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Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usuall

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

amelius 5y ago
Their defense will probably be something like: but it's one step less reckless than just throwing bombs.
wayoutthere 5y ago
We need to seriously examine our own morality for allowing these ghouls to basically genocide brown people. We are absolutely the baddies; between Iraq, Afghanistan and our air strikes on Syria, Libya, and Yemen during the same period killed 1 million civilians. We’re within an order of magnitude of the Holocaust, and we all just pretend everything is ok. I really don’t know why there aren’t more discussions of how this is basically the Islamic Holocaust.
- salawat 5y ago
  Until you can actually pierce the National Security curtain to have a frank discussion involving details on Ways and Means in the Intelligence Community, this is a "pointless act of hyperbolic futility". The answer will just be "Need to know, and you don't" or some other platitude. As what you're asking in the end is what are the inputs that drive these decision making processes. This will never be a public conversation. Note, I think it's an absolutely sound and necessary thing to happen, I just never see it happening.
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    Yep, as you can see now any discussion of it is downvoted into oblivion / killed immediately. It’s not astroturfing but I think the cognitive dissonance between what we believe our country is versus what it actually does is too great. We all wonder how German citizens could have gone along with Nazi atrocities.. and the truth is that they largely didn’t know about them and what they did find out was considered “fake news”.
    - ubermonkey 5y ago
      I'm reminded of a bit Stephen Colbert did, about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal back when he was on the Daily Show. "Even if this is something we did, it's not something we would do."
      - wayoutthere 5y ago
        I was a big fan of his show in the 00s, but in hindsight I think Colbert did a great disservice to the media landscape in this country by normalizing this kind of sarcastic mimicry. It gives the far-right plausible deniability so they can say “lol it’s just a joke I don’t actually think that” when it doesn’t go over well.
        gmadsen 5y ago
        You can't outlaw stupid. Society shouldn't be relegated to the lower common denominator
- crazy_horse 5y ago
  Genuine question - how do you get that 1 million figure?
  - wayoutthere 5y ago
    It’s 800,000 direct civilian combat deaths and likely several times that from the ancillary dangers of war (starvation, land mines, etc). The designation of “non civilian combatant” was grossly overapplied (see OP about “he had a radio” or “he had an AK-47” as if every Afghan household didn’t have one after 40 years of war). https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
    - torstenvl 5y ago
      The cited source does not support the stated proposition. Your link says 335,000 civilians, and it counts all deaths, not just those caused by the U.S. I was directly involved in U.S. CIVCAS mitigation measures in a Daesh convoy engagement by U.S. air power in the summer of 2016. I cannot comment on anything that transpired within the classified space. However, there was substantial reporting on the discrepancy between the measures implemented by U.S. drone strikes during the engagement, and measures implemented by Iraqi helicopters during the engagement. I encourage you to think about what that discrepancy might mean, if true, about how you're using those numbers.
      - wayoutthere 5y ago
        Actual combatants have been estimated closer to 150,000 (the only numbers we have are DOD numbers which have been shown to be highly suspect whenever things have been leaked from people like Chelsea Manning).
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - zd123 5y ago
        I don’t think the guy is missing the point here. Looking at the breakdown: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Direct%20War%20Deaths%20COW%20Estimate%20November%2013%202019%20FINAL.pdf https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20... I dont see how it can be seen as anything but a humanitarian disaster
- arminiusreturns 5y ago
  It's not about morality per se, and rather about understanding the people, organizations, and mechanisms that allowed it to happen. Afghanistan wasn't my war (Iraq), but I've spent most of my lifes free time since I got my brain back (left the military) tackling this topic. I think it was Ge. Wesley Clark or maybe Col. Wilkerson who said something to the effect of "There was a policy coup, some very hard nosed people took over and never informed the rest of us". Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers. A good examination of these things though is uncomfortable and difficult even for those of us with a passion for truth, but the public doesn't want to hear about it. The elite don't want to discuss it (often because they make money off it). The media wont discuss it because it is controlled by the same people that pushed us into war. I keep coming back to the media angle, and I also think thats one of the reasons for the increasing attacks on the freedom of the internet; essentially the oligarchs finally understood that as the last bastion of anarchistic freedom of thought, it was their primary threat.
  - CapricornNoble 5y ago
    >>>Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers. Glad to see you call out Wilson, I consider him possibly the worst President ever. Federal Reserve Bank? His fault. Federal income tax? His fault. European intervention? His fault.
blitzar 5y ago
> “We killed two innocent men and a charger,” the U.S. official wrote in a personal journal that day, using the military jargon “charger,” which means child. Got to wonder why the need to replace a 5 character 1 syllable word with a longer 7 character 2 syllable word, a little easier to stomach than saying, writing, or feeling like you just killed a child?
- ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
  Just a guess, but it could also be because "charger" is easier to decipher over a bad radio connection.
  - DangitBobby 5y ago
    My guess is saying you killed a child makes you sick to your stomach and it's easier to say charger.
- didntknowya 5y ago
  same reason casinos uses chips instead of cash. it reduces the emotional connection by introducing an apathetic layer.
dmos62 5y ago
Checkout Ben Anderson's 2 part ~30 minute report from Afghanistan for Vice from around 10 years ago [0][1]. He was embedded with British troops and ANA during a patrol with a lot of gun fights. The British strafed an empty field, almost bombed themselves twice and once an Apache launched a Hellfire missile into a compound with British and ANA troops in it and hit a building where a family with small children were hiding. Noone was hurt luckily. My point being, it's not always malice: sometimes it's just a chain of people making small mistakes and bad decisions that end up adding up. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yOI_WVGdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yOI_WVGdY [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JNuFPiTbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JNuFPiTbs
- CyanBird 5y ago
  > My point being, it's not always malice Correct, yet the malice lies on said situations being allowed to continue time and time again, and fester
- notsureaboutpg 5y ago
  The article says 2 innocent adults and a child were killed and not seemed civilian casualties. How is that okay? Even if it's an accident how can they artificially deflate the number of civilian casualties like that?
- sandos 5y ago
  Sounds very much like "Generation kill". Soldiers are happy when one day, finally, they kill more enemy combatants than civilians!
- 2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
  It's never malice. Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it." Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken. War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody here has experienced war. My ROEs were ridiculously strict on the ground in southern Afghanistan. It's important to have some context as well: > According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011. So sure. Both sides have killed civilians. But one side tries it's best to be accountable and limit human suffering while still carrying out missions. The alternative is to not be there at all.
ghostwriter 5y ago
> The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes. nothing new, there's a well known quote from a former NSA/CIA director: "We kill people based on metadata" [1] [1] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
- owlbite 5y ago
  Before they were killing people with two-way radios they were killing sim cards the algorithm said should die :( (or so I hear).
syshum 5y ago
>> seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. CIA considers any Adult Male over 16 and under 65 to be "the enemy" in most of these places...
thaumasiotes 5y ago
> These should be considered war crimes. It's not a war crime unless you lose the war.
- Splendor 5y ago
  The US didn't exactly "win".
  - thaumasiotes 5y ago
    It didn't lose to the extent that indemnities could be imposed on it.
moksly 5y ago
America’s drones have made children afraid of blue skies in more than 7 countries over the course of the past two decades. I’m not sure anyone really knows why or what has been achieved by it.
mleonhard 5y ago
Google is complicit. In 2017-2018, Google Cloud division developed software for the US military to watch drone footage and classify things like "man with a radio". Diane Greene, Urs Holzle, and Jeff Dean got up and lied about it to me and other Googlers in a meeting in April 2018. Specifically, they said it was only a $9M project, but it was already negotiated to $18M and on track for $270M of extensions. They also said a lot of words trying to rationalize their moral failure, greed, and callousness.
- eurasiantiger 5y ago
  Do you know what keyhole can do?

amelius 5y ago

Their defense will probably be something like: but it's one step less reckless than just throwing bombs.

wayoutthere 5y ago

We need to seriously examine our own morality for allowing these ghouls to basically genocide brown people. We are absolutely the baddies; between Iraq, Afghanistan and our air strikes on Syria, Libya, and Yemen during the same period killed 1 million civilians. We’re within an order of magnitude of the Holocaust, and we all just pretend everything is ok. I really don’t know why there aren’t more discussions of how this is basically the Islamic Holocaust.

salawat 5y ago
Until you can actually pierce the National Security curtain to have a frank discussion involving details on Ways and Means in the Intelligence Community, this is a "pointless act of hyperbolic futility". The answer will just be "Need to know, and you don't" or some other platitude. As what you're asking in the end is what are the inputs that drive these decision making processes. This will never be a public conversation. Note, I think it's an absolutely sound and necessary thing to happen, I just never see it happening.
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  Yep, as you can see now any discussion of it is downvoted into oblivion / killed immediately. It’s not astroturfing but I think the cognitive dissonance between what we believe our country is versus what it actually does is too great. We all wonder how German citizens could have gone along with Nazi atrocities.. and the truth is that they largely didn’t know about them and what they did find out was considered “fake news”.
  - ubermonkey 5y ago
    I'm reminded of a bit Stephen Colbert did, about the Abu Ghraib torture scandal back when he was on the Daily Show. "Even if this is something we did, it's not something we would do."
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      I was a big fan of his show in the 00s, but in hindsight I think Colbert did a great disservice to the media landscape in this country by normalizing this kind of sarcastic mimicry. It gives the far-right plausible deniability so they can say “lol it’s just a joke I don’t actually think that” when it doesn’t go over well.
      - gmadsen 5y ago
        You can't outlaw stupid. Society shouldn't be relegated to the lower common denominator
crazy_horse 5y ago
Genuine question - how do you get that 1 million figure?
- wayoutthere 5y ago
  It’s 800,000 direct civilian combat deaths and likely several times that from the ancillary dangers of war (starvation, land mines, etc). The designation of “non civilian combatant” was grossly overapplied (see OP about “he had a radio” or “he had an AK-47” as if every Afghan household didn’t have one after 40 years of war). https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/ https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/
  - torstenvl 5y ago
    The cited source does not support the stated proposition. Your link says 335,000 civilians, and it counts all deaths, not just those caused by the U.S. I was directly involved in U.S. CIVCAS mitigation measures in a Daesh convoy engagement by U.S. air power in the summer of 2016. I cannot comment on anything that transpired within the classified space. However, there was substantial reporting on the discrepancy between the measures implemented by U.S. drone strikes during the engagement, and measures implemented by Iraqi helicopters during the engagement. I encourage you to think about what that discrepancy might mean, if true, about how you're using those numbers.
    - wayoutthere 5y ago
      Actual combatants have been estimated closer to 150,000 (the only numbers we have are DOD numbers which have been shown to be highly suspect whenever things have been leaked from people like Chelsea Manning).
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
    - zd123 5y ago
      I don’t think the guy is missing the point here. Looking at the breakdown: https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/2019/Direct%20War%20Deaths%20COW%20Estimate%20November%2013%202019%20FINAL.pdf https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20... I dont see how it can be seen as anything but a humanitarian disaster
arminiusreturns 5y ago
It's not about morality per se, and rather about understanding the people, organizations, and mechanisms that allowed it to happen. Afghanistan wasn't my war (Iraq), but I've spent most of my lifes free time since I got my brain back (left the military) tackling this topic. I think it was Ge. Wesley Clark or maybe Col. Wilkerson who said something to the effect of "There was a policy coup, some very hard nosed people took over and never informed the rest of us". Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers. A good examination of these things though is uncomfortable and difficult even for those of us with a passion for truth, but the public doesn't want to hear about it. The elite don't want to discuss it (often because they make money off it). The media wont discuss it because it is controlled by the same people that pushed us into war. I keep coming back to the media angle, and I also think thats one of the reasons for the increasing attacks on the freedom of the internet; essentially the oligarchs finally understood that as the last bastion of anarchistic freedom of thought, it was their primary threat.
- CapricornNoble 5y ago
  >>>Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers. Glad to see you call out Wilson, I consider him possibly the worst President ever. Federal Reserve Bank? His fault. Federal income tax? His fault. European intervention? His fault.

blitzar 5y ago

> “We killed two innocent men and a charger,” the U.S. official wrote in a personal journal that day, using the military jargon “charger,” which means child. Got to wonder why the need to replace a 5 character 1 syllable word with a longer 7 character 2 syllable word, a little easier to stomach than saying, writing, or feeling like you just killed a child?

ulrikrasmussen 5y ago
Just a guess, but it could also be because "charger" is easier to decipher over a bad radio connection.
- DangitBobby 5y ago
  My guess is saying you killed a child makes you sick to your stomach and it's easier to say charger.
didntknowya 5y ago
same reason casinos uses chips instead of cash. it reduces the emotional connection by introducing an apathetic layer.

dmos62 5y ago

Checkout Ben Anderson's 2 part ~30 minute report from Afghanistan for Vice from around 10 years ago [0][1]. He was embedded with British troops and ANA during a patrol with a lot of gun fights. The British strafed an empty field, almost bombed themselves twice and once an Apache launched a Hellfire missile into a compound with British and ANA troops in it and hit a building where a family with small children were hiding. Noone was hurt luckily. My point being, it's not always malice: sometimes it's just a chain of people making small mistakes and bad decisions that end up adding up. [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yOI_WVGdY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_yOI_WVGdY [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JNuFPiTbs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n1JNuFPiTbs

CyanBird 5y ago
> My point being, it's not always malice Correct, yet the malice lies on said situations being allowed to continue time and time again, and fester
notsureaboutpg 5y ago
The article says 2 innocent adults and a child were killed and not seemed civilian casualties. How is that okay? Even if it's an accident how can they artificially deflate the number of civilian casualties like that?
sandos 5y ago
Sounds very much like "Generation kill". Soldiers are happy when one day, finally, they kill more enemy combatants than civilians!
2OEH8eoCRo0 5y ago
It's never malice. Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it." Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken. War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody here has experienced war. My ROEs were ridiculously strict on the ground in southern Afghanistan. It's important to have some context as well: > According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011. So sure. Both sides have killed civilians. But one side tries it's best to be accountable and limit human suffering while still carrying out missions. The alternative is to not be there at all.

ghostwriter 5y ago

> The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes. nothing new, there's a well known quote from a former NSA/CIA director: "We kill people based on metadata" [1] [1] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-based-metadata/ https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...

owlbite 5y ago
Before they were killing people with two-way radios they were killing sim cards the algorithm said should die :( (or so I hear).

syshum 5y ago

>> seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. CIA considers any Adult Male over 16 and under 65 to be "the enemy" in most of these places...

thaumasiotes 5y ago

> These should be considered war crimes. It's not a war crime unless you lose the war.

Splendor 5y ago
The US didn't exactly "win".
- thaumasiotes 5y ago
  It didn't lose to the extent that indemnities could be imposed on it.

moksly 5y ago

America’s drones have made children afraid of blue skies in more than 7 countries over the course of the past two decades. I’m not sure anyone really knows why or what has been achieved by it.

mleonhard 5y ago

Google is complicit. In 2017-2018, Google Cloud division developed software for the US military to watch drone footage and classify things like "man with a radio". Diane Greene, Urs Holzle, and Jeff Dean got up and lied about it to me and other Googlers in a meeting in April 2018. Specifically, they said it was only a $9M project, but it was already negotiated to $18M and on track for $270M of extensions. They also said a lot of words trying to rationalize their moral failure, greed, and callousness.

eurasiantiger 5y ago
Do you know what keyhole can do?