Secret ‘Kill List’ Proves a Test of Obama’s Principles and Will

[Jan Klimkowski]

Top level CIA insider Ray McGovern, the man who briefed Bush and loathes Gates, tells it how it is:

Fordham is the college that blessed the "priest" that blessed the president that killed from a list compiled in a White House that slaves built. And looking on silently from his commencement seat of honor atop the steps to Fordham's Keating Hall was fellow honorary doctorate awardee "pro-life" Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York and head of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.I wonder if it occurred to Dolan that from these same steps an honorary degree was conferred in 1936 on Eugenio Cardinal Pacelli, author of the Vatican's Concordat with Nazi Germany. Later, as Pope Pius XII, Pacelli could not find his voice to speak out forcefully against the wars and other abuses of the Third Reich, including genocide against the Jews.So too, the new archbishop of New York and his fellow bishops cannot find their voice on the transcendent issues of aggressive war and its accumulated evil, preferring to focus on pelvic issues.A few summers ago, I spent a couple of hours in Yad Vashem, the Holocaust museum in West Jerusalem. Decades earlier while serving in Germany, I had made it a custom to devote the last day of a visitor's stay to Dachau, the first concentration camp, established in 1933.At the end of the barracks at Dachau stands the famous caution from Santayana, "Those who do not remember history are condemned to relive it." That dictum kept racing through my mind as past and present merged on the walls of Yad Vashem, mocking the ubiquitous "Never Again."There were parallels that stood stark naked for any thinking American to see: parallels between Hitler's success in grabbing dictatorial power in Germany largely because of a supine Parliament, an acquiescent Church, a careerist Army leadership, and a fearful populace and the situation we Americans face today with "kill lists," unconstitutional "laws," and Gestapo-style police armed to the teeth.