How Do You Spell "Hypocrisy?"

Following the massacre of 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado movie theatre, President Obama condemned the killings, and said, “(T)he federal government stands ready to do everything necessary to bring whoever is responsible for this heinous crime to justice.” Here are the President's complete remarks.

While it is obvious that the defendant should be brought to justice, these remarks are hard to accept coming from a president who has involved the United States in a program of targeted assassination of suspected al-Qaeda members and sympathizers, including American citizens, without due process of law. Using unmanned aircraft, or drones, the program targets several countries, including Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen. It could be argued that we are not engaged in a legal war with any of those countries, certainly not the last three, and that these are war crimes under international law. The drone program even bears some eerie similarities to the Aurora massacre. It unleashes sudden, violent death, on what often seem to be randomly selected innocent people. It is responsible for the death or maiming of unknown numbers—probably in the thousands—of innocent civilians.

During the eight-year presidency of Dick Cheney, the U. S. became a nation of torturers. Under President Obama, we have become, in Jeremy Scahill's words, “a nation of assassins.” Unlike the ethically-challenged behavior of the Bush administration, the drone program has escalated virtually without criticism from progressives.

Needless to say, the program is entirely futile as a way of fighting terrorism, since it instills deep hatred of the United States in the citizens of these countries. This guarantees that for every terrorist “leader” we kill, hundreds will stand ready to take their place.

The drone assassination program is presented in detail in a May 29 New York Times article by Jo Becker and Scott Shane. It describes President Obama as personally approving the selection of each target of so-called personality strikes, using biographical sketches on note cards, referred to by his aides as “baseball cards.” It's much easier to get on the other type of kill list—to become the target of a so-called signature strike. If you are a young man, you merely have to fit a vague profile of suspicious behavior. One source joked that a satellite photo of “three guys doing jumping jacks” is sufficient to label a location as a terrorist training camp.

One reason we don't know how many civilian casualties have resulted from the drone attacks is that the administration has developed a self-serving and deceptive definition of enemy combatants: all military-age males are assumed to be guilty “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.” (Of course, no one looks for such evidence.)

How does the Obama administration square the summary execution of American citizens with the Constitution's guarantee of a fair trial? According to the Justice Department, the Fifth Amendment requirement of due process “could be satisfied by internal deliberations in the executive branch.”

Here is lawyer and journalist Glenn Greenwald discussing the targeted killing program, and Jeremy Scahill defending his claim that the United States is engaged in “murder.”

For a more thorough discussion of the drone program, I recommend Scahill's 40-minute speech at the Drone Summit in Washington, D. C., in April. Here is part one. You Tube will lead you to the remaining three parts. See also Terminator Planet: The First History of Drone Warfare, 2001-2050, by Nick Turse and Tom Engelhardt.

It is widely speculated that the details of the drone program were leaked to the New York Times by administration sources in order to bolster the President's tough-guy image for the upcoming elections. Apparently, the Obama campaign thinks that Americans consider being a mass murderer an important qualification for the office. However, the article may have unintended consequences.

Becker and Shane make it clear that the President personally supervises every detail of the drone program, including the kill list. In the past, international war crimes tribunals have had difficulty establishing a clear link between the actions of national leaders and atrocities committed on their behalf, since they are usually separated by several layers of bureaucracy. This article supports the claim that President Obama is personally responsible for these assassinations. This could come back to haunt him after he leaves office. As is the case with Henry Kissinger and George W. Bush, Obama may have to refrain from most travel abroad, since he could be arrested at any time and charged with war crimes under international law.