Your tax dollars, hard at work.

http://livingunderdrones.org/wp-content ... DRONES.pdf

Glenn Greenwald sums it up:

the people in the areas targeted by Obama's drone campaign are being systematically terrorized. There's just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror — highly effective terror - regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it. And that's precisely why the report, to its great credit, uses that term to describe the Obama policy: the drone campaign "terrorizes men, women, and children.

John Brennan, govt. bureaucrat, weighs in:

'Because we are engaged in an armed conflict with al- Qaeda, the United States takes the legal position that, in accordance with international law, we have the authority to take action against al-Qaeda and its associated forces,’ he told a conference at Harvard Law School last year. ‘The United States does not view our authority to use military force against al-Qaeda as being restricted solely to”hot” battlefields like Afghanistan.’

The deeper you dig, the uglier it gets:

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/20 ... -funerals/

If there exists legal authority to send soldiers into those countries to 'get' those people (like bin Laden), then there exists authority for drones to do it as well.

The deeper question is why does the US feel it, and only it, has the right of first strike war?

Because it can? Might makes right and all that.

Seems more like random murder to me.
How can we even confirm who gets killed?

This is, by far, the most under-reported story of the past few years.
As evidenced by the replies in this thread, nobody wants to touch this (except Stanford evidently).

Something tells me we're not winning hearts and minds over there.

This is IMO the worst part so far of the Obama presidency. Many people focus on his economic agenda but he's doing (or trying to do) exactly what he said he would do economically. The drone program, IMO, runs contrary to what we would have expected from someone who was so passionate about getting out of Iraq and Afghanistan and so in favor of human rights. I really wish it would have gotten more play during the election but Romney evidently would be doing nothing differently as far as drones go so the media seemed to let it go.

To be fair to RM, no one here really knows anything about this. And I will not defend the drone war (though if we are going to fight, I'd rather send our robots than our kids), but it's not like there isn't precedent for terrorists to surround themselves in civilians to elicit this exact reaction.




Getting soldiers out of combat zones and using drones to continue the GWOT economic stimulus package seems pretty logical to me (though not necessarily moral) and I don't think it's anything different than what Obama has said in the past. Anti-Iraq war does not mean anti-GWOT. You would need a RON PAUL or Gary Johnson if you want that halted.

That's one reason I voted for Gary Johnson. True, Obama did mention drone use during the 2008 election but I don't think anyone expected to see them used to the extent that they have been. What we are seeing is basically a new war fought with drones. I also think he should stop making it sound like they are precision strikes with little collateral damage when that seems to clearly not be true.

http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/20 ... ne-strike/

Here's an example.

"Initial reports said that up to six alleged militants were killed when a vehicle was struck at around noon on Sunday"

"On Monday leading Pakistan newspaper the News reported that those killed were not militants, but in fact workers from a local chromite mine."

Were they militants? Were they miners? Were they militants disguised as miners? Were they miners who were also militants? Were they completely innocent civilians?
How can anyone not on the ground possibly know? The CIA offers no comment, of course.

http://www.allmediany.com/news/5981-ral ... r-criminal

Ralph Nader:

“He’s gone beyond George W. Bush in drones, for example, He thinks the world is his plate, that national sovereignties mean nothing, drones can go anywhere. They can kill anybody that he suspects and every Tuesday he makes the call on who lives and who dies, supposed suspects in places like Yemen and Pakistan and Afghanistan, and that is a war crime and he ought to be held to account.”

“I don’t know whether George W. Bush ever read the Constitution,” he added. “This man taught the Constitution, and this is what we got.”

Not sure how much protection the Constitution provides enemy soldiers on the opposite side of the globe during War.

That quote needs a bit of context. Nader suggests that Obama makes no distinction between US citizens and non-citizens. To date, four US citizens have been killed by drone strikes. Nader is of the opinion, obviously, that such killings are unconstitutional.

I didn't get that out of the link, but it makes sense that Nader would criticize that. I thought Nader was protesting the violations of national sovereignty that Obama is employing in the current drone strategy. I am not sure what Obama has authorized is a violation of the Constitution, but it is exactly the kind of tactic that leads to the rise of people like bin Laden. I strongly suspect we have secret agreements with the governments of these nations to conduct the strikes, secret so that those governments don't get overthrown by the radical elements inside their nations, but those agreements are not going to stop the continued downhill slide of the US' reputation since the GWOT terror began.

You know, I kinda figured we would see a large media comparison between the Connecticut shooting and the drone war, but I am not really noticing it.

It's likely that as many children have been killed by drone strikes, and twenty fold innocent civilians.

I'm not one to harp on the media bias issue, but this is a definitive example.

And again, notice how all the Obama sychophants on this board will absolutely NOT TOUCH this issue.

If the goal is to save children's lives, I think we could very easily figure out a way of saving many Pakistani and Afghan children's lives. Its probably more difficult to deter crazies in the US, unfortunately.

Who cares about those brown kids?

On a related note: maybe the bin Laden raid and the use of the doctor/vaccination program to gather intelligence was all an elaborate ploy to convince the Pakistanis to stop inoculating their kids and thereby slowly depopulate Northern Waziristan and other tribal regions. Eh? Whether or not that was the intent, it seems to be playing out that way.