The United Nations special rapporteur for counterterrorism will lead an inquiry into civilian deaths from US drone strikes around the world, to determine whether the strikes violate international human rights and humanitarian laws.

Greg Miller will shine a lighton the new American way of war for the next three days, with a multi-part series in the Washington Post on the kill list, the way in which terrorist suspects are selected for death from above by Predator drones. The goal here appears to be to codify the techniques into executive branch practice, for turnkey use by any current or future Administration.

You can argue that some of this has stopped, although the better way to put it is that we leave the dirty work to other countries these days. You cannot argue that this has not damaged US credibility around the world, and given those who want to deflect from their own human rights failings an easy out.

While Mitt Romney hid behind Barack Obama and displayed about as much independent thought as a college student who didn’t cram enough the night before the test and spent the whole time looking at his neighbor’s paper, his neighbor Barack Obama reflected so strongly the smoldering wreck that is this nation’s foreign policy consensus.

Today the US State Department pulled out all of their government personnel from Benghazi – essential personnel and non-essential alike. In the wake of the attack on the US consulate, they have determined the city too unsafe, even after residents drove militia groups operating in Benghazi from their bases. The FBI has still not reached the site of the consulate attack as part of their investigation.

As we learn more about the attack on the US consulate in Benghazi on September 11, it becomes harder and harder to ignore the probability that the militants involved were retaliating for a drone strike that took out a top al-Qaeda leader who happened to be Libyan.

Given the mysteries of the Benghazi attacks on the US consulate (not an embassy, and not an entity that was guarded by Marines, apparently), I’m going to step lively before attributing any Middle East incident to anything else in a direct through-line. But we do now that riots/protests/attacks are proliferating. Today they have spread to the US Embassy in Yemen and possibly Iran.

There are 15,000 media personnel in Charlotte at the Democratic National Convention. Some of that includes photographers, but any way you slice it, you have a substantial number of journalists. Not one of them has the fortitude to pull off what Ben Swann of Fox 19 Cincinnati did in an interview with President Obama.

The Republican National Convention in Tampa will be the first national political convention to be surveilled by unmanned drones, from the air and on the ground.

The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center on Constitutional Rights have sued the Obama Administration over the deaths of three US citizens as part of the still-classified Predator drone program. Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan and al-Awlkai’s son Abdulrahman were all assassinated in Yemen (Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan in the same attack), a fact that the Administration has acknowledged and even touted on various occasions. Because of their status as US citizens, the ACLU argues, they should have been afforded the Constitutional guarantee of due process, rather than an extrajudicial bombing strike.