Undeterred, Obama’s advisers calculated Americans would like to see their commander-in-chief acting as a Lord High Executioner — though it was stressed he had also studied the works of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas about moral wars.
To Obama’s opponents on the Right and Left, this is a deeply cynical reversal of his early anti-war views. He entered the White House having vilified Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, as gun-slinging warmongers whose authorisation of Guantanamo torture, extraordinary rendition flights (the extrajudicial transfer of suspects from one country to another) and the CIA’s secret ‘black site’ prisons had besmirched America’s reputation…
Also, he has been criticised because killing terrorist suspects without due legal process can be considered immoral. Obama has gone even further and shown no qualms about killing civilians in danger areas.
As an example of the thinking in Obama’s White House, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, did not meet the criteria for targeted killing: that he posed a direct threat to the U.S.
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