Somebody died when Obama lied

The lies of the Obama administration's targeted assassination program have been blown wide open:

It turns out that the Obama administration has not been honest about who the CIA has been targeting with drones in Pakistan. Jonathan Landay, national security reporter at McClatchy Newspapers, has provided the first analysis of drone-strike victims that is based upon internal, top-secret U.S. intelligence reports. It is the most important reporting on U.S. drone strikes to date because Landay, using U.S. government assessments, plainly demonstrates that the claim repeatedly made by President Obama and his senior aides -- that targeted killings are limited only to officials, members, and affiliates of al Qaeda who pose an imminent threat of attack on the U.S. homeland -- is false.

And Landay is a reporter with enormous credibility -- he is one of a handful of Washington journalists who chronicled the lies of the Bush administration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. Now, a different president from a different party -- telling different lies. Here's a snippet from Landay's original article:

WASHINGTON — Contrary to assurances it has deployed U.S. drones only against known senior leaders of al Qaida and allied groups, the Obama administration has targeted and killed hundreds of suspected lower-level Afghan, Pakistani and unidentified "other" militants in scores of strikes in Pakistan's rugged tribal area, classified U.S. intelligence reports show.

The administration has said that strikes by the CIA's missile-firing Predator and Reaper drones are authorized only against "specific senior operational leaders of al Qaida and associated forces" involved in the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks who are plotting "imminent" violent attacks on Americans.

But they're not, Many of the the targeted drone victims are low-level nobodies lacking any real capacity to strike America from 11,000 miles away. And as been well documented, at least several hundred innocent civilians including women and children have been killed in this unholy process. This report should be getting much more attention (kind of like Landay's Iraq reporting...history repeats!) and three things need to happen: 1) U.S, active combat in Afghanistan needs to end b) drone strikes against nobodies in countries with which the U.S. is not at war also need to end c) a clear, not-unconstitutional process should be established for targeting high-level al-Qaeda leaders like bin Laden.

This isn't rocket science. It's drone science. And it starts with not lying to the American people.