If Ahmed Mohamed Had Lived in Yemen, Barack Obama Would Have Assassinated Him

Critics of Obama's drone based assassination program note that under the criteria used by his signature strike program, the clock kid would have been killed:

Yesterday Barack Obama joined the groundswell of social media support for Ahmed Mohamed, the 14-year-old high school student detained by the police for being seen with an electronic device and being a Muslim named Ahmed Mohamed. Good for Obama. And good for Ahmed that he wasn’t building a clock in Yemen.

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Since his inauguration, Barack Obama has drastically expanded the use of so-called “signature” drone strikes—killings that aren’t targeted against any person in particular, but against someone who looks or acts a certain way. Precisely which behavioral patterns or appearances are sufficient to sign an aerial death sentence remain an absolute state secret—all we know about the so-called “pattern of life activity” sufficient to justify the killing of an unidentified stranger is based on media reports quoting anonymous U.S. officials. In 2008, the New York Times reported that a “signature” can be as vague as “the characteristics of Qaeda or Taliban leaders on the run.” A later Times report said targets could include anyone near “training camps and suspicious compounds”—dicey given the Pentagon’s lackluster record when it comes to assessing compounds. The body of anonymously provided evidence suggests that loose suspicion is about all it takes to condemn someone on the ground, and based on the resultant craters, it’s easy to see that standards are lax.


In 2011, a 16-year-old American citizen named Abdulrahman Anwar al-Awlaki was killed by a drone-fired missile while eating outside in Yemen just two weeks after his father, an Islamist cleric on the CIA kill list, was drone-assassinated. Abdulrahman’s signature appears to have consisted of little more than traveling with his father and looking like the people around his father. When Attorney General Eric Holder was questioned about Abdulrahman’s assassination, he said only that he was “not specifically targeted by the United States.” Although he’s been the most visible (and controversial) drone victim due to his citizenship, al-Awlaki is far from the only child killed on Obama’s orders—the Bureau of Investigative Journalism estimates that upwards of 204 kids have been killed by drones in Pakistan alone since 2004. Some of them might’ve simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time, but only the CIA knows how many were killed because they matched some classified “signature.”

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According to a blockbuster New York Times report on the CIA’s signature strikes, the drone program’s hair trigger has quite literally become a joke:

But some State Department officials have complained to the White House that the criteria used by the C.I.A. for identifying a terrorist “signature” were too lax. The joke was that when the C.I.A. sees “three guys doing jumping jacks,” the agency thinks it is a terrorist training camp, said one senior official. Men loading a truck with fertilizer could be bombmakers — but they might also be farmers, skeptics argued.

Imagine then, that a CIA analyst in Virginia or drone pilot in Nevada sees 14-year-old Ahmed from 10,000 in the air, working with a bundle of wires and metallic pieces.

The same Times report said that the Obama administration’s drone killing program is so loose that it “in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants.” What if Ahmed Mohamed, of Sudanese descent, had been located in war zone Syria—where 14-year-olds are most certainly military age—carrying this device?

(emphasis mine)

This kid would be dead in Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Sudan, or Syria, or Iraq.

Obama has repeatedly pulled the trigger^* on kids with far less due process and far less evidence all over the Muslim world.

The Nobel committee really f$#@ed up when they gave Obama the Peace Prize.

^*He is commander-in-chief, and therefore fully culpable under the command responsibility (Yamashita) doctrine.