Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Our "Highly Moralistic" President? Not Even Close

We are subject to continuous lectures by the Moralist-in-Chief about damn near everything.

But The Moralist-in-Chief's war morals?

[F]ormer Director of the CIA and NSA, General Michael Hayden, explained that the administration's drone kill list, contrary to the narrative, was not a masterpiece of judicial and Solomonic judgment by president Obama but simply the result of a computer program. “We kill people based on metadata,” Hayden said....

Hayden was not kidding.

Whatever else one may think about warfare, killing thousands of people based on METADATA is wrong.  If it's not classified as a war crime, it should be.

Grim notes:

...He kills everyone a computer program thinks even might be associated with terrorism, based on opaque metadata that is not subject to an independent review based on other evidence...

Terrorists are not "state actors," but so long as we are at formally-declared war with terrorists, the rules of war applying to active combatants should apply here.

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