New book claims Obama once said he's 'really good at killing people'

A new book, by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann, reportedly states that the US President Barack Obama had once told his aides that he's 'really good at killing people', while discussing drone strikes.

The book titled, Double Down chronicles the 2012 presidential election and narrates about the war tactics used by the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize winner's administration.

According to stuff.co.nz, Obama oversaw the 2009 surge in Afghanistan, 145 Predator drone strikes in NATO's 2011 Libya operations, the May 2012 raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and drone strikes that killed leader of the Pakistani Taliban leader and a senior member of the Somali-based militant group al-Shabab this week.

In Obama's administration, there have been 326 drone strikes in Pakistan, 93 in Yemen, and several in Somalia, compared to a total of 52 under former President George Bush.

The report further said that under Obama, the US drone operators began practising 'signature strikes', in which targets are chosen based on suspicious behaviour, 'double tap', in which same place is bombed in quick succession, among other tactics in which a lot of innocents lives have been lost as well.

One Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) operator, Jeremy Scahill, author of Dirty Wars: The World Is A Battlefield, said that Obama will go down in history as the president who legitimised and systematised a process by which the United States asserts the right to conduct assassination operations around the world, the report added.