{"id":88780,"date":"2013-11-03T13:01:37","date_gmt":"2013-11-03T12:01:37","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/last-year-president-obama-reportedly-told-his-aides-that-hes-really-good-at-killing-people\/"},"modified":"2013-11-03T15:07:00","modified_gmt":"2013-11-03T14:07:00","slug":"last-year-president-obama-reportedly-told-his-aides-that-hes-really-good-at-killing-people","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/breaking-news\/last-year-president-obama-reportedly-told-his-aides-that-hes-really-good-at-killing-people\/","title":{"rendered":"Last Year President Obama Reportedly Told His Aides That He\u2019s \u2018Really Good At Killing People\u2019"},"content":{"rendered":"

MICHAEL KELLEY<\/strong>
\nBusiness Insider<\/a>
\nNovember 3, 2013<\/p>\n

This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner<\/a>.<\/p>\n

According to the new book \u201cDouble Down<\/a>,\u201d in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he\u2019s \u201creally good at killing people\u201d while discussing drone strikes.<\/p>\n

Peter Hamby of The Washington Post reported the nugget in\u00a0his review of the book<\/a>.<\/p>\n

The claim by the commander-in-chief is as indisputable as it is grim.<\/p>\n

Obama oversaw the\u00a02009 surge<\/a>\u00a0in Afghanistan,\u00a0145 Predator drone strikes<\/a>\u00a0in NATO\u2019s 2011 Libya operations, the May 2012 raid that\u00a0killed Osama bin Laden<\/a>, and drone strikes that\u00a0killed leader of the Pakistani Taliban leader<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0a senior member<\/a>\u00a0of the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab this week.<\/p>\n

His administration also\u00a0expanded<\/a>\u00a0the drone war: There have been\u00a0326 drone strikes<\/a>\u00a0in Pakistan,\u00a093<\/a>\u00a0in Yemen, and\u00a0several<\/a>\u00a0in Somalia, compared to a total of\u00a052<\/a>\u00a0under George Bush.<\/p>\n

Two of those strikes killed American-born al-Qaeda propagandistAnwar al-Awlaki<\/a>\u00a0and his American-born\u00a016-year-old son<\/a>\u00a0within two weeks.<\/p>\n

Under Obama U.S.\u00a0drone operators<\/a>\u00a0began practicing \u201csignature strikes,\u201d a tactic in which targets are chosen based on\u00a0patterns of suspicious behaviour<\/a>\u00a0and the identities of those to be killed aren\u2019t necessarily known. (The administration counts all \u201cmilitary-age males<\/a>\u201d in a strike zone as combatants.)<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the\u00a0disturbing trend<\/a>\u00a0of the \u201cdouble tap\u201d \u2013 bombing the same place in quick succession and often\u00a0hitting first responders<\/a>\u00a0\u2013 has become\u00a0common practice<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, a lot of\u00a0innocent people<\/a>\u00a0have\u00a0been killed<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Obama has also embraced the expansion of capture\/kill missions by Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) after it developed into theprimary counterterrorism tool<\/a>\u00a0of the Bush administration.<\/p>\n

One JSOC operator told investigative journalist Jeremy Scahill, author of \u201cDirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield<\/a>,\u201d that operations became
\n\u201charder, faster, quicker with the full support of the White House\u201d under Obama.<\/p>\n

Scahill, who also\u00a0made a \u201cDirty Wars\u201d documentary<\/a>, told\u00a0NBC News<\/a>that Obama will \u201cgo down in history as the president who legitimized and systematized a process by which the United States asserts the right to conduct assassination operations around the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

So it is true that President Obama is \u201creally good at killing people,\u201d but he has demonstrated that is not necessarily noble.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MICHAEL KELLEY Business Insider November 3, 2013 This will not go over well for the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner. According to the new book \u201cDouble Down,\u201d in which journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann chronicle the 2012 presidential election, President Barack Obama told his aides that he\u2019s \u201creally good at killing people\u201d while discussing […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1213,"featured_media":88781,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[487],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-88780","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-breaking-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88780","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1213"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=88780"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/88780\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/88781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=88780"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=88780"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=88780"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}