Remember when executive branch abuses of power provoked such outrageous outrage..?

... we do.



If the following is to be believed, it will only confirm what we've been saying for years on this blog with respect to the President's approach to the war on terror.

From The Guardian:

The lawyer who first drew up White House policy on lethal drone strikes has accused the Obama administration of overusing them because of its reluctance to capture prisoners that would otherwise have to be sent to Guantánamo Bay.

John Bellinger, who was responsible for drafting the legal framework for targeted drone killings while working for George W Bush after 9/11, said he believed their use had increased since because President Obama was unwilling to deal with the consequences of jailing suspected al-Qaida members.

"This government has decided that instead of detaining members of al-Qaida [at Guantánamo] they are going to kill them," he told a conference at the Bipartisan Policy Center.

Translation: he's lazy. Expending resources to capture, detain and interrogate bad guys is messy business when it's so much easier to hit the war on terror's easy button and send in the drones, instead.


So, the man who has wanted to close Gitmo since he started campaigning for President prior to his first term as he felt it a moral stain on this country's conscience and want's civilian trials for terror masterminds like Khalid Sheik Mohammed, has no problem with killing them instead, including Americans even suspected of untoward activities buttressed by the most tenuous of evidence.


From a civil rights/liberties standpoint, why then, is he getting a pass on this?

1) The press won't make this an issue. Doing so would implicitly acknowledge that perhaps Obama is even more egregious than ol' you know who with respect to the abuse of executive power so we know that ain't happening.

2) His fan boys and girls and other assorted low information voters that voted for him in '08 and 2012 are abject hypocrites in whistling past the graveyard. Of course, many of them are unaware of the drone killings because of No. 1 but...

3) those that are aware play the "I (heart) Barack" card saying they simply trust this President more than they would, say, President Bush. This, of course, is nonsense as it displays a stunning lack of grasping a functional constitutional republic with its checks and balances, oversight, due process and transparency of which Obama's drone program lacks altogether.

We are a nation of laws not of men and putting life and death choices into the hands of one man in the Commander-in-Chief sets a horribly dangerous precedent moving forward for what happens when the Oval Office once again becomes saddled with a mere mortal individual not nearly possessing of Obama's infinite wisdom, benevolence and moral rectitude?

The silence of the establishment-left in this country with respect to this has been craven, convenient and ultimately abjectly hypocritical.

The framework has now been laid for egregious abuses of executive power moving forward if those abuses of power have not occurred already.