Obama's drone escalation
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Obama's drone escalation is the comparison John Kiriakou uses when the drone programme is discussed as something Barack Obama inherited rather than something he enlarged. Rather than argue the point he states two months: "In George W. Bush's last month as president, he killed 24 people with drones. In Barack Obama's last month as president, he killed 440 people with drones." The question he attaches is "Like, is that really the country we want to be?", and his interviewer's gloss, trial by drone, goes unchallenged.

He presents the figures as the second half of a pair. The first is the appointment: the president he had voted for, contributed to and taken his children to see inaugurated "makes John Brennan CIA director. John Brennan, who was the executive director of the CIA during the torture program, was one of the founders, the fathers of the torture program."

The escalation belongs, in his account, to the same disposition that produced his own prosecution, a president described to his lawyers by a National Security Council attorney as having "a Nixonian obsession with national security leaks."

See also

- Barack Obama
- John Brennan
- Daniel Hale
- Espionage Act
