Sarah Seltzer: The "Evolution" of President Obama!

The "evolution"of President Obama from a "libera-constitutional law professor to a man who oversees extrajudicial killing abroad, sometimes ruthlessly, always in questionable legal territory: Mr. Obama has placed himself at the helm of a top secret "nominations" process to designate terrorists for kill or capture, of which the capture part has become largely theoretical. He had vowed to align the fight against Al Qaeda with American values, the chart, introducing people whose deaths he might soon be asked to order, underscored just what a moral and legal conundrum this could be. Mr. Obama is the liberal law professor who campaigned against the Iraq war and torture, and then insisted on approving every new name on an expanding "kill list," poring over terrorist suspects' biographies on what one official calls the macabre "baseball cards" of an unconventional war. When a rare opportunity for a drone-strike at a top terrorist arises, but his family is with him, it is the president who has reserved to himself the final moral calculation. The officials interviewed by the Times' reporters, dozens of them, describe a paradoxical leader who shunned the legislative deal-making required to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba, but approves lethal action without hand-wringing. While he was adamant about narrowing the fight and improving relations with the Muslim world, he has followed the metastasizing enemy into new and dangerous lands. When he applies his lawyering skills to counter-terrorism, it is usually to enable, not constrain, his ferocious campaign against Al Qaeda, even when it comes to killing an American cleric in Yemen, a decision that Obama told colleagues was "an easy one." As the ACLU reminds us in cases like this, if we can't summon up outrage here, imagine a president Romney with these kinds of powers.