FOD 2015.04.27

Late last week it was disclosed that two innocent hostages were killed during a drone strike on suspected al Qaeda terrorists in Pakistan.

President Barack Obama announced Thursday that a U.S. counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in January accidentally killed two innocent hostages, including one American.

Multiple U.S. officials told CNN the hostages, Warren Weinstein, an American, and Italian national Giovanni Lo Porto, were killed by a U.S. military drone that targeted the al Qaeda compound.

barry immediately went into full presidential mode, standing up and announcing he took full responsibility for the incident. So far, so good.

Then he sent his flunkies out to cover for him.

... both the Pentagon and the White House (in the form of Josh Earnest) went out of their way to make sure everyone knows Obama didn’t personally or specifically sign off on the drone attacks that tragically killed two hostages, including an American.

This is curious. First of all, he’s still responsible, as he himself said in his press conference. He set up and approved a system that lets these attacks happen. There’s something cowardly about honorably taking “full responsibility” in public, and then having your flacks go out and stage whisper “It really wasn’t him.”

(One plausible explanation for this duplicitous behavior) might have to do with his vanity. I can’t help but think the implication we’re supposed to take away is that if Obama-The-Righteous had been paying attention, mistakes like this would not have been made. The military bureaucracy has failed Obama, who famously reads Marcus Aurelius as he composes his kill lists. At least he avoided saying that he found out about these attacks by reading about them in the paper, but the upshot is the same. The president doesn’t make mistakes, others make mistakes implementing his will.

Ah, but wait. It appears that obama was more involved than previously disclosed. White House spokesweasel Josh Earnest originally said "that Obama did not specifically approve the operations that killed the Americans, but that the strikes were within the bounds of policy guidance."

Guess who approved a secret waiver to the publicly annouced drone strike policy?

Obama Kept Looser Rules for Drones in Pakistan

President Barack Obama tightened rules for the U.S. drone program in 2013, but he secretly approved a waiver giving the Central Intelligence Agency more flexibility in Pakistan than anywhere else to strike suspected militants, according to current and former U.S. officials.

The rules were designed to reduce the risk of civilian casualties. Mr. Obama also required that proposed targets pose an imminent threat to the U.S.—but the waiver exempted the CIA from this standard in Pakistan.

Last week, Mr. Obama apologized for the killings and took personal responsibility for the mistake. He called the operation “fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region” without specifying what those guidelines are or how they differed from those applied in the rest of the world.

Can you say "two-faced?"