It was under Obama that al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsular leader and US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in 2011. Twelve were women, five of them pregnant. Twenty-one were children – ten of them under five. Instead of eliminating al-Qaeda with cluster munitions a tribal group was hit, killing 55 people. According to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Obama’s first airstrike in Yemen was a disaster. The figures are never going to be exact, but you get the picture. The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) estimates that 3,797 people were killed in drone strikes during Obama’s tenure, including 324 civilians. Reprieve’s analysis estimates between 20, US drone strikes in Yemen and Pakistan killed 1,147 unknown people in failed attempts to kill 41 named individuals. UK-based rights group, Reprieve, argue lowering the threshold for who could be classed as a fighting-aged male allowed the Obama administration to claim low civilian casualty figures and a high number of militants killed. He’s one of those intel guys who signed a letter saying the Hunter Biden laptop was ‘Russian disinformation’ during the 2020 US Presidential campaign. This was conducted under the watch of Obama’s bitter CIA director John Brennan, and known as the ‘signature strikes policy’. And get this, only where evidence was brought to light after their death, were they determined to be innocent. Under Obama, the US lowered the threshold for who could be regarded as a fighting-aged male in a strike zone and boys and men over the age of 16 became legitimate targets. There is a perverse imbalance between what is acceptable for those in power compared to those deployed by that power when it comes to executing their task with extreme prejudice during times of war. Instead of facing war crimes, Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Fast forward to recent history and President Obama’s record in office was one of the most lethal for civilians out of any US President during the global war on terror (GWOT). McNamara and Airforce General Curtis LeMay concluded they’d be tried as war criminals if the US lost. In The Fog of War former United States secretary of defence, the late Robert Strange McNamara (1916-2009), described how prior to nuking Nagasaki and Hiroshima in the second world war, the US ran a fire-bombing campaign across Japanese cities.
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