[Peace-discuss] One may smile, and smile, and be a villain

[C. G. Estabrook]

[US presidents take an oath to uphold the Constitution. The present  
president has betrayed his oath, subverted the Constitution, and  
committed multiple murders, including US citizens and children. Not  
only does he admit his crimes in a propaganda article in the NY Times,  
he brags about them: even the dictators of the last century didn't do  
that.]

...Obama ... according to a lengthy leaked insider account in The New  
York Times, hurls death-dealing drones at anyone who threatens the ...  
USA. Including children.

...it reveals is the mindset of a political cynic whose seductive  
words cloak the moral indifference of a methodical executioner ...  
Truman ... obliterated the civilian populations of Hiroshima and  
Nagasaki ... Johnson ... carpet-bombed millions in Vietnam. The  
Democrats have got themselves another killer...

The story obviously was planted in The New York Times to benefit the  
Obama political campaign...

Pfc. Bradley Manning was held for many months in solitary confinement  
for allegedly disclosing information of far lower security  
classification. The difference is that the top secrets in the news  
article are ones the president wants leaked in the expectation they  
will burnish his “tough on terrorism” credentials. This is clearly not  
the Obama whom many voted for in the hope that he would stick by his  
word, including the pledge he made on his second day in office to ban  
brutal interrogation and close the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba.  
“What the new president did not say was that the orders contained a  
few subtle loopholes,” the Times now reports concerning the early  
promises by Obama...

The word “realist” is now identical to “hypocrite,” and the  
condemnation of immoral behavior addresses nothing more than  
“rhetoric” that only the “fervent” would take seriously. The Times  
writers all but thrill to the lying...

"...Obama had preserved three major policies—rendition, military  
commissions and indefinite detention—that have been targets of human  
rights groups since the 2001 terrorist attacks.”

...When Obama wanted to kill “an American citizen, in a country with  
which the United States was not at war, in secret and without the  
benefit of a trial,” the Times tells us, “[t]he Justice Department’s  
Office of Legal Counsel prepared a lengthy memo justifying that  
extraordinary step, asserting that while the Fifth Amendment’s  
guarantee of due process applied, it could be satisfied by internal  
deliberations in the executive branch.” Obama approved, and two  
American citizens were assassinated, including Samir Khan, who was not  
on any official list of targeted terrorists. “This is an easy one,”  
Obama told his chief of staff.

What makes such decisions particularly easy is that Obama does not  
have to release any details of drone attacks or the legal rulings of  
the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) that justify the assassinations— 
exactly the practice that Bush followed in regard to the OLC briefs  
that he cited for the legality of his torture policy. Michael Hayden,  
a director of the CIA under Bush and now an adviser to presumptive GOP  
nominee Mitt Romney, accurately described the danger that this poses  
to a democratic society: “This program rests on the personal  
legitimacy of the president, and that’s not sustainable. I have lived  
the life of someone taking action on the basis of secret O.L.C. memos,  
and it ain’t a good life. Democracies do not make war on the basis of  
legal memos locked in a [Department of Justice] safe.”

But imperial plutocracies do. [Robert Scheer]