Obama’s friday’s dump – Executive order on drone policy

I wondered what the news dump would be this Friday before the Fourth. We have it in the headline President Obama’s Executive Order on Pre/Post Airstrike Policies …

It’s intent was to lay out “best practices.” A sterile approach to the one way Obama gets his head into killing off bad guys.

According to Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, the authors of Double Down: Game Change 2012

“Turns out I’m really good at killing people,” Obama said quietly, “Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine.”Al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, who was an American citizen, was killed in a separate drone strike two weeks after his father.

“My grandson was killed by his own government,” the teenager’s grandfather Nasser al-Awlaki wrote in a New York Times op-ed in July.

It’s been well reported that Obama and his top minions have a so called “kill list” of which he takes a particular interest. The question is where does it start and where does it stop? The issue of his killing Americans abroad brought a fire storm, and does he have the authority to kill Americans. Here. On U.S. soil?

Finally, we get no information when he chooses to assassinate a targeted named individual. I have no problem using drones in the field of battle. But how far do we want to go with sending drones into countries we have not declared war upon, and kill. And we do kill a lot of civilians as we go about this task. How would you like looking up and seeing bombs raining down from  a drone sent to us by Mexico? Just saying. So the news you will see about this story will be the kill numbers, and will be hotly debated. I will leave you with this clip. Think about it.

FBI Director: I have to check to see if Obama can kill citizens on U.S. soil January 26, 2013

FBI Director Robert Mueller on Wednesday said he would have to go back and check with the Department of Justice whether Attorney General Eric Holder’s “three criteria” for the targeted killing of Americans also applied to Americans inside the U.S.
Pressed by House lawmakers about a recent speech in which Holder described the legal justification for assassination, Mueller, who was attending a hearing on his agency’s budget, did not say without qualification that the three criteria could not be applied inside the U.S.
“I have to go back. Uh, I’m not certain whether that was addressed or not,” Mueller said when asked by Rep. Tom Graves, R-Ga., about a distinction between domestic and foreign targeting. Graves followed up asking whether “from a historical perspective,” the federal government has “the ability to kill a U.S. citizen on United States soil or just overseas.”
“I’m going to defer.