Analyst's note: Absolutely must read. The American people have to know deep down that something is drastically wrong with the current war strategy and implementation when the President has to approve - after five or six sessions - taking out each member of the enemy force who himself follows no rules. We never would have won WWII, if we had tried to fight in this manner considering each member of enemy force a "militant" and then taking action as if they were involved in some kind of activity that should be considered by the police.
Once Washington finally discovers who this enemy really is, and the vast numbers involved (both foreign and domestic), they will certainly not have time for Presidential approval of every “Whac-A-Mole” military strike. When Mr. Obama can not decide to kill the enemy ... one by one ... he then "maintains his political options" by giving the Islamist jihadist the rights of Americans, lets them lawyer up and reads them their Miranda rights.
Think about this for just a minute, exactly what does a community agitator, with no military experience of any kind who has surrounded himself by socialists and Marxists, know about running an entire U.S. military operation? We know the answer .... nothing! BTW, the long original source of this material is a typical New York Times "puff" piece to make Mr. Obama look like a considered leader of Warriors ... which he is not. If one reads the article carefully, you will see through their self-generated "fog of the Obama's war." Don't miss the Jihad and Terrorism Threat Monitor (JTTM) Weekend Summary for additional perspective.
New George S Patton speech! Iran & modern warfare
Caution: Language is course.
"This was the enemy, served up in the latest chart from the intelligence agencies: 15 Qaeda suspects in Yemen with Western ties. The mug shots and brief biographies resembled a high school yearbook layout. Several were Americans. Two were teenagers, including a girl who looked even younger than her 17 years.
President Obama, overseeing the regular Tuesday counterterrorism meeting of two dozen security officials in the White House Situation Room, took a moment to study the faces. It was Jan. 19, 2010, the end of a first year in office punctuated by terrorist plots and culminating in a brush with catastrophe over Detroit on Christmas Day, a reminder that a successful attack could derail his presidency. Yet he faced adversaries without uniforms, often indistinguishable from the civilians around them.
“How old are these people?” he asked, according to two officials present. “If they are starting to use children,” he said of Al Qaeda, “we are moving into a whole different phase.”
It was not a theoretical question: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret “nominations” process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values; the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be.
Mr. Obama [...] insisted on approving every new name on an expanding “kill list,” poring over terrorist suspects’ biographies on what one official calls the macabre “baseball cards” of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone strike at a top terrorist arises — but his family is with him — it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation.
[....] William M. Daley, Mr. Obama’s chief of staff in 2011, said the president and his advisers understood that they could not keep adding new names to a kill list, from ever lower on the Qaeda totem pole. What remains unanswered is how much killing will be enough.
“One guy gets knocked off, and the guy’s driver, who’s No. 21, becomes 20?” Mr. Daley said, describing the internal discussion. “At what point are you just filling the bucket with numbers?”
[....] It is the strangest of bureaucratic rituals: Every week or so, more than 100 members of the government’s sprawling national security apparatus gather, by secure video teleconference, to pore over terrorist suspects’ biographies and recommend to the president who should be the next to die.
This secret “nominations” process is an invention of the Obama administration, a grim debating society that vets the PowerPoint slides bearing the names, aliases and life stories of suspected members of Al Qaeda’s branch in Yemen or its allies in Somalia’s Shabab militia.
[....] Given the contentious discussions, it can take five or six sessions for a name to be approved, and names go off the list if a suspect no longer appears to pose an imminent threat, the official said. [....]
