NBC reports:
The Trump administration is contemplating additional policy changes that will further expand the CIA's authority to conduct drone strikes in a number of countries, both in and out of war zones. Such a move would reverse years of effort by President Barack Obama to reduce the CIA's role in targeted killing and shift that responsibility to the military. It could also mean more civilian casualties in CIA drone strikes...
The White House also is drafting a new written policy on counterterrorist operations outside of war zones that would supercede the so-called drone playbook that the Obama administration had hoped would govern the decisions of future presidents, several officials said.
The drone playbook, known as the Presidential Policy Guidance, or PPG, includes a provision that no strike should go forward unless analysts determine that there is a near-certainty that no civilians will be harmed. And it includes a provision forbidding the addition of new detainees to the U.S. prison in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.
The Trump administration is contemplating removing both of those restrictions, officials involved in the planning told NBC News...
"The last thing the U.S. should be doing right now is expanding a global, secret killing program," said Zeke Johnson, senior director of programs for Amnesty International USA. "By its own admission, the U.S. government's use of drones has meant the deaths of civilians and there has been insufficient accountability.
Republican voters cannot accept that this program of intervention is "progressive" and Democrat voters cannot accept that this program is by and for the benefit of the Deep State and the military industrial complex. Facts do not seem to matter to these people. If voters do not put on some pressure, nothing is going to change.
ReplyDelete"Such a move would reverse years of effort by President Barack Obama to reduce the CIA's role in targeted killing and shift that responsibility to the military."
ReplyDeleteI wonder if the folks whose lives are destroyed by these drone strikes care whether they are run by the CIA or the Pentagon. I wonder if many Americans outside of the cesspool care.
I would like to say "They" will care when Blowback comes back to kill or maim citizens on US soil, but I am not sure of that anymore.
DeleteWe live in a real idiocracy!