Michael Boyle, who was on Obama’s counter-terrorism advisory group in the run-up to the 2008 election, writes in a study for the Chatham House journal International Affairs that Obama abandoned his pledge to restore respect for the rule of law following the Bush administration.
Obama “has been just as ruthless and indifferent to the rule of law as his predecessor [maybe worse] … while President Bush issued a call to arms to defend ‘civilisation’ against the threat of terrorism, President Obama has waged his war on terror in the shadows, using drone strikes, special operations and sophisticated surveillance to fight a brutal covert war against al-Qaida and other Islamist networks,” Boyle writes.
The study concludes that the Obama administration has been “successful in spinning the number of civilian casualties” downward by counting all military-age males they kill as combatants. Civilian casualties are likely to be far higher than so far acknowledged, Boyle said, and government claims to the contrary are ”based on a highly selective and partial reading of the evidence.”
“The result of the ‘guilt by association’ approach has been a gradual loosening of the standards by which the US selects targets for drone strikes,” the study says.
“The consequences can be seen in the targeting of mosques or funeral processions that kill non-combatants and tear at the social fabric of the regions where they occur. No one really knows the number of deaths caused by drones in these distant, sometimes ungoverned, lands.”
Stanley McChrystal, the former military general that Obama fired after he made disparaging remarks about the President to a reporter, is also speaking out against the drone war now.
“What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world,” McChrystal said in an interview. “The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes…is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who’ve never seen one or seen the effects of one.”
McChrystal added that drones exacerbate a “perception of American arrogance.”
