Hypocrisy and Lies in Obama's (Permanent) War on Terror

Running for office on a platform of humanitarian idealism is one thing. Carrying out an effective counter-terrorism policy amid an enormous range of domestic and international constraints is another. What’s most likely is that the invocation of “bringing the terrorists to justice” is just a horribly dishonest ruse that this administration keeps alive for convenient but coldly calculated political utility. And as such, it’s clear that Republican attacks of deceit and dishonesty against Obama — with growing claims of a cover up on the entire Libya debacle — are in fact embedded in a history of national security duplicity that this president has foisted on the American people since taking office. The election on November 6 will ultimately reveal whether the country has had enough of it.

Yeah, Obama's all about political expediency. It's a really disgusting and decrepit reputation, and the full record will become more clear in the fullness of time. It's going to take a long time before the full history of this administration's duplicity is revealed. That said, the picture comes into focus a bit more day by day. See the Washington Post for another data point of deceit, "Plan for hunting terrorists signals U.S. intends to keep adding names to kill lists":

Over the past two years, the Obama administration has been secretly developing a new blueprint for pursuing terrorists, a next-generation targeting list called the “disposition matrix.”

The matrix contains the names of terrorism suspects arrayed against an accounting of the resources being marshaled to track them down, including sealed indictments and clandestine operations. U.S. officials said the database is designed to go beyond existing kill lists, mapping plans for the “disposition” of suspects beyond the reach of American drones.

Although the matrix is a work in progress, the effort to create it reflects a reality setting in among the nation’s counterterrorism ranks: The United States’ conventional wars are winding down, but the government expects to continue adding names to kill or capture lists for years.

Among senior Obama administration officials, there is a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade. Given the way al-Qaeda continues to metastasize, some officials said no clear end is in sight.

“We can’t possibly kill everyone who wants to harm us,” a senior administration official said. “It’s a necessary part of what we do. . . . We’re not going to wind up in 10 years in a world of everybody holding hands and saying, ‘We love America.’”

Endless wars? Where is all the leftist outrage to those endless wars we used to hear about? Oh yeah, that stuff only counts when a Republican's in office. There is at least one key exception, which I've noted before, and that's Glenn Greenwald. See, "Obama moves to make the War on Terror permanent." Discussing WaPo's article, Greenwald writes:

This was all motivated by Obama's refusal to arrest or detain terrorist suspects, and his resulting commitment simply to killing them at will (his will).

Right.

This was all motivated by Obama's craven political expedience and epic moral bankruptcy. Personally, I'm not nearly as exercised about the U.S. drone warfare program as is Greenwald. I like killing terrorists. What I don't like is a president who as a candidate campaigned up and down against the Bush administration's national security policies. And then once taking office, knowing that the wheels of national security keep turning no matter who occupies the Oval Office, Obama took the path of least resistance and adopted the "gutsy call" persona designed exclusively to keep himself in power. Obama doesn't like drones and kill lists because they fit his preexisting views on war and peace. He likes them because they're f-king easy. The military gets pet war-fighting projects, the Pentagon keeps its orders for high-tech weaponry chugging along, and the White House can repeatedly announce how "we've got al Qaeda on the run," when all it's really done is fight a long-distance war of attrition, while simultaneously making things worse with a complete FUBAR foreign policy that assists Islamic extremism. It's almost too much to comprehend, like a Rube Goldberg contraption in foreign affairs, but that's what's been happening. Benghazi is blowback for the president's spineless "leading from behind" approach to toppling the Gaddafi regime. And what's especially priceless is the administration's cheerleaders in the press, who won't actually vet this administration's policies. Greenwald has more on that, and it's very good, "Joe Klein's sociopathic defense of drone killings of children."

I'll have more later...