For instance, last October the McClatchy news service reported that "the Obama administration violated international law with top-secret targeted-killing operations that claimed dozens of civilian lives in Yemen and Pakistan," according to reports released by Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch.
Last week, just before Obama leapt to high dudgeon with condemnation of Putin for his "breach of international law," the Los Angeles Times published an op-ed piece that provided illuminating context for such presidential righteousness.
"D espite the president's insistence on placing limits on war, and on the defense budget, his brand of warfare has helped lay the basis for a permanent state of global warfare via "low footprint' drone campaigns and special forces operations aimed at an ever-morphing enemy usually identified as some form of Al Qaeda," wrote Karen J. Greenberg, director of the Center on National Security at Fordham University's law school.
Greenberg went on to indicate the scope of the U.S. government's ongoing contempt for international law: "According to Senator Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), the Obama administration has killed 4,700 individuals in numerous countries, including Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia. Obama has successfully embedded the process of drone killings into the executive branch in such a way that any future president will inherit it, along with the White House "kill list' and its "terror Tuesday ' meetings. Unbounded global war is now part of what it means to be president."
But especially in times of crisis, as with the current Ukraine situation, such inconvenient contradictions go out the mass-media window. What remains is an Orwellian baseline, melding conformist ideology and nationalism into red-white-and-blue doublethink.
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