Obama Drone Strikes Quotes & Sayings

President Barack Obama and his family. (I was respectful, I believe, but I told him I did not like his drone strikes on Pakistan, that when they kill one bad person, innocent people are killed, too, and terrorism spreads more. I also told him that if America spent less money on weapons and war and more on education, the world would be a better place. If God has given you a voice, I decided, you must use it even if it is to disagree with the president of the United States.) — Malala Yousafzai

We know that U.S. voters, and world leaders, allow Obama extraordinary leeway when it comes to deadly drone strikes, precisely because of his politics, character and background. (We are talking about a man, after all, who won the Nobel Peace Prize while ordering the automated killing of suspected Muslim terrorists around the world). — Glenn Greenwald

Launching more drone strikes than Bush ever did and compiling a secret "kill list," President Obama's administration took the view that al-Qaeda was like an organized crime gang - disrupt the hierarchy, destroy the gang. Theirs was a concerted and dogmatic attempt at pretending that al-Qaeda was nothing but a fringe criminal group, and not a concrete realization of an ideological phenomenon with grassroots sympathy. They took this view in part because of how successful Islamist "fellow-traveler" lobbies had been in influencing Obama's campaign after the mistakes of the Bush years. For Islamists and their allies, the problem was "al-Qaeda inspired extremism," and not the extremism that had inspired al-Qaeda. — Sam Harris

The first drone strike outside of a declared war zone was conducted in 2002, yet it was not until May 2013 that the White House released a set of standards and procedures for conducting such strikes.3 Those guidelines offered little specificity, asserting that the United States would conduct a lethal strike outside an "area of active hostilities" only if a target represents a "continuing, imminent threat to U.S. persons," without providing any sense of the internal process used to determine whether a suspect should be killed without being indicted or tried.4 The implicit message on drone strikes from the Obama administration has been Trust, but don't verify.5 — Jeremy Scahill