I want to add my $0.02 to the controversy over Avril Haines, who's serving on Biden's transition team. Some former Obama aides have sought to paint her as a voice of restraint & protecting civilians, citing her role in the 2013 Presidential Policy Guidance, aka the drone playbook

For example, here's what Samantha Power says about Haines' role in drafting the Presidential Policy Guidance (PPG) in this piece. https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-proxy-war-over-joe-biden-adviser-avril-haines

And here's Brennan saying the thing that Obama officials love to say -- that he and Haines were doing all sorts of things behind the scenes to protect civilians and ward against abuse. Just take their word for it: They were on the force of restraint and caution.

But here's the thing: The PPG entrenched and normalized the drone war, which is premised on extrajudicial killing and turns the whole world into a US battlefield. Whatever its supposed safeguards to limit harm to civilians on paper, they didn't work.

Obama's drone war is responsible for tremendous civilian death. This US drone attack on a wedding in Yemen took place a year after the PPG was implemented. Groups like Airwars have documented civilian deaths due to US drone strikes under Obama. https://www.hrw.org/report/2014/02/19/wedding-became-funeral/us-drone-attack-marriage-procession-yemen#No

The Obama administration fought the release of the PPG for years and only did so in 2016 response to a lawsuit from the ACLU. Obama aides, meanwhile, have offered no evidence the PPG has reduced civilian deaths. We're supposed to take their word for it.

Haines claims she advocated restraint and protections for civilians, but provides no evidence. More importantly, she never publicly criticized the PPG, or publicly broke from the Obama administration on the drone war. She could have quit in protest. She could have gone public.

Avril Haines is responsible for effect of the policy she created, and this was a nightmarish policy of killing and traumatizing people unlucky to live beneath US drones. Vague assurances that she was advocating caution behind closed doors do not cut it.

It's true that Trump made things even worse by rolling back the scant protections for civilians that existed under Obama. But we mustn't let Trump's unconscionable acts give us amnesia about the horrors of the drone war as it existed under Obama.

Trump has pulled everything so far to the right that some of the architects of violent Obama foreign policy are now rehabilitating their images, or even being cast as progressive and humane on foreign policy. We've seen this especially with Samantha Power and Ben Rhodes.

We mustn't let the horrors of Obama's drone war go down the memory hole. And we must not give those responsible a free pass as they enter the Biden administration.