Over the past month, two members of the Obama administration have made public statements regarding different aspects of America’s ongoing “war on terror.” The second has (understandably) received much more public attention than the first, but the first says something more important about the ultimate course of that long struggle.
In the more recent of the two statements, President Obama spoke on Thursday about the deaths of two Western hostages, one American and one Italian. The hostages, Obama stated, were killed in “a U.S. counterterrorism operation targeting an al Qaeda compound in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region” this January. The president said “I profoundly regret what happened” and apologized to the families of the victims on behalf of the U.S. government, while also defending the broader thrust of America’s targeted-killing campaign against Al Qaeda and other groups.
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