Charlie Pierce had some thoughts on this subject:

I'm sure we will soon hear from some people that the fact that the president signed the new National Defense Authorization Act today, despite a previous promise to veto the measure if provisions that prevented him from closing the prison camp at Guantanamo Bay were included, because he has a "long game" strategy designed to "put the Republicans in a corner." He also endorsed, by his signature, the principle embodied in the act that Americans can be detained indefinitely without probable cause on the suspicion of "supporting" terrorism which, of course, will mean whatever the executive department or the Commander In Chief -- Trumpets, please -- decide that it means.

[snip]

Yes, Congress has partly tied his hands, and it has done so by making it harder for him to close Gitmo down. But, even against that, the president argues for the supremacy of the executive branch in such matters. That, coupled with a veto warning that was as empty as a toddler's threat to run away from home, vitiates any case the president might choose to make that what he really wants to do is to protect the Bill Of Rights. The presidency has been allowed to become a dangerous beast over a number of decades, to the point where anyone who seeks it can rightly be presumed to have at least the spark of lawless authoritarianism in him. And, if that spark is there, the presidency will seek it out and bring it to flame. This president is no different.

[snip]

This is what you get when you don't listen to old Ike's warning, when you let the Kennedys run amuck concerning Castro, when you let Lyndon fake an incident in the Tonkin Gulf, when you impeach Nixon over a burglary and not the illegal  bombing of Cambodia, when you let everyone skate on Iran-Contra, when you impeach one president over a blowjob but let another one slide for lying the country into a war, for abrogating treaties and violating international law regarding torture, when you let a sociopath like Richard Cheney anywhere near the levers of power, and when you let a president decide which American lives or dies by standards he declines to share with the rest of us. This is what you get. Barack Obama didn't sell out the Bill Of Rights today because he's Barack Obama. Barack Obama sold out the Bill Of Rights today because he's the president of the United States, and that's now part of the damn job description.

When we murder innocent folks by drone, for example, our enemies are just as "strengthened," if not more so.
 

is there a moral difference, between "collateral damage by unmanned drone", vs "collateral damage by ground troops, artillery, ship-to-shore fire, manned bombers/fighters, or infantry/seal teams? last i checked, dead is, well, dead, regardless of you come to be that way.

this whole "killing civilians by accident, by unmanned drones, is immoral" argument strikes me as ludicrous, at best. wars are not fought by the marquess of queensbury rules, and never have been. to argue that killing your enemy, by unmanned drone, with the same (or more or less, i don't know) probability of accidentally killing unarmed civilians, is somehow less moral than killing them by other means, strikes me, and always has as, sophomoric.

The signing of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2013 Wednesday puts paid to the predictions by the administration's liberal and pseudo-left supporters that Obama, freed of re-election concerns, would pursue a more "progressive" political course in his second term. As in 2012, this legislation enshrines a sweeping assault on core constitutional principles and democratic rights.

The legislation's provisions underscore the link between the eruption of American militarism abroad and the lurch toward police-state measures at home.