By: Kevin Gosztola Tuesday September 11, 2012 12:42 pm

President Obama at 2012 DNC convention in Charlotte (Photo by Scout Tufankjian for Obama for America)

Michael Hayden, former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director under President George W. Bush, delivered a speech yesterday where he outlined the ways that President Barack Obama has managed a “practical consensus,” which has fostered “powerful continuity between two vastly different presidents”—himself and his predecessor, Bush.

At the University of Michigan last Friday, according to Wired, he said, “Obama came to embrace Bush’s positions. Both Bush and Obama said the country was at war. The enemy was al-Qaida. The war was global in nature. And the United States would have to take the fight to the enemy, wherever it may be.”

Hayden noted “targeted killings” had “increased under Obama.” They had gone up because he closed CIA “black site” prisons and ended torture of detainees. Capturing terror suspects for imprisonment became “politically dangerous,” so Obama took another route: he just decided to kill them all. (Of which, Hayden said: “I don’t morally oppose that.”)

The former CIA director highlighted Obama’s failure to close Guantanamo, the administration’s invoking of the state secrets privilege in “war on terror” cases and supporting the continued legalization of the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program through the reauthorization of the FISA Amendments Act. He personally thanked Obama for invoking state secrets because in some of the cases he had been named as a defendant.

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http://dissenter.firedoglake.com/2012/09/11/more-killing-in-obamas-...