I actually had bile rise up in my mouth when I stumbled across this article and validated it with subsequent quick research:
Bureau investigation finds fresh evidence of CIA drone strikes on rescuers
The Bureau first broke the story of the CIA’s deliberate targeting of rescuers in a February 2012 investigation for the Sunday Times. It found evidence of 11 attacks on rescuers - so-called ‘double-tap’ strikes – in Pakistan’s tribal areas between 2009 and 2011, along with a drone strike deliberately targeting a funeral, causing mass casualties.
Reports of these controversial tactics ended by July 2011. But credible news reports emerged a year later indicating that double-tap strikes had been revived.
International media including the BBC, CNN and news agency AFP variously reported that rescuers had been targeted on five occasions between May 24 and July 23 2012, with a mosque and prayers for the dead also reportedly bombed.
[bold emphasis mine]
The international community has a name for such activity: war crime. I'm more disgusted than I ever imagined I could be with a Democratic president.
Have any of you ever been to a funeral? What was your connection to the dead person? Were you a relative? A colleague? A neighbor? Just an acquaintance who respected the slain man? The gathering you attended no doubt was full of family and friends and acquaintances. Do you imagine a funeral in some far away land is much different?
Close your eyes, imagine the scene. Mourners, friends, or just those paying respects gathered to pray for those killed from silent death from above. Maybe the fruit vendor from whom the dead guy bought his grapes is there. Maybe a respected tribal elder who was a family friend is there. Imagine a veiled mother holding the hand of her child, now fatherless. Maybe the woman's sister is there to support her widowed sister.
Take in the entire scene. Is it even conceivable that most of the people gathered are confederates of the fallen (even assuming for a moment they might have actually been active threats to Americans)? Of course not. Now come to the awareness that your government, in your name, led by this President is about to follow up the original murder by blowing into literal bits everyone you just imagined in that scene, knowing with 100% certainty most in attendance were entirely innocent.
But for an accident of fate, the people mourning could be my family, your parents, Obama's own children. While I might on some level possibly see justification for a drone Hellfire strike on some groups exhibiting some "signature," there is no part of me that can EVER see justification for the "Double Tap." That is a level of truly sick malice and genuine evil I subscribe to the Bundys, Gaseys, Pol Pots, Amins, Stalins of the world....or where this tactic is most familiar...follow on terrorist car bombs on the heels of an IED or car bomb blast. I have to wonder if it's Al Qaeda who taught the CIA this tactic.
I will never forgive a president or a government who condones such things, and, in fact, by all accounts of the expansion of this "policy" actually seems to revel in it. Knowing this, I am unable to generate ANY enthusiasm for this man for any nice nice talk about justice, transparency, civil rights, or anything else. It is all trivial. I am sorry, but I cannot compartmentalize the policies. If you can, maybe you can teach me how.