(updated below)

A prominent US politician late last week was asked several questions by the Huffington Post about Obama's due-process-free assassinations of US citizens. Who was it who gave the following answers? Cheating via Google will be harshly punished.

First, when asked whether the US public should be told when the Obama administration has targeted a US citizen for due-process-free execution - re-read again what was asked - this prominent politician replied:

Maybe. It just depends."

Yes, that was actually the answer. As the Huffington Post put it, this politician "appeared conflicted over whether it was acceptable for the administration to simply disappear American citizens, a term that had previously been used as a verb only outside the United States." This politician elaborated this way: "It depends on the situation. Maybe it depends on the timing, because that's right - it's all about timing, imminence. What is it that could be in jeopardy if people know that happened at this time? I just don't know."

Regarding the Obama drone wars generally, this politician explained the rationale for these extrajudicial killings by making claims about the unique, death-loving attributes of the Muslim targets and the need to Keep Us Safe:



"I don't know the American people want [the administration] to say, when in doubt, we decided that it wasn't that imminent, and boom, we get hit again. It's hard. It's not an easy thing, especially when you see that the values on the other side are not there. This is their life's work to go to heaven - not to put down their beliefs, but the fact is, we don't have a shared respect for life."

Don't let any "doubt" get in the way. Err on the side of killing. Otherwise, "we get hit again" - by "the other side" who, unlike us, doesn't "have a shared respect for life" because they want to get to heaven and get their virgins.

In the spirit of generosity, I'll give a few hints. The conservative site Hot Air, which has good analysis of all this, noted about these comments: "you might guess that they came from Dick Cheney or Condi Rice. Actually, scratch that — Condi sounds a bit more dovish about drones than" this person does. So it's not Cheney or Rice. Nor was it Gen. William Westmoreland, who justified the mass death caused by the US during the Vietnam War by explaining: "The Oriental doesn't put the same high price on life as does a Westerner. Life is plentiful. Life is cheap in the Orient."

Nor is it George Bush, who told the nation in his 2002 State of the Union address that Our Enemies in the War on Terror "embrace tyranny and death as a cause and a creed. We stand for a different choice, made long ago, on the day of our founding. We affirm it again today. We choose freedom and the dignity of every life." Just to be extra helpful, I'll add that the quotes about how "their life's work is to go to heaven" and they "don't have a shared respect for life" are also neither from Robert Spencer, Pam Geller nor Melanie "Londonistan" Phillips, who routinely depict Them - "the other side" - as being a death cult eager to die and get to heaven in contrast to the superior western love for the sanctity of life.

The answer, which is here as well as in the photograph at the end of this column, reveals so much about the US political class and American political culture.

Public opinion and right-wing support

While claiming ambivalence, this politician implicitly justified Obama's assassination program and drone war by referencing public opinion ("It's interesting how popular it is in the public. People just want to be protected"). Here one finds the standard public opinion fallacy used to justify US militarism, which I described here two weeks ago: namely, the public will virtually always overwhelmingly support policies that both political parties agree are the right one. In such cases, this "public opinion" excuse reverses causation: politicians do not embrace a policy because public opinion supports it; the opposite is true: public opinion supports it because politicians from both parties embrace it (aside from the fact that polls on these issues are far more conflicted than is suggested by this excuse).

Along those lines, the media's leading neoconservative, Charles Krauthammer, last week defended what the Washington Post called Obama's "drone wars" and did so, from start to finish, with reasoning precisely identical to that which I routinely hear from most Obama supporters justifying these policies. In particular, the central premise one must embrace in order to justify all of this is George Bush's once-controversial 2002 formulation about the War on Terror:

"These enemies view the entire world as a battlefield, and we must pursue them wherever they are."

As Krauthammer correctly notes, once you accept that Bush-defining "this-is-war-and-the-battlefield-is-the-whole-world" premise, as he and all other neocons do, then support for Obama's policies is virtually compelled, but if you reject that premise, then opposition will naturally follow. Said Krauthammer: "Now, for those who believe that the war on terror is not war but law enforcement, (a) I concede that they will find the foregoing analysis to be useless and (b) I assert that they are living on a different and distant planet. For us earthlings, on the other hand, the case for Obama's drone war is strong." That the Global War paradigm was the proper one was, prior to 2009, a highly controversial proposition.

Nancy Pelosi at a press conference in Washington DC. Photograph: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

UPDATE

These kinds of statements from US officials - we must keep killing and killing because They don't respect the sanctity of human life, unlike us - are commonplace. One invariably insightful and amusing Twitter commentator summarized it this way this morning:

And:

And:

And:

That all nicely summarizes the logic of the War on Terror.