In Obama's America it's better to look merciful than to be merciful

Even pompous elites like David Ignatius of Wapo are figuring out that giving our enemies civil legal protections has led to our military killing rather than capturing them.  And the problem with that, of course is that most of our 'targets' are surrounded by aides, wives, children, servants, bystanders when the hellfire missiles hit.  I can only imagine how gruesome the Obami's 'stepped up Predator' policy looks on the ground.

Every war brings its own deformations, but consider this disturbing fact about America’s war against al-Qaeda: It has become easier, politically and legally, for the United States to kill suspected terrorists than to capture and interrogate them. …

The pace of drone attacks on the tribal areas has increased sharply during the Obama presidency, with more assaults in September and October of this year than in all of 2008. At the same time, efforts to capture al-Qaeda suspects have virtually stopped. Indeed, if CIA operatives were to snatch a terrorist tomorrow, the agency wouldn’t be sure where it could detain him for interrogation.

Michael Hayden, a former director of the CIA, frames the puzzle this way: “Have we made detention and interrogation so legally difficult and politically risky that our default option is to kill our adversaries rather than capture and interrogate them?”

It’s curious why the American public seems so comfortable with a tactic that arguably is a form of long-range assassination, after the furor about the CIA’s use of nonlethal methods known as “enhanced interrogation.” When Israel adopted an approach of “targeted killing” against Hamas and other terrorist adversaries, it provoked an extensive debate there and abroad.

But hey in front of domestic TV Cameras it looks good.

Bill Clinton did the same thing during the Kosovo incident:  rather than risk a single US soldier's life cleaning a few hundred very unpopular Serb gunmen out of a Kosovo where 90 percent of the population were on our side, he bombed Serbian bridges, tv stations, Chinese embassies and power plants, killing between 1,000 and 2,000 men, women and children.

But don't dunk Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, that would be evil.   Well at least when George Bush is President it is....