Seal Team 6: A Big Secret, Unless Obama Wants To Brag

[Geee]

American Thinker:

Having to choose between siding with the Obama administration and siding with the ACLU is tough -- but the ACLU wins this one.

The ACLU sued the CIA for information about the deaths of Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son, and Samir Khan in CIA/JSOC drone strikes in Pakistan. The goal was to force the government to present its legal justification for targeting and killing American citizens and to establish oversight into the process, including what may have been a secret process to strip the three of their US citizenship1.

 

The Obama administration claimed that what it did was legal and argued for secrecy based on national security. The ACLU lost two related federal court cases against the CIA -- one in which al-Awlaki's father was deemed not to have standing to sue, and one in which the court said administration comments on the drone program were not specific enough to constitute "public disclosure" of the existence of the programs.

 

Suddenly, however, the administration can't seem to stop talking. In what appears to be an effort to claim reflected glory, the administration is not only openly defending the "secret" drone strikes, but also talking about the glories of SEAL Team 6, the formerly secret elite-of-the-elite U.S. commando team.

In an online "town hall," a questioner asked the president about a) the number of drone strikes and reports of civilian casualties. Creating a straw man, Mr. Obama replied that the "perception" that "we're just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly" is wrong -- although the questioner never suggested that they were "willy-nilly" or ill-conceived. He simply told the president, [You] "ordered more drone attacks in your first year than your predecessor did in his entire term."

 

Said the president, "This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists, who are trying to go in and harm Americans, hit American facilities, American bases and so on...I think that we have to be judicious in how we use drones[.] ... And I want to make sure that people understand that drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties. For the most part, they have been very precise, precision strikes against al-Qaeda and their affiliates."