Obama and Drone Warfare: Will Americans Speak Out?

NO!!! I am thinking what would happen if this took place here? How nmany Americans would be killed for no apparent reason. Yet, we allow these drones to do this to innocents.

This is murder to me, this is barbarism. If it were in my power, the high ups conducting this "rain of terror" would be arrested tomorrow, and put on trial for crimes against humanity.

This is the problem when we use technology to take out the bad boys instead of using the people that are highly trained to do that job. Any person young or old in the vicinity will be either killed or badly injured. The blast radius when it hits a target is quite phenomenal and all too often we see them hit targets where civilians reside because low and behold that is where the average terrorist resides.

I look at the problem like this, if my Special Force comrades went in and killed and wounded as many people as these drones have been doing there would be hell to pay and heads would roll. We have a special word when things like this happens, we call it a Gang F*** we call it that because we have not planned the operation properly and things have gone wrong and its everyman for himself. Believe me if you plan to either take out a terrorist or to extract him or her and you plan it right the only persons to get hurt are the terrorists.

The person or persons responsible for setting loose these drones have not in my opinion been planning the operations properly. In my role as an officer I would not under any circumstances would have given the go ahead for an operation that would see myself or my men under me kill or wound innocent civilians in the pursuance of any terrorists and I would even have aborted any raid even at the point of going in hot. For one thing, it is against the Geneva Convention to not respect any of the civilian population and it would have left my men and me liable for prosecution. So why have these drones been let loose with no regard for any of the civilian population?

The only reason that I can think of is that the authorities have an utter disregard for human life and have acted in a un professional way.


By the way, you cannot beat a ten man Special Force team backed up with other elite persons to take out any known terrorists anywhere in the world planned right you’re in and out job done and no one is any the wiser. The Government just has to have the balls to do it this way. How do I know this, well I went on four such raids in the early 80s and brought back everyone safe and sound and with no casualty's except the target that we were after, and nothing has changed now except we have better weapons and body armour so actually done right its far easier than sending In these drones.

Graham.

"So why have these drones been let loose with no regard for any of the civilian population?

The only reason that I can think of is that the authorities have an utter disregard for human life and have acted in a un professional way."

There is another reason I can think of . . .

". . planned right you’re in and out job done and no one is any the wiser. "

Why don't "terrorists" do it that way? Poor planning?

It seems that no matter who you are, if you're in the wrong place at the wrong time and one of these drones is targeted to kill someone on a terrorist list, you're going too, whether you're on the list or not, whether you're child or not. Obama is not denying it's his call to do it this way either, yet it seems that people are indeed supporting him and if they support him, they are supporting exactly what you've posted.

This is a good way to see how statistics in general can be derived very falsely:

"But the president apparently reacted quite strongly to a bad strike, an errant strike in Pakistan very early in the first days of his presidency, and has kept pressing the agencies involved to minimize civilian casualties. But there's also been some dispute over the way civilian casualties are counted. The CIA often counts able-bodied males, military-age males who are killed in strikes as militants, unless they have concrete evidence to sort of prove them innocent.
And some folks at the State Department and elsewhere have questioned that kind of a process."

So you would hope that more than just some would question because it's a justification since they're saying that it's minimal compared to casualties in an all-out war if you read just above that quote in this transcript.

So when you see them compile casualty stats, people are going to say, here's the evidence Obama wasn't as responsible for civilian casualties as his predecessor, for instance. Well, sure, but you didn't count them all. But this is how they argue.

“Militants”: media propaganda

"To avoid counting civilian deaths, Obama re-defined "militant" to mean "all military-age males in a strike zone"

Virtually every time the U.S. fires a missile from a drone and ends the lives of Muslims, American media outlets dutifully trumpet in headlines that the dead were ”militants” – even though those media outlets literally do not have the slightest idea of who was actually killed. They simply cite always-unnamed “officials” claiming that the dead were “militants.” It’s the most obvious and inexcusable form of rank propaganda: media outlets continuously propagating a vital claim without having the slightest idea if it’s true."


Obamites, read of your great "humanitarian" accomplishments.

http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/singleton/

Mr. Obama is not unique in this savagery by any means, jj. Notice any great outcry from the Repub leadership? On the contrary, as far as I have seen, they call him too soft . .

So I was reading this article that the Pakistani victims' parents' survivors are suing the CIA because of the violation of the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. (ICCPR) This is a UN ordinance and the US was instrumental in getting this enacted I read in another place. Then it says they don't expect to hear anything from the US or the UN so they have hired an attorney. But the CIA was sued in 2010 for drone strikes on Pakistan too. What's happened there? I can only imagine they denied they killed civilians and counted them as non-civilians.

Also, if you see the reported number in 2010 of about 1000 civilians killed at that time and then see in the current article that they count about 800 since the drones started being used. How do you account for such a discrepancy of fewer civilian casualities in 2012 than in 2010?

(Those were total counts from the inception of use)

no drones -- I declare a drone-free zone -- wishful thinking -- Big Brother just won't listen to us

" ...Pakistan and Yemen are less stable and more hostile to the United States since Mr. Obama became president, that drones have become a provocative symbol of American power running roughshod over national sovereignty and killing innocents.”

The day will come when "blowback" takes place ... (again).