Did Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama Wage Drone War Illegally As U.S. President?

In 2009, the Norwegian Nobel Committed awarded a "Nobel Peace Prize" worth over $900,000 to a  Democratic Party politician named Barack Obama. Yet during the 8 years that Obama occupied the U.S. power elite's White House oval office in Washington, D.C. he apparently ordered or sanctioned drone war attacks on people in foreign countries that sometimes killed civilians. As a New York Times national security correspondent named Mark Mazzetti recalled in his 2013 book The Way Of The Knife: The CIA, a Secret Army, and a War at the Ends of the Earth:

"...America has pursued its enemies using killer robots and special-operation troops...The foundations of the secret wars were laid by a conservative Republican president and embraced by a liberal Democratic one who became enamored of what he had inherited. President Barack Obama came to see it as an alternative to the messy, costly wars...It has...turned the American president into the final arbiter of whether specific people in far-off lands live or die...It is now easier for the United States to carry out killing operations at the ends of the earth than at any other time in its history...

"...Obama's desire to manage aspects of the targeted-killing program directly from the White House gave [former CIA official John] Brennan a role unique in the history of American government: one part executioner, one part chief confessor to the president, one part public spokesman sent out to justify the Obama doctrine of killing off...enemies in remote parts of the world...Obama, Brennan, and other senior members of the new administration would come to rely on targeted killing...No prominent member of President Obama's own party had criticized drone strikes...The meetings over two days at Langley were the first sign that President Obama planned to rely on the CIA and Joint Special Operations Command in ways that not even George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had...

"...During his first year in office, President Obama ordered a review of the roughly one dozen cover-action programs that CIA was carrying out at the time, from the drone strikes to a campaign to sabotage Iran's nuclear work...The summer 2009 meetings effectively rubber-stamped all of the CIA's secret ventures...By the time a `principals committee' meeting was scheduled for the fall, when President Obama's top national security advisers would make final decisions on the covert-action programs, not one of them was under consideration for cancellation...The Obama administration approved every one of the covert-action programs that had been handed down by President Bush...

"Even as the Obama administration discussed the future of the CIA's covert-action programs, there was no thought about ending the targeted-killing efforts. In the early months of the administration, National Security Adviser James Jones led a project to compile a centralized `kill list'...The American strikes in Yemen would claim more civilian casualties than...operatives affiliated with al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula.

"The first American strike came on December 17, 2009...Obama approved the operation. The next day...several Tomahawk cruise missiles slammed into the desert camp in Abyan...Wideos taken by locals at the camp revealed missile fragments with American markings and also proved that the Tomahawk missiles had been topped with cluster bombs...Most of the dead were civilians, and bloody images of dead women and children went viral on YouTube...

"The CIA had approval from the White House to carry out missile strikes in Pakistan even when CIA targeters weren't certain about exactly who it was they were killing...In an area of known militant activity, all military-aged males were considered to be enemy fighters. Therefore, anyone who was killed in a drone strike there was categorized as a `combatant.'...On March 17, 2011...CIA drones attacked a tribal council meeting in the village of Datta Khey, in North Waziristan, killing dozens of men...Just as lawyers for President Bush had redefined torture to permit extreme interrogations by the CIA and the military, so had lawyers for President Obama given...secret agencies latitude to carry out extensive killing operations...

"Throughout the...presidential election season of 2012, President Obama frequently alluded to targeted killings as a sign of his toughness...Targeted killings have made the CIA the indispensable agency for the Obama administration..."