrats spent eight years so harshly denouncing. Given that Obama himself is now expressly saying this ("he noted his viewpoint changed now that he occupies the Oval Office"), doesn't he and his party - as I've asked many times before - owe a heartfelt and sincere public apology to Bush and Cheney for bashing them so harshly for policies which Obama now not only adopts but has come to explicitly defend?

Obama's secrecy fixation causing Sunshine Week implosion | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk

 

[bucs90]

You missed the basic law 101 lesson I gave on this topic a week ago.

When a state trooper pulls over a car for speeding, and the guy pulls a gun out, the trooper (a govt agent) kills that person, without oversight, without due process. He uses a Glock instead of a drone though.

Its all about circumstance, NOT what weapon is used.

 

[Kevin_Kennedy]

You missed the basic law 101 lesson I gave on this topic a week ago.

When a state trooper pulls over a car for speeding, and the guy pulls a gun out, the trooper (a govt agent) kills that person, without oversight, without due process. He uses a Glock instead of a drone though.

Its all about circumstance, NOT what weapon is used.

Yes, and your comment was likely irrelevant then, but it's even more so now given that the topic here is government secrecy.

 

[waltky]

No real success yet in quest to develop counter-drone strategy...

U.S. documents detail al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against drones
Sep 4, 2013 > Al-Qaeda’s leadership has assigned cells of engineers to find ways to shoot down, jam or remotely hijack U.S. drones, hoping to exploit the technological vulnerabilities of a weapons system that has inflicted huge losses upon the terrorist network, according to top-secret U.S. intelligence documents.

Although there is no evidence that al-Qaeda has forced a drone crash or interfered with flight operations, U.S. intelligence officials have closely tracked the group’s persistent efforts to develop a counterdrone strategy since 2010, the documents show. Al-Qaeda commanders are hoping a technological breakthrough can curb the U.S. drone campaign, which has killed an estimated 3,000 people over the past decade. The airstrikes have forced *al-Qaeda operatives and other militants to take extreme measures to limit their movements in Pakistan, Afghanistan, Yemen, Somalia and other places. But the drone attacks have also taken a heavy toll on civilians, generating a bitter popular backlash against U.S. policies toward those countries.

Details of al-Qaeda’s efforts to fight back against U.S. drones are contained in a classified intelligence report obtained by The Washington Post.

Details of al-Qaeda’s attempts to fight back against the drone campaign are contained in a classified intelligence report provided to The Washington Post by Edward Snowden, the fugitive former National Security Agency contractor. The top-secret report, titled “Threats to Unmanned Aerial Vehicles,” is a summary of dozens of intelligence assessments posted by U.S. spy agencies since 2006. U.S. intelligence analysts noted in their assessments that information about drone operational systems is available in the public realm. But The Post is withholding some detailed portions of the classified material that could shed light on specific weaknesses of certain aircraft.

Under President Obama and his predecessor, George W. Bush, drones have revolutionized warfare and become a pillar of the U.S. government’s counterterrorism strategy, enabling the CIA and the military to track down enemies in some of the remotest parts of the planet. Drone strikes have left al-Qaeda’s core leadership in Pakistan scrambling to survive. U.S. spy agencies have concluded that al-Qaeda faces “substantial” challenges in devising an effective way to attack drones, according to the top-secret report disclosed by Snowden. Still, U.S. officials and aviation experts acknowledge that unmanned aircraft have a weak spot: the satellite links and remote controls that enable pilots to fly them from thousands of miles away.

In July 2010, a U.S. spy agency intercepted electronic communications indicating that senior al-Qaeda leaders had distributed a “strategy guide” to operatives around the world advising them how “to anticipate and defeat” unmanned aircraft. The Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) reported that al-Qaeda was sponsoring simultaneous research projects to develop jammers to interfere with GPS signals and infrared tags that drone operators rely on to pinpoint missile targets. Other projects in the works included the development of observation balloons and small radio-controlled aircraft, or hobby planes, which insurgents apparently saw as having potential for monitoring the flight patterns of U.S. drones, according to the report.

MORE

 

[Osomir]

You missed the basic law 101 lesson I gave on this topic a week ago.

When a state trooper pulls over a car for speeding, and the guy pulls a gun out, the trooper (a govt agent) kills that person, without oversight, without due process. He uses a Glock instead of a drone though.

Its all about circumstance, NOT what weapon is used.

This. Anwar al-Awlaki was deemed an imminent threat to the security of the United States. It wasn't illegal to kill him.

 

[NYcarbineer]

Bush killed an American with a drone in 2002 I think it was.