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

[Peter Lemkin]

Here's how it works:
"Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government's sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects' biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.

"This secret "nominations" process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda's branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia's Shabab militia. … A parallel, more cloistered selection process at the C.I.A. focuses largely on Pakistan, where that agency conducts strikes.

"The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan about a third of the total.

"Aides say Mr. Obama has several reasons for becoming so immersed in lethal counterterrorism operations. A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that he should take moral responsibility for such actions.

Oh, what a moral man, our Prezidunce! Oh what moral men who present him with their candidates for his hit-list. I wonder if he decides just before going to bed each night or first thing in the morning? What a sick Empire we have become - run by scycophantic warlords and oligarchs - and their 'yes men'. Smells like neo-fascism to me no matter how much 'deodorant' they use. To 'try on' just how sick this whole pile of immoral shit is, imagine....say.....some other leader of country X...being given a list of Americans his intelligence and military men think should be exterminated without trial by high-tech and/or covert means every day? How would we think of that?! One man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. But every hit man - or those who order hits are terrorists only.