So much for that Nobel Peace Prize! How anti-war Obama has become Lord High Executioner



They call them the ‘Terror Tuesday’ meetings. Held in the Situation Room in the bowels of the White House, they are chaired by President Barack Obama and include up to two dozen intelligence and counter-terrorism officials.



Their purpose is to consider which of America’s enemies should be placed on the White House’s ‘kill list’.



After viewing what officials jocularly call ‘baseball cards’, which contain terror suspects’ biographies, the pros and cons of their continued existence on earth are debated.



Long-distance killer: More and more drone missile attacks are being sanctioned by President Barack Obama

Like a latter-day Roman emperor sitting in life-or-death judgment on his gladiators, Obama then pronounces on the fate of each suspect.



Those receiving the metaphorical thumbs-down are condemned to be blown to pieces in some distant, dusty corner of Pakistan, Somalia or Yemen by a Hellfire missile or GBU-12 smart bomb launched from a CIA Reaper drone and controlled thousands of miles away back in the U.S.



Indeed, Predator and Reaper drones have revolutionised the terms of military combat — leaving the enemy with almost nowhere to hide. A single USAF pilot stationed in Nevada can drive home and sit down for supper with his family just a few hours after killing dozens of people in Pakistan by using a remote-control aircraft.



High-level: Abu Yahia Al-Libi, killed by a US drone on Monday, was al-Qaeda's second-in-command

The way drones work is that a team based at the ground control station in America sends commands via a fibre-optic link to a satellite relay station, which relays the information to the unmanned Reaper drone, which fires Hellfire missiles at the target.



Appropriately, the discussions about whether to launch such attacks are couched in Orwellian terms. There are ‘personality’ strikes — aimed at ‘high-value targets’, such as top Al Qaeda leaders — and ‘signature strikes’ against militant training camps or compounds.



A new category is TADS — Terrorist Attack Disruption Strikes —designed to snuff out a direct threat to the American homeland.



Backlash: Pakistanis burn US and NATO flags in protest against Monday's strikes

On Monday, Libyan cleric Abu Yahya Al Libi, Al Qaeda’s second-in-command, was killed when missiles from a CIA drone hit his compound in Waziristan, north-west Pakistan.



It is the ninth such attack in two weeks as the U.S. has stepped up its campaign to combat Al Qaeda and Taliban fighters who use the country as a base for attacks against American and Nato forces in Afghanistan.



Pakistanis, most of whom view the U.S. with deep mistrust, consider the drone strikes to be an affront to their nation’s sovereignty. As a result, this backlash in the nuclear power against the U.S. drone war has intensified dangerously.



Barrage: President Obama has authorised five times as many drone strikes as his predecessor



Drones strikes were first used by the Americans in 2004, but President George W. Bush was sparing with them. In five years, he authorised only 44 attacks. By the time Obama was into his third year in office, though, he had signed off on more than five times that number.



Suddenly Obama is being depicted as a steely-eyed purveyor of death. This image was reinforced by an exhaustive 6,000-word article in the New York Times, quoting senior White House officials.



The piece was clearly authorised by the White House in the hope of increasing his re-election chances.



Gutsy call: President Obama watched the assassination of Osama bin Laden in the Situation Room of the White House

This followed the Obama campaign’s ham-fisted attempt to use the anniversary of Osama Bin Laden’s death to trumpet the President’s ‘gutsy call’ in ordering the terror leader’s killing.



But this backfired because most Americans give the credit to the U.S. Navy Seals who carried out the raid.



Undeterred, Obama’s advisers calculated Americans would like to see their commander-in-chief acting as a Lord High Executioner — though it was stressed he had also studied the works of St Augustine and St Thomas Aquinas about moral wars.

To Obama’s opponents on the Right and Left, this is a deeply cynical reversal of his early anti-war views. He entered the White House having vilified Bush and his Vice-President, Dick Cheney, as gun-slinging warmongers whose authorisation of Guantanamo torture, extraordinary rendition flights (the extrajudicial transfer of suspects from one country to another) and the CIA’s secret ‘black site’ prisons had besmirched America’s reputation.



As a state senator, Obama’s reaction to the 9/11 attacks was to observe they derived ‘from a fundamental absence of empathy on the part of the attackers’ and that this grew from ‘a climate of poverty and ignorance, helplessness and despair’.



His almost pacifist solution, he suggested, was to raise ‘the hopes and prospects of embittered children across the globe’ while ensuring ‘that any U.S. military action takes into account the lives of innocent civilians abroad’.



Cynical reversal: In opposition, President Obama opposed the detention without trial of suspects at Guantanamo bay, but has since become willing to continue rendition flights and secret tribunals

As President, however, Obama swiftly changed. He preserved the options of rendition flights, secret military tribunals and indefinite detention without trial.



Though he jettisoned the Bush-era interrogation techniques, he escalated an assassination programme that ensured few interrogations would need to take place. Politically, this was an astute move. For Americans prefer a ‘light footprint’ war strategy that doesn’t involve invading foreign countries — Iraq proved how costly this is in terms of blood and treasure.



Regular announcements of the death of one of America’s enemies satisfied the public’s appetite for ‘something to be done’ about the terror threat — and there was the bonus of there being no discernible cost in U.S. lives.



Justified? Baitullah Mesud (pictured) was not a direct threat to the US, but was killed on the grounds that he posed a danger to US troops in Pakistan

In practical terms, though, by killing terror suspects, Obama squandered the opportunity to capture Al Qaeda operatives alive and gather intelligence from them.



Also, he has been criticised because killing terrorist suspects without due legal process can be considered immoral. Obama has gone even further and shown no qualms about killing civilians in danger areas.



As an example of the thinking in Obama’s White House, Baitullah Mehsud, the leader of the Pakistani Taliban, did not meet the criteria for targeted killing: that he posed a direct threat to the U.S.



Collateral damage: Drone strikes have killed non-combatants, women and children in the past

An alternative justification was given: he was a threat to American personnel in Pakistan.



Though Mehsud was initially spared from a drone attack because his wife and other relatives were with him, Obama later approved his assassination, though he knew his family would also die.Similarly, a drone attack in Yemen in December 2009 killed not only the target, but two innocent families.



This attack backfired because video footage of dead children, as well as tribesmen displaying parts of U.S. missiles, probably helped the Al Qaeda cause. More pertinently, it did more damage to America’s image than if its target had been allowed to live.



Strike: Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen

This was suggested when a Pakistan-born U.S. citizen admitted trying to set off a car bomb in New York’s Times Square in 2010.



He justified attempting to murder American civilians by telling a judge: ‘When the drones hit, they don’t see children.’



Arguably, the drone campaign has sabotaged Obama’s much-vaunted aim to reconcile America with the Muslim world.



Ever confident in his moral rectitude (the joke among Republicans is that Obama’s definition of a ‘just’ war is when he launches it), he has even been willing to kill American citizens and allow all victims of drone strikes to be categorised as terrorists.



For example, the American cleric and Islamist propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in Yemen last year with another American, Samir Khan, who was not on the ‘kill-list’.



A secret legal memo was drawn up justifying the attack by ruling that the requirement in the Fifth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution for due process could be satisfied by internal White House deliberations.



Perhaps most disturbing, the Obama administration addressed the issue of civilian casualties by classifying all military-age males in a strike zone as ‘terrorists’ unless, as the New York Times put it, ‘there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent’.



The problem is that in its enthusiasm to emphasise Obama’s machismo by ordering so many killer drone attacks, the White House may have gone too far. Indeed, there is growing widespread criticism of Obama’s actions across the U.S.



Satirist Stephen Colbert has mercilessly lampooned Obama’s tactics. ‘It’s brilliant!’ he said with heavy irony.



‘He doesn’t have to worry about habeas corpus, because after a drone strike, sometimes you can’t even find the corpus. The only problem is, occasionally our drones kill civilians.’



Deserved? President Obama receives his Nobel Peace Prize in 2009

The question is whether Obama can get away with pursuing relatively ‘cost-free’ wars without America suffering a huge backlash.



Having vowed to lead the most transparent administration in U.S. history, Obama has espoused warfare techniques that involve a level of secrecy that matches at the very least that of the Bush White House.



One of the more bizarre decisions in international politics during recent years was the award of a Nobel Peace Prize to the untried Barack Obama just after he took power of the White House.

