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"I'm really good at killing people," Barack Obama once allegedly said. The origin of the quote is the 2013 book "Double Down" by veteran political journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, who cite unnamed Obama aides as their source. The two reporters have journalistic credits even a liberal would respect--The New Yorker, The Economist, and MSNBC, to name a few. Some people choose not to give the quote credence because its source is anonymous and it wasn't caught on tape. Skepticism surrounding anonymous quotes is of course understandable though I surmise that most doubters have political motives. People who are...

China doesn’t have the same record of killing foreign enemies overseas that Russia does. But it has a large enough overseas network and piles of cash that it could get the job done if it needed to. Just ask Naw Kham what happened after the Mekong River Massacre. The bodies of the Chinese, the crew of two cargo boats, were found badly mutilated on the Thai side of the river in early October 2011. The killings, the worst slaughter of Chinese citizens abroad in recent memory, angered the Chinese public. Chinese investigators insist that Mr. Naw Kham was the mastermind...

(Reuters) - The unprecedented deployment of an unarmed surveillance drone by U.N. peacekeepers in the Democratic Republic of Congo has been delayed several months due to procurement procedures, the U.N. peacekeeping chief said on Thursday. The United Nations has procured an unarmed surveillance drone from Italian defense electronics firm Selex ES, a unit of Finmeccanica, that was due to be deployed in the volatile eastern Congo during August. "There has been some delay much to my chagrin but these have to do with the rules that member states have made upon us as far as procurement is concerned," peacekeeping chief...

How does a Nobel Peace Prize winner justify launching missile strikes in Syria? Or for that matter, a five-year drone war in the Middle East? Kirsten Powers says: he simply can’t. Military action is, of course, sometimes necessary to maintain peace. Kosovo and World War II are good examples. But the president has not demonstrated that missile attacks in Syria would do anything to achieve peace. Worse, by all accounts, Obama’s “red line” threat was an off-the-cuff remark, not a well thought-out strategy. The U.S. should not attack another country because the president was careless with his words and now...

'British special forces troops killed around 30 Afghan Taliban fighters in a night-time desert battle. The crack team of SAS soldiers were sent in after a Taliban attack on a fort manned by Afghan government forces. A US pilotless drone aircraft spotted the attackers and fired missiles at their convoy of trucks, blowing up two. The survivors fled into the desert and the SAS were quickly flown in to hunt them down. They set up an ambush and after the rebel fighters opened fire, a battle raged through the night. One SAS man survived a “quick-draw” shoot-out when he stumbled...

Jose Canseco tweets Lindsey Graham address for suggested drone strike Twitchy staff - 5:36 pm on August 19, 2013 hey linds @LindseyGrahamSC when you are done droning adam gadahn can you send another to 245 park avenue new york— Jose Canseco (@JoseCanseco) August 19, 2013 Who is at that address that Canseco could be so unhappy with? You might have guessed it: Lindsey Graham calls for droning Adam Gadahn. Canseco calls for droning Bud Selig: twitter.com/JoseCanseco/st… #droneweek— Alex Burns (@aburnspolitico) August 19, 2013 Yes, that’s the address of the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, among many other corporations.Canseco has...

I can no longer keep track of all the ways the United States has lost the moral high ground when it comes to Egypt. There was our initial namby-pamby response to the popular uprising against Hosni Mubarak in early 2011: We made vague noises about the virtues of democracy, but we dithered over calling for Mubarak to step down, because we're Dictators R Us -- Mubarak might have been a bastard, but he was our bastard. After Mubarak's ouster, we continued to sit on our hands as Egypt's interim military government grew ever more repressive in the run-up to elections....

Michael Grunwald, Senior National Correspondent for TIME Magazine, spent much of last night trying to find the mythical delete from internet button that many before him have sought out so desperately. At 7:25 P.M. on Saturday, Grunwald offered his opinion on how the United States should solve the problem of Julian Assange and his antagonizing position toward the U.S. Here's the tweet:Looking beyond the fact that Julian Assange, founder of Wikileaks and Australian citizen, has never been convicted (or charged) with a crime under United States law, Grunwald's use of the phrase "take out" more appropriately describes a Mafia-style hit...

Putin talks NSA, Syria, Iran, and Drones in Exclusive Video

Why isn't Obama outraged about a drone war based on profiling?President Barack Obama surprised the White House press corps on Friday when he preempted the normal daily briefing to offer his unscripted ideas on the Trayvon Martin case. Obama departed from his usual reluctance to talk publicly about his personal experience with racial bias, reminding viewers that African-American men -- including him, before he became a senator -- experience prejudice based only on their appearance, not their personality or behavior. He added that the African-American community was interpreting the outcome of the case through a "set of experiences and a...

ADDIS ABABA, Ethiopia (AP) - U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry straddled the diplomatic boundary this weekend between presenting the best face of America and a misleading one. In a question-and-answer session with young Ethiopians on Sunday, Kerry exaggerated the U.S. record on climate change, appeared to conflate past U.S. policy on drones with President Barack Obama's new policy and gave an incomplete account of how he opposed the Iraq war. A day earlier, he struggled with economic data as well as the contents of his own department's terrorism blacklist. Here's a look at how some of his statements measured...