Bloodthirsty Liberal

While President Obama was taking his victory lap a year after SEAL Team 6 greased OBL, declaring Al Qaeda as defunct as Gimbels, Al Qaeda begged to differ:

He could have breezed through security at any airport.

A terrorist wearing the latest underwear bomb would not have been caught by the TSA’s most conscientious human screeners or its highest-tech fullbody scanners, experts told The Post yesterday. But the country ducked a disaster by employing an age-old weapon: a double agent.

With the help of American allies in Saudi Arabia and Yemen, the secret agent inserted himself into the terrorists’ secret inner circle, and became so trusted, the thugs accepted his offer to board a US-bound plane wearing the bomb.

Instead, the agent turned it over to the United States.

But experts said that as far as future suicide bomb attempts are concerned, current technology is not good enough to find nonmetallic explosive devices like the newest underwear bomb — despite Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano’s assurance that there was a “high likelihood’’ the bomber would have been stopped.
One top law-enforcement official insisted, “They would not have gotten him.”

This is one of those occasions when US security can proclaim a victory. Usually, it’s only the failures that make the news.

Which makes you wonder:

Federal investigators are conducting a probe into who leaked information about an al-Qaida plot in which an explosive device was to have been detonated on a U.S.-bound airline flight, a law enforcement official said Wednesday.

The official spoke on condition of anonymity about the leak investigation, which is just getting under way.

An anonymous official leaked information about a leak investigation? Typical.

The federal investigation is the latest move in an aggressive campaign by the Obama administration to crack down on leaks, even as it has supported proposed legislation that would shield reporters from having to identify their sources. The administration has already brought at least six criminal cases against people for discussing government secrets with reporters, more than under any previous presidency.

…

A spokesman for the AP, Paul Colford, said in a statement that the news organization “acted carefully and with extreme deliberation in its reporting on the underwear bomb plot and its subsequent decision to publish.”

“As the AP has reported, we distributed our exclusive report on the underwear bomb only after officials assured us — on Monday — that their security concerns had been satisfied and we learned that the White House would announce the news the next day,” Colford said.

I’ve got an angle for the FBI to investigate. Given Team Obama’s penchant for boasting (you would have thought Obama himself had caught Osama, with nothing but a lariat and a Swiss Army knife), maybe they leaked the news. They announced it publicly the next day anyway, and it was a national security victory—but as was also true of the OBL raid, premature jubilation can be an embarrassing problem.

How FOS is the Left?

Pretty FOS:

There are few areas of greater disappointment for liberal supporters of President Barack Obama than his policies on civil liberties. From the failure to close Guantanamo Bay and his ramped up drone war to the continued reliance on indefinite detention, military commissions for accused terrorists, and the recent National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that potentially allows for the killing of American citizens without due process, Obama’s presidency, or so the argument goes, has been one broken promise after another.

Yet, none of this seems to be having any effect on Obama’s political standing — even among Democrats. The results of a recent Washington Post-ABC News poll provide compelling evidence of how little a price Obama has paid for these policies. According to the poll, 70 percent of respondents support the president’s decision to keep Guantanamo Bay open. Indeed, backing for Gitmo is actually higher today than it was in 2003. Among the president’s political base, 53 percent who self-identify as liberal Democrats — and 67 percent of moderate or conservative Democrats — are also supportive.

What about drone strikes? In total, 83 percent of Americans are on-board with the use of drones — a mere 4 percent are strongly opposed. Even more shocking, when asked if they still back the policy if American citizens are being killed without due process (like Anwar al-Awliki), 65 percent approve and only 26 percent disapprove. Among Democrats, the policy has broad, majority support.

What is one to conclude from these numbers? Are progressives, as Glenn Greenwald suggests, “repulsive hypocrites” who have shifted their position on civil liberties simply out of political expediency?

Ya Think? When Cindy Sheehan is a beacon of constancy in your movement, you have a serious problem.

Thanks, Barry. Those women didn’t want equality anyway. And who needs peace between Egypt and Israel. The world is a much safer place today with Obama in the White House.

Islamists claimed a decisive victory on Wednesday as early election results put them on track to win a dominant majority in Egypt’s first Parliament since the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the most significant step yet in the religious movement’s rise since the start of the Arab Spring.

The party formed by the Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt’s mainstream Islamist group, appeared to have taken about 40 percent of the vote, as expected. But a big surprise was the strong showing of ultraconservative Islamists, called Salafis, many of whom see most popular entertainment as sinful and reject women’s participation in voting or public life.

Analysts in the state-run news media said early returns indicated that Salafi groups could take as much as a quarter of the vote, giving the two groups of Islamists combined control of nearly 65 percent of the parliamentary seats.

I would like to remind our brain-dead liberal readers that you believed the nonsense from the White House and from the State Department: This is a Democracy movement! There is simply no learning curve in this country any more, and we will someday pay the price. Does anyone recall that the Bush administration was all overjoyed at the thought of voting in Gaza? How did that work out? Why couldn’t we see the trend?

That victory came at the expense of the liberal parties and youth activists who set off the revolution, affirming their fears that they would be unable to compete with Islamists who emerged from the Mubarak years organized and with an established following. Poorly organized and internally divided, the liberal parties could not compete with Islamists disciplined by decades as the sole opposition to Mr. Mubarak. “We were washed out,” said Shady el-Ghazaly Harb, one of the most politically active of the group.

Although this week’s voting took place in only a third of Egypt’s provinces, they included some of the nation’s most liberal precincts — like Cairo, Port Said and the Red Sea coast — suggesting that the Islamist wave is likely to grow stronger as the voting moves into more conservative rural areas in the coming months. (Alexandria, a conservative stronghold, also has voted.)

The Obama administration is going to refuse to discuss this, and the media will soon stop reporting, so let’s tell the truth while we can: The United States, as the most powerful nation on earth, has responsibilities. Peace and stability are good. Revolution and anarchy are bad. Rigid religious systems that oppress women and minorities are bad. The United States, but turning a blind eye to what was obviously happening in Egypt, supported bad outcomes. We could not possibly have been stupid enough to innocently believe that the Islamists wouldn’t take over the country. And that leads to the most basic question about the Obama administration: Is Obama merely incompetent or is he malevolent?

- Aggie

When I reported yesterday the Obama administration’s justification for greasing an American citizen without due process, I wondered what John Yoo, Bush’s advisor on such matters, would have to say about it.

I didn’t have to wait long:

Let’s give partial credit where it is due. Apparently the Obama administration argues that al-Awlaki was a legitimate target because he is a member of an enemy engaged in hostile conduct against the United States. At least Obama has figured out that the war on terrorism is in fact a war, and that it is not limited just to Afghanistan. We should be thankful that Obama officials have quietly put aside the arguments they made during the Bush years that any terrorist outside the Afghani battlefield was a criminal suspect who deserved his day in federal court. By my lights, I would rather the Obama folks be hypocrites in favor of protecting the national security than principled fools (which they are free to be in the faculty lounges both before and after their time in government).

But the administration’s former worldview of terrorism still infects their decisions, to the country’s detriment. According to the reports, the Obama administration believes that force could only be used against al-Awlaki because arrest was impractical and al-Awlaki posed an imminent threat of harm to the United States. This is plainly wrong. It may make for good policy, especially toward American citizens who make the mistake of joining the enemy, but there is no legal reason why a nation at war must try to apprehend an enemy instead of shooting at him first. Every member of the enemy armed forces and leadership is a legitimate target in wartime, regardless of whether they can be caught or whether they pose an imminent threat. In fact, the Obama administration continues to confuse war with crime — the idea that you must try to arrest first and can only use force against an imminent attack is the standard that applies to the police, not the military.

…

It may be that the Obama administration thinks that U.S. citizens who join the enemy are entitled to special rules — like those that apply to the police, instead of those that apply to the military. But this would be wrong too. As I explained in the Wall Street Journal last week, ever since the Civil War, our national leaders and the Supreme Court have agreed that a citizen who joins the enemy must suffer the consequences of his belligerency, with the same status as that of an alien enemy. Think of the incentives that the strange Obama hybrid rule creates. Our al-Qaeda enemy will want to recruit American agents, who will benefit from criminal-justice rules that give them advantages in carrying out operations against us (like the right to remain silent, to Miranda and lawyers, to a speedy jury trial, etc.). Our troops and agents in the field may well hesitate in the field, as they will not be able to tell in the heat of the moment whether an enemy is American or not. Obama still remains trapped by his liberal pieties, and those biases will reduce the reach of American arms and bless the enemy with undeserved advantages.

Keep killing them terrorists, Mr. President, and don’t listen to the Dershowitzes. It’s easier to ask for forgiveness than it is to ask for permission. But as you expand your range of suspects, remember that the neighbors of your contributors who have not (yet) contributed themselves are not enemies of the state. Seriously, Mrs. Fedorowicz in apartment 8C is not a legitimate target.

But it was a legit hit (NY Times article, if you’re counting):

The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.

The memo, written last year, followed months of extensive interagency deliberations and offers a glimpse into the legal debate that led to one of the most significant decisions made by President Obama — to move ahead with the killing of an American citizen without a trial.

The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis. The memo, however, was narrowly drawn to the specifics of Mr. Awlaki’s case and did not establish a broad new legal doctrine to permit the targeted killing of any Americans believed to pose a terrorist threat.

So, maybe that’s why this guy’s family got an apology:

An official from the U.S. State Department has called the Charlotte family of al-Qaida propagandist Samir Khan to offer the government’s condolences on his death in a U.S. drone attack last week in Yemen, according to a family spokesman.

“They were very apologetic (for not calling the family sooner) and offered condolences,” Jibril Hough said about the Thursday call from the State Department to Khan’s father, Zafar.

The phone call came a day after the family released a statement through Hough that condemned the “assassination” of their 25-year-old son – a U.S. citizen – and said they were “appalled” that they had not heard from the U.S. government to discuss their son’s remains or answer questions about why Khan was not afforded due process…

Why do I think that Barack Obama is just George Bush with a Mission:Impossible-style rubber mask on? For a guy who ran as the anti-Bush, he sure acts like him.

Anyhow, congrats on bagging yourself another terrorist (whoever you are), and good job with the CYA legal memo. I’m sure the ACLU is very proud.

This is why.

Obama doesn’t want to have to interrogate the terrorists, so he just orders them killed. Are we losing valuable information by our failure to interrogate them?

The elimination of Anwar al-Awlaki last week was a splendid achievement. Awlaki was a terror guidance counselor whose ghastly roster of alumni included two of the 9/11 hijackers, Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hasan, would-be Christmas Day underwear bomber Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, would-be Times Square bomber Faisal Shahzad, and participants in more than a half dozen other terrorist incidents.

An American citizen fluent in English, Awlaki was a formidable recruiter and tactician. The attack on him also killed another American, Samir Khan, who barely a week ago published the seventh edition of a slick al Qaeda magazine called Inspire. Among its articles: an exhortation of readers to imitate the exploits of Hasan, and detailed instructions in how to build bombs.

It may be that capturing Awlaki and Khan wasn’t feasible logistically. But what could we have done had we captured them? Were they subjected to the interrogations techniques renounced by the Obama administration with great fanfare, they could have provided a wealth of intelligence on potential attacks and attackers.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM), the admitted mastermind of the 9/11 attacks, is probably the most famous but certainly not the only captured terrorist to have broken following experience with these harsh techniques. Indeed the mere availability of that program caused at least one captured al Qaeda operative to cooperate once he learned he was in CIA custody, even though he didn’t know precisely what the harsh techniques entailed.

President Obama abolished that program within 48 hours of taking office and replaced it with no classified program. Instead he announced to the world, and to our enemies, that henceforth all interrogations carried out by anyone acting under the authority of the United States would be limited to the techniques set forth in the Army Field Manual, a handbook meant to be suitable to the most raw recruit acting in the field without supervision. The Army Field Manual has been available on the Internet for years and is regularly used by terrorist groups for training in resistance to interrogation.

We don’t have a coherent detention policy governing the capture of terrorists of any standing, let alone totemic figures like Awlaki. Adm. William McRaven, who oversaw the SEAL raid that killed bin Laden, testified that our base at Bagram in Afghanistan cannot be used long term because the host country resists such use, and current administration policy takes Guantanamo Bay “off the table” as a detention location. That leaves three alternatives: (1) transfer detainees to the U.S. for trial in civilian courts, assuming evidence exists that they committed a crime and that such evidence has been gathered in accordance with rules that permit its introduction in civilian court, such as a recorded chain of custody for physical objects; (2) render detainees to third countries where concern for conditions of confinement and the limits of interrogation techniques are likely to be less exquisite than ours, and where in any event we would receive only second-hand intelligence, if any; or (3) release detainees outright.

Although Guantanamo, based on my own observation in 2008, is in fact a humane, state-of-the-art facility, the Obama administration apparently took it off the table in 2009 when it decided to bring KSM and the other accused 9/11 plotters to downtown New York City to stand trial in civilian court. Congress prevented that by resort to its power over the purse and barred use of any federal funds to bring any prisoner from Guantanamo to this country.

Not wishing to forgo the saintly option of a civilian trial for new detainees, the administration has simply refused to take any additional prisoners to Guantanamo. Instead, this most self-consciously virtuous of administrations has set the default option at Predator strikes.
Related Video

Matt Kaminski on the killing of Al Qaeda leader Anwar al-Awlaki.

Why fret about the difficulty of eliciting information from captured detainees, or of detaining them at all, when we have drones available to kill rather than capture? Well, drones are aptly named, in the sense that they do not guide themselves—they need human beings, who need intelligence. If we are to win this war against an enemy that occupies no particular territory, we need intelligence. That can be gathered electronically but electronic wizardry has its limits.

The trove we gathered by hand from bin Laden’s hideout, and the valuable facts we learned from the lips of detainees like KSM—or Abdel Rahim al-Nashiri, who is about to be tried, after a couple of false starts, before a military commission at Guantanamo for his involvement in the 2000 attack on the USS Cole that killed 17 American sailors—are gifts that keep on giving.

The same day we learned that Awlaki had gone to his reward, we learned also that Haji Mali Khan—a leader of the Haqqani Network, a terrorist-cum-organized-crime clan that has killed and recruited others to kill Americans for years, and last month conducted a day-long assault on the U.S. Embassy in Kabul—was captured in that city by NATO forces.

The Haqqani Network operates with the active cooperation of Pakistan’s spy agency, Inter-Services Intelligence. Imagine what we could learn from Khan. Regrettably, it appears that most of what we will be able to do is imagine—because it’s currently anyone’s guess where, whether, and under what circumstances Khan will be detained.

There are better and more effective alternatives. When and if the time comes that the current administration stops trying to define itself simply as the antithesis of its predecessor, perhaps the intelligence gatherers who are our only reliable defense will have those alternatives available.

Mr. Mukasey, a former federal judge, was attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009.

I reprinted this in full because it is excellent.

- Aggie

I have been pretty hard on Obama’s extension of Constitutional rights (and extra-Constitutional rights, like Miranda) to foreign terrorists whose only connection to this country was their desire and effort to blow it up.

But I have to think a little harder about American citizens

Ron Paul aggressively criticized President Obama today for al-Awlaki’s death.

“No I don’t think that’s a good way to deal with our problems,” Paul said in a media avail after his remarks at the Politics + Eggs event here. “He was born here, Al-Awlaki was born here, he is an American citizen. He was never tried or charged for any crimes. No one knows if he killed anybody. We know he might have been associated with the underwear bomber. But if the American people accept this blindly and casually that we now have an accepted practice of the president assassinating people who he thinks are bad guys, I think it’s sad.

Kook that he is, he’s not a lone kook:

Al-Awlaki’s father filed a lawsuit against Obama, then-CIA chief Leon Panetta and then-Secretary of Defense Robert Gates last year to prevent the U.S. government from trying to target his son for assassination.

A district court judge threw out the case last December, leaving open the question of whether the government has the right to kill Americans abroad without a trial.

Friday, the American Civil Liberties Union said the al-Awlaki killing was part of an American counterterrorism program that “violates both U.S. and international law.

“This is a program under which American citizens far from any battlefield can be executed by their own government without judicial process,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer.

I’ve thought harder. Grease the MF-er with extreme prejudice.

He was born here, but he was leading a declared war against his native country. From abroad. Were we supposed to get a warrant and arrest him in Yemen? Read him his Mirandas? John Walker Lindh was no Awlaki, but he took up arms against his country. And we had to offer him a deal to keep him quiet over “abuses” he suffered while in custody.

I’m still not sure myself, but does the ACLU envision no scenario in which a person born in America has effectively renounced his Constitutional rights?

It usually takes two or three false reports to get one of these right, but who knows—maybe he really is Dead Man al-Awlaking:

American-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the public face of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, has been killed in Yemen, the nation’s Defense Ministry said Friday.

The U.S. regards al-Awlaki, who was believed to be hiding in Yemen, as the biggest threat to its homeland security. Western intelligence officials believe al-Awlaki is a senior leader of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), one of the most active al Qaeda affiliates.

Al-Awlaki was killed about 8 kilometers (5 miles) from the Yemeni town of Khashef, east of the capital city of Sanaa, Mohammed Basha, a Yemen Embassy spokesman in Washington D.C., told CNN. Basha said the operation was launched at about 9:55 a.m. local time, though he did not say what type of operation was conducted or how al-Awlaki was killed.

A senior U.S. administration official confirmed al-Awlaki was dead, though no details surrounding the operation that led to the cleric’s death were released. The official spoke on condition of anonymity to CNN. The official was not authorized to release the information.

Born in New Mexico, al-Awlaki preached at a mosque in Virginia before leaving the United States for the Middle East.

Ever the optimist, let me use the opportunity of a dead American citizen to welcome another illegal citizen to take his place. Uncle Omar Onyango, step forward!

Yet another Republican policy which bedevils our noble President:

After 9/11, terrorism experts inside and outside the government all agreed that more attacks would come. The coordinated hijackings revealed our open society’s vulnerability and displayed the resources, sophistication and determination of a deadly enemy. Al Qaeda had a committed, intelligent leadership, a safe harbor in Afghanistan with dozens of training camps and thousands of trained fighters, and an ideology that appealed to frustrated, oppressed men in the Arab world. It had a track record of returning to the same targets; it had tried to blow up the World Trade Centers with a truck bomb in 1993. No one would have predicted that George W. Bush, and his successor, Barack Obama, would succeed in preventing another successful and disastrous terrorist attack.

Looking back over the decade, the first clear lesson is the critical importance of Mr. Bush’s decision to consider the struggle with al Qaeda a war. Unlike past administrations, his chose not to view al Qaeda as a Middle Eastern version of the mafia, if on a grander scale. The 9/11 attacks constituted an act of war—they were a decapitation strike, an effort to eliminate our nation’s leadership in a single blow. If the Soviet Union had carried out the same attacks, no one would have doubted that the United States was at war. Al Qaeda’s independence from any nation state would not shield it from the American military and leave it solely to the more tender mercies of the FBI and the courts.

Choosing war opened the arsenal that has decimated al Qaeda’s leadership and blunted its plan of attack. A nation at war need not wait for a suicide bombing to arrest the “suspects” who remain. Instead, it can fire missiles or send in covert teams to pre-emptively capture or kill the enemy. Our government doesn’t need a judge’s permission before tapping an al Qaeda operative’s phones, intercepting his emails, or arresting him. We need not provide terrorists with Miranda warnings, lawyers and jury trials. A nation at war can detain the enemy without lawyers or civilian trials and interrogate them for information to prevent future attacks.

In its second critical decision, the Bush administration pushed to translate knowledge into action. Winning the war requires, above all, the gathering, analysis and exploitation of intelligence. Before 9/11 our national security bureaucracies, prodded by the civil liberties worries of the courts and Congress, had deliberately handicapped their ability to pull all intelligence into a single mosaic. Passage of the Patriot Act, the expanded interception of international terrorist emails and phone calls, and the tough interrogation of a few high-ranking al Qaeda leaders broadened and deepened the pool of information on our enemy.

As President Obama said of the Tea Party:

Sounds like you can fit the entire leadership of Al Qaeda in a phone booth (whatever that is):

Al-Qaeda’s suspected operations chief, Atiyah Abd al-Rahman, has been killed in Pakistan, a senior US official says.

The Libyan militant was killed on 22 August in the volatile Pakistani tribal region of Waziristan, he added.

He would not say how Abd al-Rahman died, but a CIA drone strike was reported in Waziristan on the same day.

…

In October 2010, Pakistani intelligence officials said they believed Abd al-Rahman had been killed in an air strike by a US drone in North Waziristan.

Believed to be in his late 30s, he was a close confidant of Osama Bin Laden, who was killed in Pakistan in May by US special forces.

Abd al-Rahman joined Bin Laden in Afghanistan as a teenager in the 1980s. He later gained a reputation within al-Qaeda as an explosives expert and Islamic scholar.

I wonder if Muslims appreciate the irony of that juxtaposition: explosives expert and Islamic scholar. Says more than I could.

PS: I wanted to give it a couple of days until the smoke cleared, but with Qaddafi removed from power (it seems), Osama still dead, and now Rahman noodled, Obama deserves credit for at least not screwing it up. Unlike Egypt, Libya can only get better (can’t it?), and the only good Al Qaeda leader is a dead one. So, if Bush deserved credit (or blame), so does Obama. Keep ‘em coming, Bammer!

And they’re attracting a fair amount, too:

The presumed head of Al-Qaeda in east Africa, Fazul Abdullah Muhammad, wanted for blowing up the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, was killed in Mogadishu this week, sources said Saturday.

Fazul Abdullah, 38, is thought to have planned the massive truck bombings in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam that killed 224 people in 1998 and had a $5 million bounty on his head.

“We have confirmed by DNA tests carried out with our partners that it definitely was Fazul Abdullah,” an official at Somali’s National Security Agency told AFP.

A commander of Somalia’s rebel Al-Shebab movement had told AFP earlier this week on condition of anonymity, “One of the men that was killed near Mogadishu was Fazul Abdullah, may Allah bless his soul.

“He is not dead as thousands like him are still in the fight against the enemy of Allah.”

No, I’m pretty sure that still makes him dead. They will be soon enough, too.

But you want to know how they nailed the son-of-a-bitch? Seal Team Six? Delta Force? Girl Scout Troop 1402 of Akron Ohio?

Not even:

Officials with the Somali Transitional Government (TFG) said the men were killed at a roadblock on Tuesday night.

“Our forces fired on two men who refused to stop at a roadblock. They tried to defend themselves when they were surrounded by our men,” TFG military commander Abdikarim Yusuf told AFP.

Members of a non-government in a lawless state killed the chief terrorist in their midst. Some luck, huh? You don’t know the half of it:

The two men were driving in a pick-up truck full of medicine, laptops and mobile phones.

The same source said they appeared to have taken a wrong turning while trying to reach a Shebab position and ended up in an area under TFG control.

…

The man was also in possession of $40,000 in cash, the same Somali source said. He appeared to have come from Lower Juba in southern Somalia where he was heading a group of foreign fighters under the name of “Abu-Abdirahman the Canadian.”

The second man killed was a known Kenyan jihadist called Mohammed Dere, a Nairobi-based security source told AFP, adding that the Kenyan intelligence services were checking the DNA of the two men.

As there was so much of it about!

And not only did all this evidently happen, they gave us (American forces) the body! We could dump it in the Arabian Sea next to Osama’s when we’re done defiling it.

President Obama sure is one lucky guy.

Do we all remember when Bush was scornfully referred to as a cowboy because he unilaterally acted in the best interests of the United States by going after terrorists – without saying “Mother, May I?” to the United Nations and to Europe? With a Democrat in the White House, unilateral cowboyism is cool again!

The man described by counterterrorism officials as al Qaeda’s “military brain,” Ilyas Kashmiri, was killed in a drone strike Friday night in Pakistan, a spokesman for his group, the jihadist Harakat-ul-Jihad-Islami, said.

Pakistani and U.S. officials, however, said they have not confirmed Kashmiri’s death.
…

“The oppressor U.S. is our only target and, God willing, we will take revenge on the U.S. soon with full force,” he said.
[Notice that Obama administration policies are making them hate us. Lefties, where are you???? - Aggie]
A senior Pakistani military official said that in all, nine were killed by the drone strike. The official reiterated that they had not confirmed Kashmiri’s demise.

Kashmiri, who was known to operate in North Waziristan, had moved to South Waziristan and was seen at the site of the attack on Friday, the official said.

If confirmed, his death would be the first major kill or capture since Osama Bin Laden, and the highest profile drone target since Beitullah Mehsud in 2009.

It could also be seen as an embarrassment for Pakistanis, who have twice in just over one month, had a major al Qaeda figure killed on their territory without their participation.

U.S. drones now operate entirely autonomously in Pakistan, a Pakistani intelligence source has told CNN. Whereas before the United States cooperated with Pakistan and used their intelligence, today, the Americans have an intelligence network that allows them to go after terrorists unilaterally.

Readers of this blog realize that I agree with the policy of using drones but cannot stand the hypocrisy of the Left. When Bush did it, it was a WAR CRIME. When the Israelis did it, it was a WAR CRIME. But when Cowboy Barry does it, it’s just really awesome, isn’t it? No one that can think for him or herself will ever be able to seriously listen to a leftist argue about anything again. They are really just sports fans.

- Aggie