A January drone strike against a “suspected al-Qaeda compound” in Pakistan has killed at least two innocent hostages, the White House admitted today, identified as American aid worker Dr. Warren Weinstein and Italian aid worker Giovanni Lo Porto.
While President Obama expressed a rudimentary level of “regret” in his statement on the killings and said he takes “full responsibility” for them, and spent much of his prepared statement patting himself on the back for his “transparency” on the killings.
It was unclear how long the administration had known about the killings, but other White House officials said they had been “classified” for at least some time, and that today just marked the decision to “declassify” the killings.
Obama said his decision to eventually declassify the matter reflected his desire that the families of the slain hostages “know the truth,” though other administration officials defended the killings as “lawful and conducted consistent with our counterterrorism policies.”
Officials say their initial intelligence gave them “near certainty” that there were no hostages at the targeted site, and much of the commentary defending the killings on cable news focuses on the idea that this was not a “hostage rescue mission” at any rate.
If he "takes full responsibility", does that mean he'll be turning himself in to the federal marshalls?
No? Then what is the burden of "full responsibility" that Mr. Obama is taking?
That he wouldn't seek reelection.
he takes “full responsibility,SURE!
These people don't have the slightest idea who they're blowing up, do they? Are we even sure the kid pressing the joystick button is an American and not some israeli student or some such thing?
The families of the slain hostages do now "know the truth" of the utter incompetence of the U.S. government.
A human life means nothing to the murdering thugs in control of the USG.
The mainstream has been (dumb) down to the point that it parrots the crap
dished out by the corporate media. This being the case, I expect these
cowardly acts committed this corrupt regime to continue.
Was it really a "botched" job? Why would I believe a word they say?
We are reminded that CIA remains in control of drone warfare in Pakistan and Yemen. If you were to time travel back to an earlier decade, say the 1970's, you'd witness the general belief that CIA never did targeted assassinations using death squads (which had to do until there were drones) in, say Latin America. Those who paid attention would know, but the rest would persist in believing that when massacres of the innocent occurred, the government was just as shocked and dismayed as the average American, that those American priests and nuns were killed, along with illiterate jungle villagers who might possibly organize against big corporations or military juntas the US preferred to leftists.
People living in that far gone time would polarize along the lines of whether you thought our government was being accused by paranoid leftists or whether it was running the whole evil show.
Today, there is no such pretense, and secret unelected government's role in keeping a spy organization to carry out assassinations is something the President can walk around with, having the knowledge of it sitting lightly on his shoulders and not throwing off his gait by one step. He may not even have given a single quasi-military order for their wet-work to be done. Imagine what might happen to him if he complained!
I have some doubts about the reality of a character like Adam Gadahn. He's too cute to be anything but a cut-out doll, conveniently home-schooled like Adam Lanza, not someone well-known. Oh, and so was Johnny Taliban (Walker Lindh). They have a bizarre sort of identity, but there's always some tie to law enforcement or Zionism or probably (judging from Walker Lindh's father), Spookery. So if and when they die, it is not in the ordinary way. And Lindh is said to be in a federal prison.
People, they have no reason to tell us the truth about anything. Spies killed terrorists (and their hostages whom they never told anyone about) with drones. Or didn't. We'll never know.
There is no Cincinnatus to hang up his sword and sit around the fire to tell his tale. No citizen soldier back from the wars. No, just a bunch of professionals with secrets for life which it would be exile or imprisonment to illuminate. Why do we even care what they say? Because they are boasting of their power? Maybe that's why.