The question is made more stark considering the fuzzy math that the Obama administration is using to determine who is a "militant."



. . . Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

For now, consider what this means for American media outlets. Any of them that use the term “militants” to describe those killed by U.S. strikes are knowingly disseminating a false and misleading term of propaganda.

“He realizes this isn’t science, this is judgments made off of, most of the time, human intelligence,” said Mr. Daley, the former chief of staff. “The president accepts as a fact that a certain amount of screw-ups are going to happen, and to him, that calls for a more judicious process.” . . . . Mr. Obama, through Mr. Brennan, told the C.I.A. to take the shot, and Mr. Mehsud was killed, along with his wife and, by some reports, other family members as well, said a senior intelligence official.

Glenn Greenwald already eloquently articulated the propaganda benefits for the administration in using the obviously erroneous "civilian death" calculations: Reports indicate that Obama is comfortable with at least some innocent loss of life:Obama flippantly called the decision to kill al-Awlaki with a drone strike "an easy one," but that strike also killed another American - Samir Khan. Was the decision to kill him as easy? Then, a drone also killed al-Awlaki's wholly-innocent 16-year-old American son.

The fuzzy-math formula for calculating civilian deaths implies that the Obama administration wants to skew the numbers to look as though drones are killing more "militants" and fewer innocents, implying there is a limit somewhere for how many innocent people Obama is willing to deliberately kill in order to take down a suspected terrorist.

But, without any meaningful oversight, Americans have no way of knowing Obama's "limit" for acceptable innocent deaths. The Obama administration's steadfast attempts to keep the courts from weighing in by insisting that it cannot "confirm or deny" the existence of the drone program reinforces the secrecy and solidifies Obama as the sole arbiter of how many innocents are worth the life of a suspected terrorist. If nothing changes, the next President will have the same authority.

Whatever our partisan leanings, Americans should ask ourselves if we would have been willing to trust all past presidents with deciding how many innocent people - including Americans - it is alright to target and kill to get one supposed "bad guy." Would we have been as comfortable with G.W. Bush or Richard Nixon making these decisions? The presidency is bigger than Mr. Obama and his personal judgment calls about who to kill, and whatever powers President Obama seizes for himself, the next President will no doubt embrace.

In the meantime, we will continue to hear that Obama-authorized drone strikes have killed "militants," with no meaningful oversight check on whether the "militants" are actually terrorists or whether the number of civilians killed has reached an unacceptable level, whatever that is.

And this from the self-proclaimed "most transparent administration in history."