The heinous terrorist attack in London today makes the timing of this announcement interesting.
Al-Awlaki, a radical Muslim cleric, was killed in a drone strike in September 2011 in Yemen. Holder said three other Americans were killed by drones in counterterrorism operations since 2009 but were not targeted. The three are Samir Khan, who was killed in the same drone strike as al-Awlaki; al-Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a native of Denver, who also was killed in Yemen two weeks later; and Jude Kenan Mohammed, who was killed in a drone strike in Pakistan.
“Since entering office, the president has made clear his commitment to providing Congress and the American people with as much information as possible about our sensitive counterterrorism operations,” Holder told Leahy, D-Vt. “To this end, the president has directed me to disclose certain information that until now has been properly classified.”
This administration is purposely schizophrenic on terrorism. It’ll drone select terrorists lurking overseas, but so far isn’t lifting a finger to apprehend the terrorists who attacked the US facility at Benghazi last September. Obama wants to avoid the optics of capturing them and then sticking them at Gitmo, and seems to prefer local proceedings to be done against transnational terrorists (some were from Yemen) who attacked and killed four Americans in a quasi-state. The optics of killing them without trial is better than keeping them alive at Gitmo? It is, in the sense that dead terrorists don’t have lawyers and don’t wage hunger strikes and, because they’re dead, no one agitates on their behalf anymore.
No one, like Barack Obama, who campaigned on closing the terrorist holding pen at Gitmo and has yet to fulfill that promise. Basically, we’re looking at the effect of Sen. Barack Obama’s disagreement with President Barack Obama. An Obama divided against itself cannot stand.
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