Vincent Smothers and Barack Obama

Dear Mr. President,

In this week’s New Yorker, “The Hit Man’s Tale” profiles a bright, personable young man Vincent Smothers, of mixed parentage who grew up in the roughest part of a rough town, Detroit’s east side, but in a relatively stable family which instilled in him a strong work ethic, familial bonds and sense of duty. He neither smoked, drank to excess, nor did drugs, was an honors student in school and yet, somehow, became a for-hire contract-killer. By the age of 26 he had killed at least a dozen people, mostly drug dealers. His first killing, he said, “Emotionally, it didn’t affect me.” None of his others did either, not until his last hit: a Detroit cop hired him to kill his wife. Even before he pulled the trigger, Smothers said, “I thought about how wrong it was…” This time he killed a woman, someone he deemed an innocent; he had crossed a line and it upended his sense of who he was. He never considered himself a hit man. “Who has a list of people they want taken care of?” he said. “That doesn’t happen in real life.” But today is Kill List Tuesday and as I read this, I realized it may not happen in real life, but it does every Tuesday in the Situation Room of the White House. I wondered if, like Smothers, you will ever reach the place he reached, a place where, suddenly, you realize that what you do every Tuesday is as much a criminal act as what he did, killing mostly drug dealers, but also innocents, what the article calls “collateral damage.” You, of course, have others do the dirty work, people like Smothers who pull the triggers or fire the missiles, but you set it all in motion, finger who dies this week in a land far from our shores, people no one here ever heard of and who pose no imminent threat to us. Is this what caused your poor performance at the last debate? I wonder if today’s Kill List session will distract you again tonight or if, like Smothers, emotionally, it won’t affect you. In a NY Times article today, another green-on-blue attack, 2 Americans killed, a soldier and a “former Army officer,” i.e., a contractor/mercenary. Buried deep in the article, it mentions that Afghan officials condemned a weekend air strike that killed 3 children, ages 12, 10 and 8, 2 boys and a girl out gathering dung for the fire. The military claims all 3 were insurgents planting roadside bombs. What’s the difference, Mr. President, between you and Vincent Smothers, other than the fact that he doesn’t have a cadre of lawyers to justify what he did?