30 Bazillion New Militants Killed

On twitter, Glenn Greenwald links to a reader who points to the fundamental issue with the Obama Administration's decision to label all adult men killed by a strike "militants":

Isn’t the presumption that everyone in the so-called strike zone is a "militant" particularly egregious given past accusations that our enemies intentionally embed themselves in civilian populations? Haven’t we condemned our enemies in the past precisely because they’ve surrounded themselves with civilians? And now we’re justifying our crowd-killing strikes on the grounds that anyone close to a militant must himself be a militant?

Well said.