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Drone Program Expanded In Obamas 2nd Term
Without warning in the dead of night of Jan. 3, on a dirt road in a remote region of Pakistan, two missiles slammed into a double-cab pickup truck and blew it to smithereens along with the six men inside. It’s safe to say the victims never heard the U.S. drone circling far overhead.
One of the dead was a known bad guy, Mullah Nazir, a Taliban warlord who boasted of his ties with al Qaeda and recently banned polio vaccinations for local children. The other men killed were said to be lower-ranking Taliban commanders.
A clean kill, demonstrating the increasing ability of the United States to identify, track, target and eliminate dangerous threats to American security? Perhaps. A majority of Americans think so — by 59 to 18, Americans approve of using drones to kill high-level terrorist suspects overseas, according to a new HuffPost/YouGov poll. But a growing number of military and civilian experts in war and law say that President Barack Obama’s drone war is counterproductive and unsustainable, perhaps violating the Constitution as well.
That puts the expanding American fleet of 375 armed drones — which gives the White House a seductively simple, inexpensive, safe (for Americans) and easily hidden way to wage war — squarely on top of Obama’s agenda when he takes up his second term Jan. 21. Complicating a potential reform of the drone program: Its chief architect and apologist, White House terrorism adviser John Brennan, is Obama’s pick to run the CIA — which operates in secret many of the drone strikes. MOREHERE
