The president and his underlings refuse to be bound even by secret rules they invented and believe to be prudent.

Reuters

For a year, the Obama Administration has been trying to codify rules to govern its drone strikes. The finest minds on the White House national security team have given their input. Now the carefully though-out rules are nearly finished. And guess what? The CIA won't have to abide by them!

In Pakistan, they can just keep doing what they're doing, according to a remarkable Washington Post story:



The carve-out would allow the CIA to continue pounding al-Qaeda and Taliban targets for a year or more before the agency is forced to comply with more stringent rules spelled out in a classified document... Among the subjects covered are the process for adding names to kill lists, the legal principles that govern when U.S. citizens can be targeted overseas and the sequence of approvals required when the CIA or U.S. military conducts drone strikes outside war zones.



This is beyond parody. The White House has so little regard for the importance of running a government of "laws, not men" that they can't even commit to be bound by secret guidelines they created. Would Circe even bother warning him if sirens were ahead? He'd never think to have himself tied to the mast. He would order the crew to put wax in their ears, but he'd exempt John Brennan: "Officials said concerns about the CIA exemption were allayed to some extent by Obama's decision to nominate Brennan, the principal author of the playbook, to run the CIA."