After President Obama entered office, he drastically increased the role of the Central Intelligence Agency and the use of drone strikes in counterterrorism operations. Simultaneously, however, Obama closed the American-operated “black sites” in Europe, where terrorist suspects were sent to and interrogated. And while he has yet to fulfill his promise of shuttering the Guantanamo Bay prison camp, it does not take new prisoners.
So what do you do when you have a war to fight, but are too morally pure to detain the enemy? You either send them to Third World hellholes like Bosaso or you incinerate them with Hellfire missiles.
The Obama administration considers waterboarding to be cruel “torture.” So what does it do instead? It dispatches remote-control drones to rain hell on suspected terrorists. Eliminating the alleged terrorist this way removes the pesky question of what to do with an enemy combatant captured alive. It also obviates the difficult task of intelligence-gathering; a dead terrorist can’t talk.
Of course, occasionally we hit the wrong person. Or an entire family. Or, perhaps, a village.
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