For an anti-war liberal Barack Obama sure has a long list of people he has ordered to be killed. According to the New York Times, Obama - who campaigned on shutting down Gitmo because it played music too loud for terrorists - has, quote, “placed himself at the helm of a top secret ‘nominations’ process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical.”
During a discussion of an MSNBC host refusing to refer to soldiers as "heroes", Glenn noted the hypocrisy in the media and from the left when it comes to Obama.
"Democrats have control of the Senate, they have control of the Pentagon, they have control of the White House. They control it. Go ahead. You've had your opportunity to stop it. For four years you could have stopped it. They've done nothing. They've made it worse," Glenn said.
The NYT article notes that Obama is determined to make the "moral calculations" on who on the list meets an untimely demise.
Some more striking details:
It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.
...
The nominations go to the White House, where by his own insistence and guided by Mr. Brennan, Mr. Obama must approve any name. He signs off on every strike in Yemen and Somalia and also on the more complex and risky strikes in Pakistan — about a third of the total.
...
They describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counterterrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda — even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Mr. Obama told colleagues was “an easy one.”