Ironically, an administration that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on a botched healthcare website is suddenly claiming to have been careful and “precise” when it comes to drone strikes overseas said to have killed dozens of civilians.
The real problem for White House Press Secretary Jay Carney is that he “declined, however, to speak about specific operations or strikes”.
“To the extent these reports claim that the U.S. has acted contrary to international law, we would strongly disagree,” Carney said at Tuesday’s White House press briefing.
Disagreeing is one thing. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, as recently reported by Breitbart News, Amnesty International laid out a detailed case against Obama.
Amnesty International has accused the Obama administration of “war crimes” in its drone policy in a new report released Tuesday. The human rights organization reviewed forty-five drone strikes in the Pakistani providence of Waziristan since January 2012, and concluded that they “have resulted in hundreds of civilian deaths, some of which may amount to extrajudicial executions or war crimes under international law.
Certainly the Obama administration is being given more latitude by the media than a Republican administration might get; however, if his poll numbers continue to sink along with his so-called signature achievement, healthcare.gov, things may yet turn around on him in the press. If nothing else, the international press isn’t likely to give Obama the pass he gets from the media here at home.
The Amnesty report was covered by National Public Radio and CNN on Tuesday, as well as a few other sources. However, the New York Times article ignored the explosive “war crimes” accusation.
It was once axiomatic on the left, and in much of the mainstream media, to believe that President George W. Bush and his administration had been responsible for war crimes in Iraq and even in Afghanistan.
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