Fair enough. But if the goal is to change policy it’s the wrong tactic to take.
This is misleading. You’d link says of 705 people identified 295 were linked to terrorist groups. That’s nearly 50 percent. Your making the assumption that the US doesn’t have any clue who their shooting at because Pakistan hasn’t positively identified all the bodies yet.
Where is there a culture “based on terrorism?”
I guess you studied a different World War II than I did. The WWII that I was taught about was the most inhumane and savage war ever fought in recorded history, and far more civilians were killed than soldiers.
You think positive identification might possibly come before shooting ? 
But you’re right, I did the math using the total body count rather than the ID’d count - not that there’d be much to ID in many cases. Still, considering the drone campaign is sold upon the whole “pinpoint, clean, targeted, whizbang intel, only upon imminent threat gathered with space age technology” angle, it’s hard to qualify a 60% civilian death rate as anything like success. (41% is not “nearly 50%” dude).
That makes it impossible for anyone to verify the claims. This isn’t debate-worthy evidence, only “FOAF” second- or third-hand claims.
Also, the claims are so extreme, I simply do not believe them. The drone program has numerous faults, but targets are not chosen “randomly” as you have claimed.
If they’ve taken over entire cities and are killing blacks and Jews in large numbers? If they kill anyone who opposes them? If they’re raping women and destroying property? If tens of thousands have fled the city to get away from their predation? Yes, please: attack these bastards with modern weapons of warfare. Defeat them, whatever it takes.
And yet now we are terrorizing people with drones. That’s collaborating with the enemy!
Double unverified. Dude with boots on the ground like to tell tall tales and dont really have good Intel. And then we’d have to believe you.
For those who strongly believe that American drones are perpetuating a systematic war crime (or something near to it) for killing large numbers of civilians, and relatively few combatants, I’m very curious to know what your view of Obama’s role in all this is.
Do you think Obama is personally involved in setting the policies that prioritize killing of civilians for very little military purpose?
Do you think Obama is personally involved in drone policy and seeks to limit civilian deaths, but he is unable to control his subordinates who are carrying out these missions?
Do you think Obama is generally unaware/uncaring of what you think is going on with the reports of large numbers of civilian casualties?
Do you think Obama knows that the civilian toll is much higher than the Government reported, but he has approved a policy to lie about the number of deaths?
Do you think that Obama believes that the civilian toll is generally in accordance with the Government estimates, but he’s being duped by subordinates who know the toll is much higher, but they are lying to him?
Any other comments on whether Obama knows what is “really happening” and approves of it and is willing to lie to continue the program; or maybe he’s being kept in the dark and being lied to, so his perception of the situation is at odds with “reality,” or any other thoughts along these lines?
+1
Absolutely agree.
Well, do you have any clue about how the drone operations are executed?
Do you just assume that every strike is corrobarated from intelligence on the ground or might there also be sort of “snap decisions” based on what the operators interpret from the monitor images?
It’s this. Or do you think it’s a coincidence that Obama has used the Espionage Act of 1917 to prosecute more whistleblowers than every other President combined?
I have no idea what the connection is.
So if you believe Obama is simply lying about the numbers of civilian casualties, does that imply that you think Obama supports killing innocent people in a mostly random fashion? Why do you think that is? For example, does he simply not like Muslims? Does he believe it is morally just to kill, say, 50 civilians in order to take out 1 terrorist leader?
I don’t know…do you? There is a procedure that the drone operators are supposed to go through, and those procedures AND the strikes are reviewed, IIRC, monthly by Congress. Even ‘snap decisions’ have to go through a process and be authorized, and it’s not the operators who make those decisions.
Same as, basically, air strikes using other resources…the pilots don’t give the authorization to fire, they GET the authorization to fire from higher authority, and the missions and strike are reviewed afterwards.
I wish every soldier wore brightly colored uniforms, and we stood in ranks on an empty field and shot our muskets at each other. That would be the ideal solution. But that is not the world we live in.
The very notion of wars fought between states, under government control, by voluntary combatants who are distinctively identified as such, is as dead as the dodo. I would argue that type of warfare has been dead since WW2, but that’s not really relevant. People who argue about targeted airstrikes and network-centric warfare are oblivious to the fact that they type of warfare they imagine - conventional, symmetric warfare - is obsolete. Our laws and our morals have not yet caught up to the new reality.
So when I hear someone whining about how drone strikes are “crimes” or “immoral,” I imagine the first time a mounted knight got shot by a firearm and started crying about how “immoral” it was. The graveyards of history are littered with armies who stuck to their traditional ideas of what ethical and moral warfare was supposed to be, even after the evolution of tactics and technology rendered their morality obsolete.
The fact of the matter is that morality is irrelevant. This is reality, whether you like it or not, and we must adapt to the new reality of what war has evolved to be.
Yes, I have also read Sun Tzu. And that argument is still silly.
We do recognize civil rights in our own country, and have different parameters and rules of engagement here. What’s going on is the same old imperialist nonsense we’ve seen for decades. Libya, Yemen, Afghanistan, etc. don’t really count as civilized countries in our minds. A rural area is out of sight, out of mind for many. “Arabs” (or Pashtun for that matter) are seen as the enemy by the constituents back in the USA. So an Arab in rural Yemen, for example, doesn’t get to be safe from attacks by foreign powers.
That’s why we just attack them. Has nothing to do with the terrorist types in those areas, we just attack them because they aren’t ‘civilized countries in our minds’, and because…IMPERIALISM!
snort Good grief, it’s funny that you actually believe this stuff. It must be so comforting to you to have such an uncomplicated, simplistic and black and white world view.
America is the hope of the Earth and the leader of the world. No, America is not committing so-called “war crimes.” There comes a point where sometimes yes, just as leaders, like POTUS, PMs, etc. get immunity in one country, so should America in the world.
Good God, that’s just as absurd going the other way! America gets “immunity” from war crimes? Not only no, but hell no! We have done horrible wrong things – Abu Ghraib will forever remain a stain on our national conscience, and some of us still remember My Lai – and we must be held just as responsible as any other nation.
We aren’t “the hope of the world,” just a slightly better-than-average actor on the world stage.
Not even sure what you are trying to say here, but if it’s that the US should be immune from war crimes, I totally disagree. WE have internal methods of determining what is a ‘war crime’, and our armed forces personnel and the command staffs and even elected and appointed official are and should be accountable to them. Internationally, it’s a bit more murky, since ‘international law’ itself is so murky and corrupt in a lot of cases, and there is no enforcement mechanism, but the treaties that the US is a signatory on we are and should honor.
The trouble with these discussions is that often people have double standards (i.e. stuff that the US does is often ultra criticized while stuff other countries are doing is handwaved), and often actually have no idea what an actual, honest to the gods ‘war crime’ even IS. They are also unable to grasp that the US has things like the UCMJ and internal auditing of illegal military actions, as well as that press thing that eventually outs infractions that the military might try and white wash or cover up. Our drone strike programs is NOT a ‘war crime’ except in the gut feelings of folks like the OP. The US gives a lot of thought, and spends a lot of money on trying to mitigate, to the greatest extent possible, collateral civilian causalities. There is oversight (bipartisan as well as in conjunction with our various allies in theater) of what we do in the field. One just has to look at some of the details about Russia’s air strikes to see the difference…and Russia is probably the next best combat capable potential advisory to the US on the planet (funny we didn’t see any threads on Russian ‘war crimes’ :p). Despite the care the US takes in it’s military operations, it’s true that mistakes happen…and when you are talking about weapons as deadly as the things we have today, that means people are going to die.
And, of course, the folks who are fighting against the US and it’s allies in these places kind of know this…that’s why they fight where and how they fight, knowing and accepting (even hoping for) mistakes to happen and innocents to be killed. After all, if they are willing to strap bombs to themselves and kill a bunch of innocent civilians, why would they balk at fighting where it would force us to do so trying to get at them??