Over at Crooked Timber, Chris Bertram takes a good hard look at American drone warfare. He concludes:

Fortunately, I’m not an American citizen, so I don’t have a moral decision to take about whether to vote for Obama or not this year. If I were, I don’t think it would be an easy decision to take. Romney is clearly remarkably close in political belief to Obama, but will be beholden to the crazy Republican right, as Obama is not. That provides people with a reason to vote for Obama. But the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner doesn’t deserve the vote of anyone who cares about human rights, even if, pragmatically they might feel they have to give it to him.

It would be difficult to say that Bertram is wrong about this, just as it would be difficult to argue with Glenn Greenwald, who has been shouting about “the apparent willingness of the US drone campaign to attack events where non-combatants will certainly be present, such as funerals and to try to evade moral and legal responsibility by redefining ‘combatant’ to include any military-age male in a strike zone.”

So I’m not arguing, just posting Bertram’s entirely worthy conclusion with links to Greenwald.

When it comes to human rights abroad, the American government continues to make terrible, terrible decisions — regardless, it seems, of who happens to occupy the White House.