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21 " The documents show that the military designated people it killed in targeted strikes as EKIA, “enemy killed in action,” even if they were not the intended targets of the strike. Unless "
― Jeremy Scahill , The Assassination Complex: Inside the Government's Secret Drone Warfare Program
22 " Remember that there was great controversy that George Bush asserted the power simply to detain American citizens without due process or simply to eavesdrop on their conversation without warrant. Here you have something much more severe. Not eavesdropping on American citizens, not detaining them without due process, but killing them without due process. And yet many Democrats and progressives, because it’s President Obama doing it, have no problem with it and are even in favor of it.” Greenwald added: “To say that the President has the right to kill citizens without due process is really to take the Constitution and to tear it into as many little pieces as you can and then burn it and step on it.” For "
― Jeremy Scahill , Dirty Wars: The World is a Battlefield
23 " Obama was particularly offended, as he put it, that “the National Security Agency has been spying on Americans without judicial approval.” Justifying "
24 " When Obama took office, there had been only one U.S. drone strike in Yemen, in November 2002.6 By 2012 a drone strike was reported in Yemen every six days. As of August 2015, more than 490 people had been killed in drone strikes in Yemen alone. "
25 " That Obama would embrace rather than repudiate these Bush-Cheney “war on terror” principles became evident almost immediately after he was inaugurated. Within the first several weeks of his presidency, his top legal officials explicitly advocated several of the most extremist and controversial theories of power that defined the Bush administration’s approach to terrorism. "
26 " Although government officials have repeatedly said there is a rigorous process for making sure no one is unfairly placed in the databases, the guidelines acknowledge that all nominations of “known terrorists” are considered justified unless the National Counterterrorism Center has evidence to the contrary. In an April 2014 court filing, the government disclosed that there were 468,749 KST nominations in 2013, of which only 4,915 were rejected—a rate of about 1 percent.10 The rules appear to invert the legal principle of due process, defining nominations as “presumptively valid. "
27 " When we went after the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, there was a certain understanding that we had the ability and the right to defend ourselves. And the fact that al Qaida had been harbored by the Taliban was lagitimate. I think when we make the decision to go into Iraq, that was less legitimate with many of the observers. And so while there was certainly a certain resource strain and reduction in the ability of just our attention in multiple places, I think it was more important that much of the Muslim world now questiones what we were doing, and we lost some of the support that I think would have been helpful longer term. "
28 " special forces and drones replaced the type of large-scale ground invasion that destroyed Iraq. But the defining essence of the Bush-Cheney template—that the United States is fighting an endless war against terror suspects who have no due process rights of any kind—is very much alive and, in many cases, stronger than ever. "