Killing Them Softly

[Geee]

American Spectator:

Between December 7, 1941, and September 2, 1945, a clarity of thought and purpose pervaded America. We understood who our enemies were and undertook as a nation to bring about their utter defeat. After September 1945, that clarity was dulled in Korea and by the midpoint of the Vietnam War it had disappeared altogether.

We never had that clarity after the war that was brought to our homeland on September 11, 2001. Since then, we have muddled through bereft of the unifying knowledge of who the enemy really is and the pervasive purpose of bringing about its defeat. Now we have another episode of ad hockery: a U.S. president has undertaken to choose personally who shall be targeted for what the left used to call "non-judicial killing" and to reveal the once-secret killing program to his media allies.

The New York Times May 29 story on President Obama's "Secret Kill List" put together the pieces of the process Obama established to identify terrorists and decide himself who would be targeted for drone strikes. The article was produced in cooperation with the White House. (In the long and tendentious piece, the Times claimed three dozen interviews with current and former Obama administration officials as the story's foundation.) It was clearly intended to portray the heroic and moral role the president had created for himself but instead demonstrated how undecided the president is, and how timorous his approach to defeating the terrorist threat remains.

There have been a number of articles analyzing and criticizing how the president goes about deciding who will be killed and how. But many of them either pass by the most important issues or simply get it wrong.

Fox News's Judge Andrew Napolitano condemned the program as illegal. But the judge apparently decided his case without all the facts. Saying that the president's powers were bound by the Constitution and our laws, he concluded that Obama's program wasn't lawful because it lacked the necessary statutory authorization. However, as I have been repeatedly informed by members of the intelligence community, the CIA has secret lethal authorities. These statutory authorities almost certainly provide the legal basis for the targeted killings of terrorists.