The Obama Administration Assures You That Its Drone Kill List Is in Good Hands

Wonkette sums up the situation well:

Good morning, liberals! Did you spend yesterday carefully poring over the extremely long The New York Times article about the list of people the administration carefully compiles, personally selected by the President (except in those cases when they’re not!) to be killed by missiles from flying death robots? Probably you didn’t, because it’s obviously one of the most depressing things you could possibly read, being as it is about your Hopey solemnly deciding who should live and who should die. But you really should, to face the world as it is and do your duty as a citizen. The reality, of course, is that being the President is a job that, structurally, comes with the duty of making up a list of who you want dead, which is why every president ends his four or eight years in power looking about 20 years older than when he started. But even if you have accepted in your heart that, yes, explosive-tipped missiles are an acceptable means of forwarding foreign policy, maybe there are some things in this article will make you mad! Or drink yourself into a stupor, either one.

Here is a thing to know about this article, before you decide what to think about it: It contains a note in paragraph eight that it based on sourcing from “three dozen of [Obama's] current and former advisers,” most of whom go unnamed. You don’t get that kind of acknowledged cooperation from White House underlings unless the White House is really pretty OK with the article as it stands, either in the sense that they pitched it to the Times or that they heard the Times was working on it and decided to get out in front of it. So it represents more or less the Administration’s idea of what they think the serious-minded liberals who read the Times want to hear.

That having been said, though: are you a pacifist? Then there is no way to sugar-coat the fact that your tax dollars continue, under President Obama, to be used to kill people with missiles in foreign countries. Sorry! But if you think that sometimes you need to perpetrate violence for the greater good — even in a politicized Obama only when necessary kind of way — then you’ll probably be satisfied, queasy-satisfied, or talk-yourself-into-it-satisfied, at the general description of how the Secret ‘Kill List’ is compiled, with Obama signing off on the drone strikes done by the military and most of the strikes done by the CIA (which is in charge of the Pakistani strikes for the usual byzantine reasons). Everyone tries really hard to make sure that only double-confirmed terrorists who are actually working on killing USA Americans and who aren’t hanging with civilians are vaporized by flying death robots.

And even when the wrong people are killed (AND OF COURSE THE WRONG PEOPLE GET KILLED SOMETIMES), less of them get killed than were killed constantly in the wars Obama ended/is ending, OK? Because if there’s one thing that kills more people than flying death robots firing missiles at camps and villages a couple times a week, it’s full-on wars with armies and soldiers invading your country for years and years.

And here's Glenn Greenwald, to fully depress you if you weren't already.