Here is an excerpt from President Barack Obama's remarks on Sunday in Chicago after meeting with Afghan President Hamid Karzai:

"I just want to stress my appreciation for the hard work that President Karzai has done. I think he recognizes the enormous sacrifices that have been made by the American people & most profoundly, by American troops, as well as the troops of our other coalition partners. We recognize the hardship that the Afghan people have been through during these many, many years of war. Both of us recognize that we still have a lot of work to do & there will be great challenges ahead. The loss of life continues in Afghanistan; there will be hard days ahead. But we're confident that we are on the right track & what this NATO Summit reflects is that the world is behind the strategy that we've laid out."

Yeah, right .....

The lessons Obama has learned in Afghanistan have been absolutely crucial to shaping his presidency. Fatigue & frustration with the war have defined the strategies his administration has adopted to guide how America intervenes in the world's messiest conflicts. Out of the experience emerged Obama's "light footprint" strategy, in which the US strikes from a distance but does not engage in years-long, enervating occupations.

Whilst Obama's wife swans around Chicago with the wives of the visiting NATO delegates in tow, prattling-on about her 'struggling' childhood, we shouldn't forget that the same Obama doctrine has informed US thinking about how to deal with the challenges such as Libya, Syria & a nuclear Iran, whilst also driving the US administration down an increasingly slippery slope of greater & more frequent war crimes, courtesy of its drone program, the use of which the Obama Administration has dramatically ramped up in secret.

Obama refused to even admit that the US was engaged in drone strikes in Pakistan until January this year, by which time, according to one estimate, between 1800 & 2800 people had been killed, nearly all of them since 2008. It was less than a month ago that the administration even acknowledged its regular use of drones to assassinate 'alleged' terrorists.

The admission had no detail about the extent of the use of drones or the number of innocent people estimated to have been killed in the course of drone strikes. One estimate by the Brookings Institution suggests 10 civilians are killed for every militant killed via drone strike. But even on lowball estimates, hundreds of civilians have been killed by Obama's drone program with no disclosure or public debate. A lawyer representing Pakistani victims of drone strikes has been denied entry to the United States.

Among those killed, significantly, have been Americans. Fundamentalist cleric & US citizen Anwar al-Awlaki was assassinated in a drone strike in Yemen in October that also killed another American citizen (admitted by US officials to have been "collateral"); three weeks later his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, born in Denver, was slaughtered in another strike. The boy was, an unnamed US official admitted, "in the wrong place at the wrong time". The extra-judicial killing of Americans by their own government led to the revelation of a secret panel that determines drone targets.

US government agencies are now opening up US domestic airspace so that bigger drones can be used to spy on Americans, bringing the land of the free another step closer to a permanent surveillance state.

Also last week, a lawyer for Obama's Justice Department advanced a chilling new argument in hearings over the Administration's attempt to force New York Times journalist James Risen to give evidence against a former CIA agent charged with leaking classified material. The DoJ argued that the journalist had no privilege in relation to the leak because it was a criminal offence. If adopted, such an approach would exercise a chilling effect on all but officially sourced "leaks" by removing any legal protection for journalists.

This prosecution of Jeffrey Sterling, for revealing details of a bungled operation against Iran's nuclear program, is part of the Administration's war on whistleblowers, in which it has prosecuted twice as many whistleblowers for espionage as all previous administrations in US history, as well as harassing others such as Thomas Drake, the NSA employee who revealed the astonishing billion-dollar stuff-up involving SAIC. And the trial of alleged WikiLeaks whistleblower Bradley Manning only started in late 2011 after Manning had been subjected to a series of abusive detention practices by the US military.

The Obama Administration has ridden roughshod over free speech in several instances, including the case of Tarek Mehanna, an American Muslim fundamentalist who was sentenced to more than 17 years in prison for a variety of terrorism-related offences in April. But among the offences for which he was convicted was that of "providing material support to terrorists" by translating a Saudi book on jihad & sharing jihadi videos.

There is also the Administration's ongoing war on Julian Assange & WikiLeaks, encompassing not merely an international financial blockade but a secret grand jury process aimed at the "high-tech terrorist" Assange, who by the Administration's own admission had embarrassed but caused no material damage to US interests.

Obama also signed into law the remarkable NDAA, which purports to enable the US military to indefinitely detain anyone, either within or outside the US, who provides "substantial support" for terrorists or those associated with terrorists, without defining what substantial support equates to. Several prominent journalists have complained of having to curtail their reporting for fear of breaching the NDAA. Last week a Federal Court judge ruled that section of the NDAA unconstitutional.

All this is in addition to Obama's continuation of warrantless surveillance, its novel interpretation of key parts of the renewed Patriot Act & the National Security Agency's interception and storage of every piece of internet and telecommunications data produced by US citizens.

In each case, the Obama Administration has gone beyond, & often well beyond, the Bush Administration, which was vilified by progressives for using the War on Terror to dramatically increase government powers, hold people indefinitely & impose warrantless surveillance. Obama, however, has been able to get away with upping the tempo of US government attacks on basic rights from the level under Bush with minimal mainstream criticism, even from Republicans otherwise content to attack Obama as a socialist hell-bent on imposing government control over every aspect of American lives. Only Ron Paul among the Republican presidential field stood up in opposition to an otherwise bipartisan agenda of eroding basic rights.

This points to a key failure, & double standard, on the part of US progressives who have failed to speak up about Obama's agenda of surveillance & censorship.