OBAMA: END BUSH POLICIES OF RENDITION AND KILLING PAKISTANI VILLAGERS

I commend Barack Obama for coming out with a budget that does not try to hide the costs of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But I cannot understand why Obama allows CIA Chief Leon Panetta to claim that firing missiles into small villages in western Pakistan has been "successful." All the rockets do is build up animosity and hatred in the minds of ordinary Pakistanis for Americans and America. If the U.S. and Panetta think it is ethical and otherwise legal to kill 20 women and children if they aim at the one Taliban leader, they are morally blind and guilty of war crimes.

I also want Obama and Panetta to forcefully condemn rendition or extraordinary rendition. This is where the U.S. military or CIA captures a suspected terrorist in some foreign country and delivers him or her to a third country for purposes of harsh interrogation, otherwise known as "torture." So far Panetta and Obama seem to be signaling that the U.S. will continue this illegal and cruel practice.