Obama's Drone Murder Rule Book

Early in his second term, President Obama set out to create a Rule Book that would provide some semblance of legal oversight over his administration’s drone program, which in the previous four years had become the administration’s preferred method of targeting suspected terrorists in remote regions of Pakistan, Yemen, and elsewhere. Sometimes dubbed the “Disposition Matrix,” news articles about the Rule Book offered tidy flow charts of how a suspected terrorist would go from “suspect” to “dead” - or, less realistically, “captured.” The book was intended to bring new order to the war on terror, there being “a broad consensus that such operations are likely to be extended at least another decade,” as The Washington Post reported in the fall of 2012.

Obama announced the formalization of the Rule Book - now dubbed the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) - in May 2013. It was partly a response to critics who said the administration was essentially conducting extrajudicial killings, with no rubric by which to judge whether it was staying within the bounds of international law. Obama explained that after four years of drone war without such formal rules, he was now “insisting upon clear guidelines, oversight, and accountability that is now codified in Presidential Policy Guidance.”

It took three more years and a lawsuit before, on Friday, the administration finally released a copy of the PPG to the ACLU in response to a Freedom of Information Act request. While some of the policy promises in the document are laudable, the document, in a structural sense, doesn’t seem to add the oversight to the war on terror that Obama promised back in 2013. Indeed, it seems designed not to.

You can read the rest @
https://newrepublic.com/article/135933/limits-obamas-drone-war-really

And you can find the PPG itself here:

https://www.aclu.org/foia-document/presidential-policy-guidance

If a President can write his own rule book on whom, when, and how he can kill people without oversight or granting due process to his victims, isn't that the very definition of tyranny?

And when he can publish his rule book and no one really seems to care, what does that say about what the US has openly become?

Hint: Don't use the word "democracy" in your answers to these questions.