Nothing new about using drones to target terrorists, just ask Obama
Adriana Cohen
https://www.bostonherald.com/2020/01/05 ... obama/amp/
January 5, 2020
President Barack Obama gestures while making remarks during his news conference at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) in Lima, Peru, Sunday, Nov. 20, 2016. (AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
If you want to know just how toxic partisan politics is today, look at how Democrats and the left wing media reacted when the Obama administration assassinated Osama Bin Laden and compare it to how they’re responding to the Trump administration’s elimination of Iranian Major Gen. Qassem Soleimani.
Soleimani was a known terrorist, was behind the recent attack on the U.S. embassy in Baghdad and had left a record of mayhem and carnage throughout the Middle East spanning decades.
His death toll includes the murders of over 600 U.S. soldiers.
When Obama “got” Bin Laden the media gave him a standing ovation. It was roundly applauded by both sides of the aisle. No one in the Democratic Party, media or GOP questioned the mission that took out the 9/11 mastermind nor the intelligence leading up to it. Nor did anyone use it in an attempt to smear former President Obama or his administration.
Our country was justly unified behind it.
Contrast that with what we’re seeing in the aftermath of President Trump’s approved drone strike of Soleimani, an evil butcher who was planning imminent deadly attacks against the United States.
On Sunday during an interview on CNN, Sen. Elizabeth Warren accused President Trump of executing the drone strike to distract from the impeachment hearings, sowing skepticism about whether the pre-emptive strike to protect American lives was justified.
she told anchor Jake Tapper.Look, I think that people are reasonably asking about the timing and why it is that the administration seems to have all different answers,
Warren’s heinous allegation and conspiracy theory came after she told reporters in Iowa that if she were president she would not have ordered the drone strike. Instead, she accused our president of escalating tensions with Iran and “moving us to war.”
Many other liberal lawmakers and partisan media have been doing the same — opting to malign the Trump administration for killing a dangerous terrorist.
Yet during the Obama years they turned a blind eye to the hundreds of drone strikes by the former White House administration in Pakistan, Somalia and beyond that took out terrorists and dozens of innocent civilians alike.
The New York Times editorial board reported last March,
Other experts calculated the civilian death toll closer to 324.The Obama administration estimated that over its two terms drone strikes had killed between 64 and 116 civilians in 542 airstrikes outside the major war zones.
But when the Trump administration — backed by the U.S. State Department and Pentagon — sent a drone after a known Iranian terrorist who was a clear and present danger to the United States, the left and #FakeNewsMedia immediately engaged in a smear campaign against President Trump.
Far left progressives, Reps. Ilhan Omar, D-Minnesota, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-N.Y., even took to Twitter over the weekend accusing Donald Trump of potential “war crimes” against Iran. Ocasio-Cortez called the president “a monster” in a tweet to her six million followers..
Let that sink in.
Adriana Cohen is a nationally syndicated columnist and TV commentator. See adrianacohen.com.
