Before Obama’s enemies came down on him he was catching it from his friends

“As a result, much of what the administration says about its secret war—about civilian casualties, or the validity of its legal analysis, or the quality of its internal deliberations—seems incomplete, self-serving, and ultimately non-credible.”

And Kenneth Roth on drones in the New York Review of Books: “The recent Justice Department ‘White Paper’ . . . is meant to give the impression that, at least for US citizen targets, the program has been carefully reviewed by lawyers, but it seems written to maximize the program’s latitude. That is obviously troubling for people who believe that the United States should conduct its counterterrorism operations in accordance with international law.”
And Katha Pollitt on drones in the Nation: “Whatever happened to arresting people, extraditing them, giving them lawyers, putting them on trial—all that? Even in the hottest days of the Cold War, when millions believed communism threatened our very existence as a nation, Americans accused of spying for the Soviets had their day in court. No one suggested that President Eisenhower should skip the tiresome procedural stuff and just bomb the Rosenbergs’ apartment. . . . Even giving Obama the benefit of every doubt, do we want the president to be a one-man death panel?”

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