Drone Drone Drone Americans.....

[Genx87]

This policy is truely cutting off your nose to spite your face. Look at all these people cheer leading the killing of american citizens because their govt told them they bad people. Ask for the evidence? That is classified. I suspect in 50 years when the govt expand this to killing citizens within country these people will be up in arms. How did this happen? Where is our due process?

But I guess we should just have better fathers, or don't speak out against an unjust war. Wait a minute. The many of the same people cheer leading this were vocal opponents of our policy in Iraq? The drones are in the air. Just don't leave the country.

 

[Genx87]

This administration is very transparent, when compared with the last administration.
Water-boarding, rendition, false intelligence used to go to war, paid hacks to go on tv news shows, etc, etc.....
I have no problem with drone strikes. Don't want to be hit with a drone strike, don't hang around with terrorists.
Drone strikes are not equivalent to a full-scale war, and don't produce tens of thousands of innocent victims.

Yeah, dont drink the koolaid. Why am I not surprised you are full steam ahead with our president being judge and executioner of your fellow citizen?

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics...ations-abject-failure-on-transparency/252387/

http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2014/3/27/barack_obama_the_least_transparent_president

He also used the espionage act more than all the presidents combined.

https://www.aclu.org/blog/free-speech/leak-prosecutions-obama-takes-it-11-or-should-we-say-526

Then the cooling effect of the media then they target them because they are digging too deeply into the terrible programs they are running.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...-coverage-Operation-Fast-Furious-scandal.html

Wake the fuck up.

 

[zinfamous]

No it isn't that simple. If a US citizen in Yemen and I am travelling in a vehicle with a known senior level terrorist and the vehicle gets destroyed by a Hellfire and I am killed. Sorry, I am not going to get worked up about that.

However if a US citizen in Pakistan and travelling with my family with no known terrorist ties and a US drone strike destroys the vehicle and kills the US citizen then I have concerns.

Do you see the difference????? Make sure you read carefully.

It is now published knowledge that the US qualifications for approving targets during an active operation is "male of fighting age" spotted within the designated region.

That, added to the fact that operatives hiding out in these villages are often hiding in the property of innocents, essentially holding them as hostages.

Do you remember why Clinton didn't kill Bin Laden with the air strike when he had the chance?

This.

The rules of engagement/targeting have effectively changed.

 

[unokitty]

Do you remember why Clinton didn't kill Bin Laden with the air strike when he had the chance?

In fact, Clinton tried, and failed, to kill Bin Laden.

Aug 98, Clinton sent 75 Cruise Missiles into Afghanistan in an attempt to kill Bin Laden. The only confirmed death in the strikes was Egyptian-Canadian Amr Hamed. Osama bin Laden jokingly told militants at the al-Jihad merger that only a few camels and chickens had died.

Looking in the National Security Archives, you'll find an article titled: 1998 Missile Strikes on Bin Laden May Have Backfired

The August 20, 1998, retaliatory cruise missile strikes did little to help solve the problem posed by bin Laden and may ultimately prove to have done more harm than good...

A State Department cable argues that although the August missile strikes were designed to provide the Taliban with overwhelming reason to surrender bin Laden, the military action may have sharpened Afghan animosity towards Washington and even strengthened the Taliban-al-Qaeda alliance...

The Archives make a few more points:
*"The attack provoked a new round of terrorist bombing plots."
*Bin Laden received a good deal of publicity and "appeared to many as an underdog standing firm in the face of bullying aggression."

It wasn't the rules of engagement that kept Clinton from killing Bin Laden. It was more Clinton's failure to accomplish the mission despite throwing 75 million dollars worth of missiles at Bin Laden.

That said, neither using Tomahawk missiles nor using Reaper drones to play whack a mole with terrorists strike this old dog soldier as being likely to bring a positive resolution to the current situation.

Uno

 

[Newell Steamer]

These were accidents; you know, like all the innocent people killed in Iraq and Palestine when America and Israel fights terrorism.

 

[pcgeek11]

Yet another impeachable offense. Due process is guaranteed by the constitution.

No it isn't... Don't hang out with terrorist or in high risk countries that are at war.

 

[zinfamous]

No it isn't... Don't hang out with terrorist

well, sucks for those guys if they get held hostage then, yeah?

or in high risk countries that are at war.

are you intentionally stupid, or were you just born that way?

Did you have any choice over where you were born, what life and what culture you were born to?

idiot.

 

[pcgeek11]

well, sucks for those guys if they get held hostage then, yeah?




are you intentionally stupid, or were you just born that way?

Did you have any choice over where you were born, what life and what culture you were born to?

idiot.

Yes it does suck for those guys. Never said it didn't.

Life isn't fair. Get over it. Look what life did to you.

When your country hides terrorist and does nothing to stop them... That countries innocents pay the price.

What I am specifically talking about is killing US Citizens with drones. If they are stupid enough to go to those war torn areas, they accept the risk of getting kidnapped, killed on their own accord.

 

[Subyman]

Should we ask the terrorists nicely not to mingle with civilians so we can avoid collateral damage?

That has nothing to do with what I said.

 

[unokitty]

Should we ask the terrorists nicely not to mingle with civilians so we can avoid collateral damage?

Arguably a more appropriate question would be are drone strikes productive for anyone other than the defense contractors and politicians that profit from them?

Retired four-star Marine General James Cartwright, ... has spoken out forcefully against the unchecked use of drones. According to the general, who’s been a long-time skeptic of the war in Afghanistan, drones cause anger, bitterness and resentment among Muslim populations targeted in the attacks, and he suggested that their use will cause “blowback,” i.e., attacks against the United States.

How have six years of drone warfare worked in Yemen? What impact have they had on ISIS? Seems that every six weeks we kill a 'high ranking terrorist leader' in Pakistan. Funny though, they haven't run out of leaders yet...

Only clear winners I see are the defense contractors and politicians both of whom profit from producing drones.

High body count != victory

Uno

 

[davmat787]

This administration is very transparent, when compared with the last administration.
Water-boarding, rendition, false intelligence used to go to war, paid hacks to go on tv news shows, etc, etc.....
I have no problem with drone strikes. Don't want to be hit with a drone strike, don't hang around with terrorists.
Drone strikes are not equivalent to a full-scale war, and don't produce tens of thousands of innocent victims.

Shouldn't you be out catching up on your vaccine schedules?

 

[Matt1970]

This administration is very transparent, when compared with the last administration.
Water-boarding, rendition, false intelligence used to go to war, paid hacks to go on tv news shows, etc, etc.....
I have no problem with drone strikes. Don't want to be hit with a drone strike, don't hang around with terrorists.
Drone strikes are not equivalent to a full-scale war, and don't produce tens of thousands of innocent victims.

Just as long as someone has done worse, all is forgiven.

 

[kage69]

Sure, ok, let's round up the entire admin and put them on trial!


But, as a point of order, I guess we'll first need to attend to the all the previous admins who were in office when American citizens were killed by the state without being able to exercise their Constitutional rights and due process. The hostage situations where the suspect was shot before being able to kill hostages, the suicide by cop incidents, the shoot outs which produced perp fatalities, all of these represent a long history of Americans dying at the hands of the government without ever getting near a courtroom. Where is the outrage guys? If anything I suppose they'd even be more egregious as they occurred within our borders, kinda removes the excuses of inaccessibility regarding apprehension, no?

I think it comes down to one thing, and if you agree with it or not. Do you believe an American citizen(who has repudiated and warred against America btw)'s right to a day in court supersedes other Americans having any rights, by virtue of being killed? As a general rule, my answer to that is NO.

My beef with Obama on this is regarding oversight, not the fundamental issue of giving the lives of law abiding citizens their due weight.

 

[Brovane]

Arguably a more appropriate question would be are drone strikes productive for anyone other than the defense contractors and politicians that profit from them?



How have six years of drone warfare worked in Yemen? What impact have they had on ISIS? Seems that every six weeks we kill a 'high ranking terrorist leader' in Pakistan. Funny though, they haven't run out of leaders yet...

Only clear winners I see are the defense contractors and politicians both of whom profit from producing drones.

High body count != victory

Uno

Here is a paper discussing such a question.

https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/esocweb/ESOC%20website%20publications/JS_DronesTerrorism.pdf

 

[Brovane]

That has nothing to do with what I said.

Well how else do you want to deal with terrorists that hide among civilians?

Here is a better definition.

Collateral damage is damage to things that are incidental to the intended target. It is frequently used as a military term where non-combatants are accidentally or unintentionally killed or wounded and/or non-combatant property damaged as result of the attack on legitimate enemy targets.

 

[rudeguy]

Well how else do you want to deal with terrorists that hide among civilians?

Here is a better definition.

It is not "accidentally or unintended" if the government knows there are people other than the bad guy in the vehicle. Also your point ignores the fact that the government knew at least one of these guys were American.

If I see a guy holding up a gas station and go to shoot him but hit a kid instead, that is collateral damage. It was unintended. If I see a guy holding up a gas station and blow up the whole gas station with innocent people inside and say I was just trying to kill the bad guy, that is murder.

 

[unokitty]

Here is a paper discussing such a question.

https://webspace.princeton.edu/users/esocweb/ESOC%20website%20publications/JS_DronesTerrorism.pdf

A RAND Corporation paper?

But body counts were far from the only metric America used. Beginning in 1965, USAID, the CIA, and the RAND Corporation developed a tool called the Hamlet Evaluation Survey (HES) to assess, among other things, the degree to which a given community was under Saigon government or Communist control...

But by 1967 American officers were complaining that the HES data were hopelessly optimistic. Trying to get villagers embroiled in a civil war to tell surveyors what they really thought, rather than whatever they thought would keep officials (on both sides) off their backs, was a quixotic endeavour. The pressure to generate encouraging results, both for American officials and for the Vietnamese staff who administered the surveys, was intense. When large areas of the countryside that had been listed as government-controlled suddenly rose up during the Tet Offensive in January 1968, the HES suffered a huge blow in credibility, and it has gone down in popular history as one of those ridiculous gobbledygook programmes that underline the stupidity of American thinking during the war.

If you believe the RAND corporation, TET 68 couldn't possibly have happened... all those hamlets were already pacified. RAND corp had the metrics. Or as McNamara would say "...Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war."

Still losing the war in Viet Nam didn't keep defense contractors from making huge profits...

RAND can generate whatever drone metrics they want. The fact is that drones didn't win in Yemen. Didn't stop ISIS. And didn't stop the terrorists in Pakistan.

One thing is true though. Drones have made defense contractors very rich. And the money they spend on political campaign contributions and lobbying politicians has produced an excellent ROI for them... Not to mention being a windfall for the politicians.

As for winning the war in Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, or where ever, as McNamara used to say "...Every quantitative measurement we have shows we are winning this war."

Uno