Sky Robots killing bad guys for freedom!!!

[chunksmediocrites]

So for a long time Obama and those in his administration refused to comment on drone strikes, let alone even acknowledge that the US drone program existed. You know, the drones used in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, Iran, Libya, Iraq...

So Obama recently, finally acknowledged the drone program. Great. But it has been pointed out many, many, many times that the drone strikes are a massive cause of anger towards the US, precisely because they have the same problems that our airstrikes almost always cause- civilian carnage. Without even getting into the whole Act of War thing, violation-of-sovereignty thing- we blow up groups of people in their homes, surrounded by their wife, children, parents, cousins, nieces- we blow up people in public locations with others walking by. We perform extra-judicial assassinations of US citizens and their families. We blow up those responding to the drone strikes. We blow up innocents via bad intel. And now we also target funerals to blow up with missiles from drones.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism:

The CIA’s drone campaign in Pakistan has killed dozens of civilians who had gone to help rescue victims or were attending funerals, an investigation by the Bureau for the Sunday Times has revealed.

The findings are published just days after President Obama claimed that the drone campaign in Pakistan was a ‘targeted, focused effort’ that ‘has not caused a huge number of civilian casualties.’

Speaking publicly for the first time on the controversial CIA drone strikes, Obama claimed last week they are used strictly to target terrorists, rejecting what he called ‘this perception we’re just sending in a whole bunch of strikes willy-nilly’.

‘Drones have not caused a huge number of civilian casualties’, he told a questioner at an on-line forum. ‘This is a targeted, focused effort at people who are on a list of active terrorists trying to go in and harm Americans’.

But research by the Bureau has found that since Obama took office three years ago, between 282 and 535 civilians have been credibly reported as killed including more than 60 children. A three month investigation including eye witness reports has found evidence that at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims. More than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners. The tactics have been condemned by leading legal experts.

Glenn Greenwald points out here the NYT providing anonymity for a "top Obama official" to denounce careful, painstakingly sourced, documented instances of the US committing these acts with our drones as a (paraphrasing) "misinformation campaign by elements who want al Qaeda to win." Here's the NYT article quote:

A senior American counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, questioned the report’s findings, saying “targeting decisions are the product of intensive intelligence collection and observation.” The official added: “One must wonder why an effort that has so carefully gone after terrorists who plot to kill civilians has been subjected to so much misinformation. Let’s be under no illusions — there are a number of elements who would like nothing more than to malign these efforts and help Al Qaeda succeed.”

Greenwald:

Note that the “senior counterrorism official” did not deny the findings, at least not in the quotes provided, but there are two lessons to take from this paragraph. First, at least according to some “senior” Obama official, those who report critically on the civilian-killing, rescuer-and-funeral-targeting American drone attacks (i.e., those who “malign these efforts”) are either supporters of or useful idiots for Al Qaeda; it sure is a good thing the Bush era is over when those who questioned the President’s national security policies were accused of helping the Terrorists. Second, if you’re a cowardly senior government official who wants to smear critics as Al Qaeda enablers or supporters, The New York Times will grant you anonymity to do it, all while violating multiple provisions of its own policy on anonymity adopted after its historically shameful performance in the run-up to the Iraq War:

That the drone attacks remain minor news notes, especially when used on civilians, for assassinations of US citizens without trial, first responders, and funerals is despicable. In any case I'm starting a thread to put updates and discuss. I think drones will be a big part of our future, in that many other nations are working on their own drones now, and drones are being used for law enforcement applications inside the US.

[godfry n. glad]

Let's get a picture in here, so people know what we're talking about.

Here's one with people for scale...one of the Border Patrol units, no less:





Creating entire squadrons of anonymous "desk murderers" to unleash weapons of destruction upon innocents half a world away, secure in the knowledge that they are safe and their victims will have no recourse....the very epitome of the "banality of evil."

[Goliath]

Whenever I hear about "drone bombers", I keep picturing a disaffected office worker sitting in a bombardier's chair on a B-52.

"Yeah...bombardier to pilot. Yeah, a bit to the North, I guess. Say, did Sally say something about donuts in the conference room earlier today? I wonder if there are any left..."

[chunksmediocrites]

Greg Miller, Washington Post:

The United States has begun launching drone strikes against suspected al-Qaeda operatives in Yemen under new authority approved by President Obama that allows the CIA and the military to fire even when the identity of those who could be killed is not known, U.S. officials said.

The policy shift marks a significant expansion of the clandestine drone war against an al-Qaeda affiliate that has seized large *pieces of territory in Yemen and is linked to a series of terrorist plots against the United States.

U.S. officials said that Obama approved the use of “signature” strikes this month and that the killing of an al-Qaeda operative near the border of Yemen’s Marib province this week was among the first attacks carried out under the new authority.

So this is the US attacking people in Yemen. Apparently it is okay to fire missiles and kill groups of people- whose identities are unknown- and you have a guess at what it is they are doing. In their country.

The expanded authority will allow the CIA and JSOC to fire on targets based solely on their intelligence “signatures” — patterns of behavior that are detected through signals intercepts, human sources and aerial surveillance, and that indicate the presence of an important operative or a plot against U.S. interests.

Until now, the administration had allowed strikes only against known terrorist leaders who appear on secret CIA and JSOC target lists and whose location can be confirmed.

Keep in mind those secret target lists included the names of people like Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen who the US government killed in Yemen, using a missile fired from a drone. The evidence against Anwar al-Awlaki? We don't know because the Obama Administration refused and spurned the idea of showing any evidence to our courts, let alone offering any evidence to the public. He was not charged or convicted of any crime. And then the US killed his teenage son- also a US citizen- in a drone strike a few weeks later.

And do you know what has been one of the biggest drivers of recruitment to al-Qaeda in Yemen? Drone strikes. Jeremy Scahill, one of the few US journalists to actually go to Yemen:

For years, the elite Joint Special Operations Command and the CIA had teams deployed inside Yemen that supported Yemeni forces and conducted unilateral operations, consisting mostly of cruise missile and drone attacks. Some of the unilateral strikes have killed their intended targets, such as the CIA attack on Awlaki. But others have killed civilians—at times, a lot of civilians. And many of these have been in Abyan and its neighboring province of Shebwa, both of which have recently seen a substantial rise of AQAP activity. President Obama’s first known authorization of a missile strike on Yemen, on December 17, 2009, killed more than forty Bedouins, many of them women and children, in the remote village of al Majala in Abyan. Another US strike, in May 2010, killed an important tribal leader and the deputy governor of Marib province, Jabir Shabwani, sparking mass anger at the United States and Saleh’s government. “I think these airstrikes were based on false intelligence from the regime, because that is the nature of the contractor,” Qahtan charges. “The contractor wants to create more work in return for earning more money.”

The October drone strike that killed Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, a US citizen, and his teenage cousin shocked and enraged Yemenis of all political stripes. “I firmly believe that the [military] operations implemented by the US performed a great service for Al Qaeda, because those operations gave Al Qaeda unprecedented local sympathy,” says Jamal, the Yemeni journalist. The strikes “have recruited thousands.” Yemeni tribesmen, he says, share one common goal with Al Qaeda, “which is revenge against the Americans, because those who were killed are the sons of the tribesmen, and the tribesmen never, ever give up on revenge.”

Missiles from above have made it possible for nations to excuse the kind of carnage and death of civilians that we would never allow troops on the ground to perform- in no way would we sanction soldiers killing everyone with machetes, or hand grenades, or assault rifles, or flamethrowers in a certain radius- men, women, and children- on the basis of vague, general suspicions. Not even in the midst of a full-scale war would we give that a pass. If it was performed on our citizens, we would pronounce it a massacre and a war crime.

But here we are, and it is ignored and dismissed, since there is no MSM afilliate in rural Yemen to document what has been done in our name. It is removed from us geographically and culturally and socially even- the people who strike and are stricken are nowhere near each other, not even line-of-site; it is clinical detachment of people pressing a button in a windowless, air-conditioned room far from the site of the place where people will be killed.

Greenwald covers this all in detail here, and concludes:

As usual, to the extent that most Democrats mention any of this, it will be to celebrate its political value: how it proves that Obama is so very Tough and Strong on national security. Because nothing exudes Strength — or the values of the Nobel Peace Prize — like continuously escalating secret wars and targeting people for death via remote-controlled aircraft from thousands of miles away without even knowing their names. The innocent corpses, the trampling on accountability and transparency, the ongoing fueling of Endless War, must not be permitted to interfere with the President’s re-election, so all of this is just best ignored, again.

[ZEZOZE]

it's a cowardly way to fight, but fitting for the gamer nation that deploys them...

to win you must defeat. to be number one you gotta number two on everybody else. but being number one is mentally draining and people are too tired to actually fight anymore and too wise from all the free speech to even want to sign up. so robots!

you must dominate and so you strategically pick places to dominate that satisfy your needs. drugs and oil fuel the internet! just think of all those red eyes behind lenses held in thick black plastic that some wedding party died for.

it's good to point out the ugly fact that people use robots to murder other people, but it's kind of silly to think it's just some secret agreement between a few men. oh some people organize it all and it's fine to point that out, but they are just gangsters supplying a demand to customers who are willing to look the other way when it comes to the real truth of how their satisfaction is maintained.

day off.

[ceptimus]

How would citizens of the USA feel if another country, say China, was operating similar killer drones over other countries?

[Ensign Steve]

Most probably wouldn't notice.

[erimir]

That's different: China is Communist and yellow and different and a giant, teeming mass of undifferentiated propaganda sheep and they eat dogs and they're evil*!

So it's ok if we do it.

*Except when they're making our iPhones, then we like them ok enough

[ZEZOZE]

Originally Posted by ceptimus

How would citizens of the USA feel if another country, say China, was operating similar killer drones over other countries?

well i'm sure some parts are made there.

[chunksmediocrites]

So this is in the news today:
AP via the Herald Tribune: Brennan confirms US carries out drone strikes

WASHINGTON - White House counterterrorism official John Brennan has publicly acknowledged the covert practice of drone strikes against al-Qaida targets, the first time the Obama administration has described the widely known practice in detail.
...>snip<...
In the most detailed comments by an administration official on the long-used practice, Brennan says targets are chosen by weighing whether there is a way to capture the person against how much of a threat the person presents to Americans.

Compare and contrast:
Greenwald via Salon: Obama takes Bush secrecy games one step further

The ACLU is suing the Obama administration under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), seeking to force disclosure of the guidelines used by Obama officials to select which human beings (both U.S. citizens and foreign nationals) will have their lives ended by the CIA’s drone attacks (“In particular,” the group explains, the FOIA request “seeks to find out when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killing”). The Obama administration has not only refused to provide any of that information, but worse, the CIA is insisting to federal courts that it cannot even confirm or deny the existence of a drone program at all without seriously damaging national security...

I expect Brennan will be arrested and held in maximum security while the details of the charges of revealing state secrets and giving comfort to the enemy (whoever the fuck they are, since Obama gave the CIA the green light to kill people with missiles without knowing their identities.) are figured out. Surely Brennan is as much a threat as Bradley Manning, or apparently a FOIA request.

[Watser?]

This morning, the New York Times has a very lengthy and detailed article about President Obama’s counter-Terrorism policies based on interviews with “three dozen of his current and former advisers.” I’m writing separately about the numerous revelations contained in that article, but want specifically to highlight this one vital passage about how the Obama administration determines who is a “militant.” The article explains that Obama’s rhetorical emphasis on avoiding civilian deaths “did not significantly change” the drone program, because Obama himself simply expanded the definition of a “militant” to ensure that it includes virtually everyone killed by his drone strikes. Just read this remarkable passage:

Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.

Counterterrorism officials insist this approach is one of simple logic: people in an area of known terrorist activity, or found with a top Qaeda operative, are probably up to no good. “Al Qaeda is an insular, paranoid organization — innocent neighbors don’t hitchhike rides in the back of trucks headed for the border with guns and bombs,” said one official, who requested anonymity to speak about what is still a classified program.

This counting method may partly explain the official claims of extraordinarily low collateral deaths.

"Militants": media propaganda - Glenn Greenwald - Salon.com

Emphasis mr Greenwald

[Watser?]

[Watser?]

[Watser?]

And another one:



ok, another two:

[davidm]

So the C.I.A. and the military is allowed to fire even when the identity of those who are fired upon is not known.

And this is not a war crime, to be tried at the Hague? Indiscriminate killing without knowing in advance who is being fired on is a guarantee that innocent people will be murdered.

Liberals support Obama again because why?

[chunksmediocrites]

Yeah, Greenwald pointed out today again that the US continues to use drone strikes to kill mourners and first responders, and how we as a nation characterized those kinds of tactics when others used it- unsurprisingly as terror.

On an added note, I am a little surprised that when I posted a link on Fb about the WhiteHouse.org petition for the satiric "do not kill list", that some people seemed to think I was actually asking the government to start a "do not kill list" that US Citizens could sign up on, or hoping that such a petition would then change Obama's mind, rather than seeing it as an attempt to draw media attention and public attention to what I see as a huge, criminal, damaging policy issue.

[Ari]

Um, WTF?
Isn't that the type of tactic followed by the people the US is supposedly trying to save these countries from?

USA: "You have been liberated for freedom!"
Civilian: "But everyone's dead!"
USA: "Killed clean and proper with a hellfire, not dirty and underhanded by a suicide bomber."
Civilian: ...
USA: "You're welcome! Have some candy, refugees love candy!"

[The Man]

Senate: Drones Need to Operate “Freely and Routinely” In U.S. | Secrecy News

fuck you, Senate

[chunksmediocrites]

A UN special rapporteur is questioning the rationale of the US in using drone strikes, and pointing out that these strikes undermine international law.
Guardian UK June 21, 2012:

The US policy of using aerial drones to carry out targeted killings presents a major challenge to the system of international law that has endured since the second world war, a United Nations investigator has said.

Christof Heyns, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial killings, summary or arbitrary executions, told a conference in Geneva that President Obama's attacks in Pakistan, Yemen and elsewhere, carried out by the CIA, would encourage other states to flout long-established human rights standards.

In his strongest critique so far of drone strikes, Heyns suggested some may even constitute "war crimes". His comments come amid rising international unease over the surge in killings by remotely piloted unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs).

Not that the US really listens to UN special rapporteurs, since they do things like condemn the "cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment" of Bradley Manning.

Continuing from the original link:

If it is true, he said, that "there have been secondary drone strikes on rescuers who are helping (the injured) after an initial drone attack, those further attacks are a war crime".

Heyns ridiculed the US suggestion that targeted UAV strikes on al-Qaida or allied groups were a legitimate response to the 9/11 attacks. "It's difficult to see how any killings carried out in 2012 can be justified as in response to [events] in 2001," he said. "Some states seem to want to invent new laws to justify new practices.

"The targeting is often operated by intelligence agencies which fall outside the scope of accountability. The term 'targeted killing' is wrong because it suggests little violence has occurred. The collateral damage may be less than aerial bombardment, but because they eliminate the risk to soldiers they can be used more often."
...>snip<...
The Pakistani ambassador declared that more than a thousand civilians had been killed in his country by US drone strikes. "We find the use of drones to be totally counterproductive in terms of succeeding in the war against terror. It leads to greater levels of terror rather than reducing them," he said.

Claims made by the US about the accuracy of drone strikes were "totally incorrect", he added. Victims who had tried to bring compensation claims through the Pakistani courts had been blocked by US refusals to respond to legal actions.

The US has defended drone attacks as self-defence against al-Qaida and has refused to allow judicial scrutiny of the UAV programme. On Wednesday, the Obama administration issued a fresh rebuff through the US courts to an ACLU request for information about targeting policies. Such details, it insisted, must remain "classified".

Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU's national security project, said: "Something that is being debated in UN hallways and committee rooms cannot apparently be talked about in US courtrooms, according to the government. Whether the CIA is involved in targeted lethal operation is now classified. It's an absurd fiction."

Former US President Jimmy Carter has also begun speaking out against US drone strikes, notably with this June 24 op-ed in the New York Times.

[California Tanker]

Originally Posted by davidm

So the C.I.A. and the military is allowed to fire even when the identity of those who are fired upon is not known.

And this is not a war crime, to be tried at the Hague? Indiscriminate killing without knowing in advance who is being fired on is a guarantee that innocent people will be murdered.

Liberals support Obama again because why?

I have never known the identity of anyone I shot at. Not much opportunity to ask for ID, really.

[Watser?]

Do you shoot at unarmed people? Because those drones will.

[But]

But they are combatants, because they are standing somewhere near where the bomb hits, which is the definition of a combatant. But only if they are male and between 15 and 50 or so.

This is quite reasonable, because normally everyone in the strike zone, which is the area where the bomb explodes, is a combatant. Wait.

Say the word combatant out loud about 350 times in a row, then you'll understand how it works.

[ZEZOZE]

there was a show on about drones the other day (pbs maybe?) and it showed gamers...i mean pilots...going into their little fighter cubicles, killing people halfway across the world, then getting in their cars to drive home to have dinner with the family. there is no risk. it seems nowadays people are fighting more for money than what they believe in.

we live in crazy times.

i wonder if one of these 'soldiers' dies in a car accident on the way into work...is that kia? does their family receive a medal? is it a purple heart for whiplash?

[davidm]

Originally Posted by California Tanker

I have never known the identity of anyone I shot at. Not much opportunity to ask for ID, really.

*sigh*

Except that presumably you were firing at people who were firing back, no? Or were you kind of shooting at random into crowds of people, many of them unarmed civilians, on the theory that maybe some of them were bad guys? And were you firing from a joystick behind a computer terminal so that you had no chance of being shot at yourself?

[California Tanker]

Originally Posted by Watser?

Do you shoot at unarmed people? Because those drones will.

Except that presumably you were firing at people who were firing back, no?

Find me anything in the laws of war that states that an enemy must be armed or firing back before you can kill them. Find me anything that states that civilian structures may not be destroyed as long as there is "some reasonably close connection between the destruction of property and the overcoming of the enemy's army." Chateaus and hotels were commonly used by enemy commanders in WWII, there was absolutely nothing wrong with shelling or bombing them by grid, even though one couldn't be absolutely sure who was inside it, or if you were killing German Field Marshals or French maids.

The bottom line is that as long as the attacker is reasonably sure that he is engaging an enemy target (or at the outer limits, a target which can provide advantage to the enemy), and that the method chosen to attack is that which is a reasonable option which will cause the fewest civilian casualties without excess, it's legal.