“If there’s an Arab-American family that is being rounded up without benefit of an attorney or due process, that threatens my civil liberties,” proclaimed Barack Obama during his famous Democratic National Convention Speech in 2004. “It is that fundamental belief–I am my brother’s keeper. I am my sister’s keeper–that makes this country work.” How far he has come since then. Now, President Obama jokes about killing the Jonas Brothers with drone strikes, even as he actually is killing Americans without due process abroad.
The Skeptical Libertarian has just created a youtube account, and in our first video, we document the war crimes that the president is committing on a regular basis against Pakistanis, Yemenis, and even American citizens. His crimes include the murder of a 16-year-old American citizen from Denver, Colorado, Abdulrahman al Awlaki, while he come to Yemen to search for his father, the American cleric and U.S. citizen, Anwar al Awlaki. Anwar and his close friend Samir Khan were murdered in Yemen only weeks earlier. All three were killed by U.S. drone strikes.
After denying the existence of the program early in his term, the president now claims that few civilians have been killed by drones and that the attacks are precise and against non-speculative targets. But all the evidence indicates that these are lies. Thousands have died from drones under Obama’s watch, according to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism, and according to a New York Times report, the White House’s method for counting civilian casualties includes all adult males as “militants” unless conclusive evidence proves them otherwise. The administration has also used “cluster bombs,” which are banned by treaty.
“Some actions are so ruinous to human rights, so destructive of the Constitution, and so contrary to basic morals that they are disqualifying,” wrote the Atlantic’s Conor Friedersdorf recently. This is what he was talking about.
Watch the video here: