Nader: “Obama is a War Criminal”
(Stephen C. Webster, RawStory.com, September 26, 2012 )
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“He’s gone beyond George W. Bush in drones, for example,” Nader told reporter Patrick Gavin. “He thinks the world is his plate, that national sovereignties mean nothing, drones can go anywhere. They can kill anybody that he suspects and every Tuesday he makes the call on who lives and who dies, supposed suspects in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is a war crime and he ought to be held to account.” . . . President Obama’s own attorneys recognize that key portions of the U.S. drone bombing campaign in Pakistan and other countries are legally questionable, according to a report in The Wall St. Journal on Wednesday. That’s especially the case in Pakistan, which has stopped giving direct approval to U.S. drone strikes, but the bombs continue to fall anyway. . . . Casualty figures collected from media reports by the nonprofit New America Foundation show that between 1,877 and 3,177 people have been killed by drone strikes from 2004-2012, most of them being civilians. The vast majority of deaths reportedly happened during 2010, President Obama’s second year on the job. A study published this week by researchers at Stanford and New York Universities also claimed that only about 2 percent of the people killed in U.S. drone strikes were actual militants, saying at least 176 of those slain were children. . . . Nader added that Obama’s intellect and experience helped legitimize Bush’s “lawless war-mongering and militarism,” making him a “more effective evil” than Romney. However, he warned that the former Massachusetts governor is not to be trifled with either, calling him the greater of the two evils and warning that he’s “basically a corporation running for president masquerading as a human being.”
croft woodruff Said,
November 28, 2012 @ 2:39 pm
i dont see anything for the greatest doctor in history,dr abram hoffer.
Rafael Said,
November 10, 2015 @ 2:52 am
Dave M Two points from your reecnt show on the law of war in U.S. history:1. Although frequently misused, the term rules of engagement refers to a commander’s orders specifying when armed force may or may not be used. Although rules of engagement must comply with the laws of war, they are not themselves statements of the law. Rules of engagement usually incorporate strategic, operation, or tactical considerations in addition to the legal restrictions on when, where, and against whom deadly force may be used. For example, the famous line don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes incorporates many considerations ammunition conservation, optimal use of firepower, etc. that would be found in modern rules of engagement.2. During your show, a caller asked about the legality of the raid to kill Osama bin Laden in Pakistan. The discussion following that question compared the raid to U.S. interventions in various Latin American countries in the 20th century. I think that comparison was a less than accurate discussion of the current legal issues surrounding intervention. There is a growing body of law suggesting that states have the right, or even the obligation, to militarily intervene when a state harbors known terrorists and refuses or cannot prevent those individuals from committing further crimes. U.N. intervention in Yugoslavia and Somalia, as well as various actions against international terrorists demonstrate that state sovereignty is no longer a barrier to intervention. No doubt, this is a controversial issue and I don’t mean to suggest otherwise. Some have argued that this is appropriate in failed states only, while others have argued that in the case of operations against terrorists no state should be allowed to harbor terrorists. The so-called right to intervene is and will remain a contentious issue intermingled with discussions about sovereignty, power, and politics. But it invokes different issues than the imperialist interventions of the 19th and 20th century.Thank you for a great show and I look forward to the next one.