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The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us. But imagine the reaction if the cafe where this occurred

The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us. But imagine the reaction if the cafe where this occurred were in the US, and the drone was controlled by a foreign government. That singular event would ignite a US invasion or possibly nuclear assault against the country responsible. People in other countries are also people. They have the same reactions and emotions that we would when a foreign entity blows up their businesses, families, and friends. We have so far been lucky that none of our victims have had the military power and political will to retaliate in the vicious and violent manner that we would. That will not always be the case, and I do not look forward to the day when our own brutality is visited upon us.

veidr 13y ago
> I do not look forward to the day when our own brutality is visited upon us. Many people around the world would say that one of those days was September 11, 2001.
- downandout 13y ago
  9/11 was a single horrific event carried out by a small number of radicals. I don't think it holds a candle by any metric to the lives lost and damage done in an actual government-run war scenario. We don't yet have foreign bombers blowing up cafes on a regular basis because somebody on their hit list was inside, but because of our actions, we someday might.
  - angersock 13y ago
    And on that afternoon, there will be rage upon the twitters, and that evening, the news. And on the following day, we'll bomb the everliving christ out of the people we think are responsible, and on some day hence, we will be bombed in response. The wheel turns--might as well get into the drone and bomb business. :(
    - Volpe 13y ago
      Actually I think you'll bomb a bunch of other random people (Iraq, Afghanistan), and continue to treat the responsible "country" (Saudi Arabia) as an ally and friend. Just before people rewrite history, afganistan and iraq governments had nothing to do with 9/11.
      - philwelch 13y ago
        Unless you're a kook, the people responsible for 9/11 were a group whose interests include overthrowing the Saudi government. The erstwhile Afghan "government", the Taliban, harbored them.
        lostlogin 13y ago
        Yes, but don't be forgetting that the Taliban are a rebranded mujahideen. This crowd were US allies (or were they pawns?). Armed and trained.
        briandon 13y ago
        And Italy was one of the Allies during WW1 before allying itself with Germany in WW2. During the fight against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, other nations provided assistance to Italy. Individuals jumped into the fray too. Hemingway, for example, was a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy in WW1. Beating the USA over the head post-911 with the club of having assisted anti-Soviet fighters in the 1970s and 1980s makes as much sense as castigating Italy's WW1-era allies and people like Hemingway in the late 1930s for having come to Italy's aid twenty years earlier.
        lostlogin 13y ago
        The US leaders who started these wars had no issue making comparisons to WW2 and claiming Bush compared to Churchill. Words such as 'Crusade' were used. Good versus Evil. Crappy comparisons have been a hallmark of the campaigns. What I said was, to my knowledge, fact. I was attempting to point out that friends can become enemies, so a bit of tact and care is obviously a good idea. And of course, claiming you're on a crusade and fighting evil is just plain BS. The US deserves castigation for its role in these conflicts, it has acted appallingly, as have others. My own country, New Zealand, has troops in Afghanistan and have been involved in some controversy. The only reason I can think of for this deployment is to brown nose a few so-called allies. Making the world safer one botch job, torture and killing at a time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1470658/Mayor-of-America-compares-Bush-to-Churchill.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1... http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Bush-s-use-of-word-crusade-a-red-flag-1066045.php http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Bush-s-use-of-word-cru... http://www.3news.co.nz/Govt-cant-rule-out-SAS-link-in-Afghan-prisoner-torture/tabid/419/articleID/229127/Default.aspx http://www.3news.co.nz/Govt-cant-rule-out-SAS-link-in-Afghan...
  - madaxe 13y ago
    Radical conservatives? Tin-foil hat aside, it strikes me as oddly coincidental that the folks who use drones these days to kill around the planet with impunity are the same folks who had several allegedly drone controlled airliners carry out an attack, garnering public support for several illegal wars. Just saying, it's all mightily convenient. As ever. As to foreign bombers... So? Most Americans agree drone strikes are a good thing, so surely they'd still be a good thing when they start happening on US soil?
    - regal 13y ago
      I like how you say "tin-foil hat aside", then go on to state with what seems to be complete seriousness that 9/11 was carried out by the U.S. against the U.S. using drone-controlled passenger airplanes.
      - madaxe 13y ago
        And? You thought the 9/11 commission report was good and conclusive? WTC7 just "imploded" due to "natural causes"? And of course destroying all the evidence pronto was the best way to investigate the crime? I don't think a single word that comes out of the US (and UK) gov't is truthful. Why would they be truthful about 9/11?
      - LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
        No, but it was convenient in the same way the Reichstag fire was convenient.
        madaxe 13y ago
        No no, it was filthy commies that started the reichstag fire, right?
        LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
        making it even more convenient. The Nurimberg Laws could be passed thanks to this event. Almost as convenient as 9/11 so that the Patrot Act could be passed.
- sneak 13y ago
  9/11 wasn't carried out by foreigners. There's no motive. Means, motive, and opportunity: Who'd consider 3000 dead Americans a reasonable price to pay for carte blanche to make a pushbutton military coup possible in this country? The US already controls, coerces, or mutually cooperates with a large number of other sovereign states (as we've seen with this whole Snowden airspace thing, or the global surveillance networks, et c). Such an action would place a person or group that was able to exert leverage over the majority of US persons high in the running for "able to control the majority of humans on Earth". Not a bad prize, that.
  - tsotha 13y ago
    Please go somewhere else and take your tinfoil hat with you.
    - PavlovsCat 13y ago
      Explain WTC7. (I don't even speculate "who did what, exactly" -- but that this thing is fishy as fuck, and has been from day one, is undeniable. You can cover your ears and scream tinfoil all you want, but that doesn't answer the gaping questions. Apply Occam's razor, how about that? The possibility that the laws of physics were suspended that day is very slim, even more slim than aliens using lizards to convince mice to hypnotize humans to do it. Logic!)
      - ferdo 13y ago
        What's to explain about a controlled demolition? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
        PavlovsCat 13y ago
        or: http://wtc7.net/ http://wtc7.net/ Fires have never before or since destroyed a steel skyscraper. The team that investigated the collapse were kept away from the crime scene. By the time they published their inconclusive report in May, 2002, the evidence had been destroyed. Is any of the above untrue? Why did the government rapidly recycle the steel from the largest and most mysterious engineering failure in world histor? [..] ? Why indeed? That's just scraping the surface, and attacking the ones who ask the questions you kinda should ask yourself, is just being silly. It's been nearly 12 years now, there is no excuse anymore, the shock wore off; "you" accepted Gitmo, so you can deal with this. Wo/man up.
mtgx 13y ago
Sometimes I wish Americans felt what real blowback was. Americans kill so many people abroad, and then they're shocked that there's a "terrorist attack" every 10 years or so, against them. That's nothing. Imagine having these wars with a country that can really fight back. Imagine having that war close to home. I think, then, Americans would be a lot more cautious about sending over attacks to other countries without caring what happens. That's the problem. Americans are very sheltered from the wars they start for the most part, so they let their government do whatever. Americans aren't still thinking 9/11 happened because they hated them for their freedoms, do they?
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- VMG 13y ago
  > Sometimes I wish Americans felt what real blowback was. The typical reaction of a nation is not "Oh well, we better stop doing that then".
  - nitrogen 13y ago
    Exactly, so why does the USG think it will work in the opposite direction?
    - LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
      Europe is very pacifistic by the US standards precisely because of the wars and totalitarian states experienced in the past. Remember, the "historical memory" doesn't vanish with a generation that experienced Nazism or Communism. It is passed on to the next generations. My guess is that what USG is claiming is that given the US had the same sad and tragic historical experiences as the Europeans did, they would have thought twice before engaging in all the wars. Just to give you some perspective: I live in Poland. 20% of the population - 6 million (not 10,000) civilians - was killed in WW2 by Germans and Russians. Our neighbors. We lived through it. We have quite good relations with both countries. Now - forgive me the language - but how many Poles look at your 9/11 - it's a non-event. And you go like crazy on a 1000-year war with billion Muslims because some idiots blew up a couple of buildings. I'm sorry but that's how I and I'm sure many in Europe perceive it. Completely and totally overreacted. Just bring the responsible before the Court give them the due process and hand them or something. You are totally inexperienced as a nation with just 200 years of history with the phenomenon called "shit happens" and totally, totally overreact to the point it just looks comical. You are like this big fat guy with a machine guy at a bar doing shooting-frenzy trying to kill a fly.
chrischen 13y ago
And probably, to some degree, because it's happening to people who aren't traditionally regarded as Americans. For example, despite having earned citizenship, a lot of people would still regard me as Chinese instead of American. And even people in China would claim I'm still Chinese, not American, because they see an American as a white male of european descent.
- ekianjo 13y ago
  Well, nobody should be considered "American" in the first place since it's a country made by immigration (apart from native indians). And the principle behind America is that you can be born "American" without being born in the country. But I know what you mean, there's the principles on one hand and the reality on the other.
  - Sven7 13y ago
    "Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet. Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing." - Nicholas Negroponte
    - guelo 13y ago
      Yea but nation states have done wonders for the advancement of humanity. The conundrum...
      - alan_cx 13y ago
        So did the steam engine, but its pretty much redundant now.
        lifeisstillgood 13y ago
        Steam engines were replaced only after the invention of a much more efficient engine (internal combustion). What is the much more efficient boundary of government that is not a nationstate ?
throwmeaway33 13y ago
To play devil's advocate: (and this isn't to excuse the US's actions, but to illustrate a major difference between what happened and what you're talking about) The big difference in this case is that we have tacit (or maybe even explicit) consent from the Yemeni government to hunt Al Qaeda. So the representatives of the people of that country are allowing us to kill these people basically on their behalf. (which doesn't make it OK, but is a major differnce) It's not just that we are bullying Yemen into allowing us to bomb people in their country - it's that the Yemini authorities (and probably most of the population) don't want these people operating in their country but they lack the resources and infrastructure to stop them themselves; and that's where we come in. Bare in min that we also give Yemen a lot of military aid so that we DON'T HAVE TO come in and do their law enforcement for them. In this case that wasn't sufficient and we intervene on their behalf To make your example comparable you would need to have a person that is evading US authorities, operating in the US, and that we are completely incapable of stopping (and only some other country could do it for us?)
- firat 13y ago
  Bullshit. Here is why: Yemeni government != Yemeni people. The authorities, probably, don't mind letting US drones kill people, simply because it won't be them getting killed. Imagine the US military firing tear gas and water cannons on protesters in Turkey and saying "It's OK, your government gave us permission". The major problem in the Middle East is that, the governments can get away with not giving a fuck about the people.
  - throwmeaway33 13y ago
    "Imagine the US military firing tear gas and water cannons on protesters in Turkey and saying "It's OK, your government gave us permission". " I think you're having reading comprehension issues. It's not just that the gov't are requesting help. The reason we are involved in Yemen is because the Yemini gov't is incapable of exerting it's own will b/c they are weak and poor. Their interests are also strongly tied to our interests - so that's why we intervene. Your example has is not at all analogous. The Turkish gov't is not incapable of tear gassing and water cannoning protesters, so they fail the first criteria of being incapable of carrying out their will. The example also fails the second criteria for intervention - that it's strongly in the US's interest. "Yemeni government != Yemeni people" Who else can you appeal to in Yemen to get permission to operate drones? And are you seriously suggesting that the Yemeni people are supporting Al Qaeda? If they are, then they become the "enemy". The way it works for other nations is we tell them: 1 - You will fight Al Qaeda in our country 2 - If you are incapable, we will help you do it by providing military aid. 3 - If you are still incapable we will us our own armed forces to make sure you are able to. 4 - If you are not willing to fight Al Qaeda or are actively defending them they we will intervene anyways. The last point either leads to the case of the Taliban where we destroy them because they are defending Al Qaeda, or to Pakistan where they are forced to accept our help.
lifeisstillgood 13y ago
I respect your views and comments and the above is correct and mournful and valid. But it suffers from something too common around here - dispassion. Looking at the wider, geopolitical implications, a step back from the facts and keeping things on the level of "people" - not that person. I read your comment first, then dived into the article. I expected to agree with you, but I just felt mounting horror, outrage and a realisation that things are beyond a line I never knew existed. So here is my comment Jesus H Fucking Christ on a Stick! We are blowing up American Citizens sitting in cafes and legally it's "untouchable". Are we that fucking removed from reality that its ok to murder people with no trial or comeback. It seems its ok to blow away the son and grandson of other country's government ministers and not expect a war, a prison sentence, or even a mention on CNN Are we that fragile as a civilisation that the tiny amount of damage terrorism presents is actually a threat? What did I miss - I thought we had industry, welfare, science and ingenuity. Stop murdering people. I am writing to my MP but mostly I would like some figures - there was a twitter thing that reported gun murders. Can we do the same for drone murders?
- cinger 13y ago
  http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ they have an amazing datastore of all of the known drone strikes http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drone... if you click into a specific country, they give detailed accounts of the events, like location, and how many dead, down to the number of civilians versus presumed militants, and also a detailed description of what occurred i remember reading of one where the drone bombed a shelter with presumed militants inside, one person survived, crawled out of the wreckage and began to run into the desert, the drone circled around and tracked and followed the man for twenty minutes as he ran away and finally shot him dead there are so many that I had to go into their archive to find the one spoken about in this article, and it is a very detailed account: YEM034 October 14 2011 ♦ 7-9 people killed, including 16-year and 17 year old boy ♦ 2 teenage children reported killed A second drone attack then struck either a vehicle or a restaurant area. PBS Frontline later filmed at the scene of the attack, the footage showing the ruined foundations of a small building along with a nearby crater. Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki, the 16-year old son of al-Awlaki, died... the article is written by NASSER al-AWLAKI... Also initially reported killed was militant Ibrahim al-Bana. Doubts have since been raised about al-Bana’s death. A statement from Abdel-Rahman’s family read, ‘he left with some friends for dinner under the moonlight when an American missile landed, killing Abdel-Rahman and his friends‘. In a separate statement, the family said: ’On October 14th, 2011 Abdulrahman, along with some of his tribe’s youth have gone barbecuing under the moonlight. A drone missile hit their congregation killing Abdulrahman and several other teenagers’. A second teenager and family member, Ahmed Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki, 17, is known to have died. Five to seven others were also killed, including Sarhan al-Qusa (aka Farhan al Quso) brother of AQAP leader Fahd al-Qusa or Quso, according to a member of Awlaki’s tribe. Reuters later claimed that the dead men were planning to renounce al Qaeda before they were killed. Elders claimed that four other Awlaki tribal members died in the strike. Two weeks after the strike, AQAP released leaflets stating that Ibrahim al-Bana had not been killed. Ansar al-Sharia also reported in its second October newsletter that Bana’s death was ‘a lie’. In a statement, Yemen security officials said the air strike was among five that targeted al Qaeda positions in Shabwa, adding that al-Bana was wanted internationally for planning attacks both inside and outside Yemen. ‘He was one of the group’s most dangerous operatives,’ it said. The Washington Post reported that it was JSOC rather than the CIA which carried out the attack: When pressed on why the CIA had not pulled the trigger, US officials said it was because the main target…an Egyptian named Ibrahim al-Banna, was not on the agency’s kill list. The Awaki teenager, a US citizen with no history of involvement with al Qaeda, was an unintended casualty. In interviews, senior US officials acknowledged that the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why. In April 2012 the Toronto Star featured an interview with Nasser al-Awalaki, grandfather of Abdel-Rahman and former Yemen government minister. In it he said that former Yemen President Saleh had sent him a message insisting that he had had no role in his grandson’s death: ‘Tell Dr. Nasser I swear to God that I have nothing to do with the killing of his son.’Nasser al-Awlaki also said he would be taking legal action: ‘I am only a university professor and I’m not the kind of guy who would enlist tribal people. My only chance now is to go to court and I hope as far as Abdulrahman at least, they will be fair to us. They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.’ In April 2013 Jeremy Scahill added further controversy to the attack, reporting: A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was “surprised and upset and wanted an explanation.” The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. “We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone,” the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, “It was a mistake, a bad mistake.” However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, “suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review.”‘ And in May 2013 US Attorney-General Eric Holder told US lawmakers Abdulrahman was ‘not specifically targeted by the United States’. In a letter, Holder explained Anwar al Awlaki was a legitimate target and that ‘[US] citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted’. He said three other US citizens, including Abdulrahman, had been killed by US drones during Obama’s presidency. Abdulrahman’s grandfather discusses his death in a July 2012 interview for ACLU and CCR Type of action: Air assault, drone strike Location: Azan, Shabwa References: CNN, GlobalPost, Business Insider, Yemen Post, ABC, AFP (via Taiwan News), Reuters,Press TV, AP, Washington Post, Long War Journal, LA Times, Reuters, Yemen Post, Time Magazine, Antiwar.com, Empty Wheel, Salon, Al-Awlaki family statement, EmptyWheel, Toronto Star, PBS Frontline, CNN, The Nation (US), Department of Justice i was first turned onto this site[1] from an app that attempted to text you every time a new drone strike was posted to this site, the APPL app store refused its submission a number of times citing "The features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough" .[1]. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/
TimJRobinson 13y ago
Can someone (with better writing skill than I) please write about this story with the names and places changed to an American restaurant with american people inside then at the end mention "The names and places of this real event have been changed to illustrate a point. This is what is happening in other countries every day, I want to bring light to the terrible things American drones are doing on foreign soil" etc. So few Americans seem to care because to them it's just "some brown people on the other side of the world", showing it in the context of their own homes will make them realize how terrible these drone strikes really are.
- DrewVarner 13y ago
  How's this look? http://avarner.org/TheDroneThatKilledMyGrandson.html http://avarner.org/TheDroneThatKilledMyGrandson.html
rayiner 13y ago
> The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us. It's not that it's far away from us, it's that it happens to others. In this case, to the family of a terrorist that, while born in the U.S., spent a decade waging war against the U.S. on behalf of Al Qaeda while eluding every attempt to bring him to justice. The U.S. reserves the right to have different rules for us versus others like every other people in the history of the world.
- arh68 13y ago
  Do you have a good test for 'us' vs 'others' other than citizenship? What should it be based on? What should we call 'us', and what should we call the 'others'? 'Citizens' & 'Foreigners' seems to be pretty good already.
  - rayiner 13y ago
    I think citizenship is a good general rule, but like every rule it has corner cases. But citizenship guarantees you due process, not a trial regardless of the circumstances. At some point, it becomes impractical to provide a trial (e.g. consider a police man killing a suspect because he presents an imminent deadly threat). We did give civilian trials to terrorists like John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla who were American citizens in our custody. But Al Awalki evaded our attempts to give him judicial process for a decade. Does citizenship mean that you can't be touched as long as authorities can't bring you in alive?
    - arh68 13y ago
      I think it's a false dichotomy to either use kid gloves for citizens or secret hit lists. To compare with the recent Snowden extradition attempt, charges were filed and authorities were notified. Why should Snowden & Anwar be apprehended any differently? To quote Wikipedia, > Yemeni authorities offered guarantees they would not turn al-Awlaki over to the U.S. or let him be questioned. This demands explanation from the State Dept why they didn't pressure Yemen like they recently did to countries offering relief to Snowden. US-Yemen relations cannot be evinced in an Internet comment, but it appears to me the US was quick to pull the trigger when other options were not fully exercised. The least they could have done was charge him, right?
roc 13y ago
> "The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us." The LAPD destroyed a home and burned a suspect alive, while having no good reason to suspect he was even alone. And not only was there very little outrage, but many were actually cheering this on. And this, after the LAPD had multiply-revealed their snap-judgment to be dangerously-poor and restraint to be non-existent, having opened fire on innocent citizens in two separate instances, unprovoked, despite none of the citizens nor vehicles remotely matching the suspects description. Do you really expect the reaction to have been much different, if that cabin was destroyed by hellfire missile, rather than the reckless-to-intentional over-application of tear-gas? The citizenry is, to an appalling degree, OK with this sort of thing so long as the government can convince them that only "very bad people" are being targeted. (cf Ruby Ridge, Waco) Sadly, I don't see them having too much additional trouble doing that, should they start using armed drones instead of SWAT teams.
- rayiner 13y ago
  The Dorner example is actually very apropos. Many people were cheering on the LAPD in that case. Some people were appalled by the cowboy run-and-gun methods of the police. I think very few people, however, would call their actions unconstitutional.
joyeuse6701 13y ago
I wrote out something long and convoluted for this but I'll simplify it: Either wiping the 16 year old off the face of the earth without due process was justified or it wasn't. Justification could be (for the sake of argument): serious threat to national security / several lives at stake / not feasible to apprehend physically (jurisdiction, unfriendly government etc etc.) If upon scrutiny the reasoning behind his demise were not justified: proper adjustments must be made and compensation and punishment doled out. else continue addendum: People seemed ok with this when it was Osama, but not this guy. Seems like the method was less of an issue and it mattered much more about who it was. I agree with that sentiment.
- rayiner 13y ago
  You're ignoring the obvious justification: the strike was targeted at different Al Qaeda officials that he was traveling with: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/yemeni-security-forces-fire-on-protesters-in-sana.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/yemeni-se... ("Airstrikes, believed to have been carried out by American drones, killed at least nine people in southern Yemen on Friday, including a senior official of the regional branch of Al Qaeda and an American, the 17-year-old son of a Qaeda official killed by the United States last month, according to the government and local reports on Saturday.").
  - shadowfox 13y ago
    How much of such "collateral damage" is acceptable in your opinion?
    - rayiner 13y ago
      As a practical matter, the collateral damage is a lot lower with drone strikes than they were in Clinton's day when we lobbed cruise missiles at countries, or before that when we'd do targeted bombings.
- userulluipeste 13y ago
  "People seemed ok with this when it was Osama, but not this guy. Seems like the method was less of an issue and it mattered much more about who it was." In the case of Osama bin Laden a team was deployed and as far as I know they have not annihilated the entire family. In this case a drone was used to wipe out a group of people. The method is therefore very different and if that boy "was not specifically targeted" (which leaves him as collateral damage) then the method is also a very poor choice.
Bulkington 13y ago
Legit concern for a nuclear bomb on an American soil? Plug that into the decision matrix. It's the only possble justification I can come up with for kill lists and domestic spying. Not even the 9/11 attack justifies current scope of anti-terror programs, and the precedent for a 'new normal.'

veidr 13y ago

> I do not look forward to the day when our own brutality is visited upon us. Many people around the world would say that one of those days was September 11, 2001.

downandout 13y ago
9/11 was a single horrific event carried out by a small number of radicals. I don't think it holds a candle by any metric to the lives lost and damage done in an actual government-run war scenario. We don't yet have foreign bombers blowing up cafes on a regular basis because somebody on their hit list was inside, but because of our actions, we someday might.
- angersock 13y ago
  And on that afternoon, there will be rage upon the twitters, and that evening, the news. And on the following day, we'll bomb the everliving christ out of the people we think are responsible, and on some day hence, we will be bombed in response. The wheel turns--might as well get into the drone and bomb business. :(
  - Volpe 13y ago
    Actually I think you'll bomb a bunch of other random people (Iraq, Afghanistan), and continue to treat the responsible "country" (Saudi Arabia) as an ally and friend. Just before people rewrite history, afganistan and iraq governments had nothing to do with 9/11.
    - philwelch 13y ago
      Unless you're a kook, the people responsible for 9/11 were a group whose interests include overthrowing the Saudi government. The erstwhile Afghan "government", the Taliban, harbored them.
      - lostlogin 13y ago
        Yes, but don't be forgetting that the Taliban are a rebranded mujahideen. This crowd were US allies (or were they pawns?). Armed and trained.
        briandon 13y ago
        And Italy was one of the Allies during WW1 before allying itself with Germany in WW2. During the fight against Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire, other nations provided assistance to Italy. Individuals jumped into the fray too. Hemingway, for example, was a volunteer ambulance driver in Italy in WW1. Beating the USA over the head post-911 with the club of having assisted anti-Soviet fighters in the 1970s and 1980s makes as much sense as castigating Italy's WW1-era allies and people like Hemingway in the late 1930s for having come to Italy's aid twenty years earlier.
        lostlogin 13y ago
        The US leaders who started these wars had no issue making comparisons to WW2 and claiming Bush compared to Churchill. Words such as 'Crusade' were used. Good versus Evil. Crappy comparisons have been a hallmark of the campaigns. What I said was, to my knowledge, fact. I was attempting to point out that friends can become enemies, so a bit of tact and care is obviously a good idea. And of course, claiming you're on a crusade and fighting evil is just plain BS. The US deserves castigation for its role in these conflicts, it has acted appallingly, as have others. My own country, New Zealand, has troops in Afghanistan and have been involved in some controversy. The only reason I can think of for this deployment is to brown nose a few so-called allies. Making the world safer one botch job, torture and killing at a time. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1470658/Mayor-of-America-compares-Bush-to-Churchill.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/northamerica/usa/1... http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Bush-s-use-of-word-crusade-a-red-flag-1066045.php http://www.seattlepi.com/news/article/Bush-s-use-of-word-cru... http://www.3news.co.nz/Govt-cant-rule-out-SAS-link-in-Afghan-prisoner-torture/tabid/419/articleID/229127/Default.aspx http://www.3news.co.nz/Govt-cant-rule-out-SAS-link-in-Afghan...
- madaxe 13y ago
  Radical conservatives? Tin-foil hat aside, it strikes me as oddly coincidental that the folks who use drones these days to kill around the planet with impunity are the same folks who had several allegedly drone controlled airliners carry out an attack, garnering public support for several illegal wars. Just saying, it's all mightily convenient. As ever. As to foreign bombers... So? Most Americans agree drone strikes are a good thing, so surely they'd still be a good thing when they start happening on US soil?
  - regal 13y ago
    I like how you say "tin-foil hat aside", then go on to state with what seems to be complete seriousness that 9/11 was carried out by the U.S. against the U.S. using drone-controlled passenger airplanes.
    - madaxe 13y ago
      And? You thought the 9/11 commission report was good and conclusive? WTC7 just "imploded" due to "natural causes"? And of course destroying all the evidence pronto was the best way to investigate the crime? I don't think a single word that comes out of the US (and UK) gov't is truthful. Why would they be truthful about 9/11?
    - LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
      No, but it was convenient in the same way the Reichstag fire was convenient.
      - madaxe 13y ago
        No no, it was filthy commies that started the reichstag fire, right?
        LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
        making it even more convenient. The Nurimberg Laws could be passed thanks to this event. Almost as convenient as 9/11 so that the Patrot Act could be passed.
sneak 13y ago
9/11 wasn't carried out by foreigners. There's no motive. Means, motive, and opportunity: Who'd consider 3000 dead Americans a reasonable price to pay for carte blanche to make a pushbutton military coup possible in this country? The US already controls, coerces, or mutually cooperates with a large number of other sovereign states (as we've seen with this whole Snowden airspace thing, or the global surveillance networks, et c). Such an action would place a person or group that was able to exert leverage over the majority of US persons high in the running for "able to control the majority of humans on Earth". Not a bad prize, that.
- tsotha 13y ago
  Please go somewhere else and take your tinfoil hat with you.
  - PavlovsCat 13y ago
    Explain WTC7. (I don't even speculate "who did what, exactly" -- but that this thing is fishy as fuck, and has been from day one, is undeniable. You can cover your ears and scream tinfoil all you want, but that doesn't answer the gaping questions. Apply Occam's razor, how about that? The possibility that the laws of physics were suspended that day is very slim, even more slim than aliens using lizards to convince mice to hypnotize humans to do it. Logic!)
    - ferdo 13y ago
      What's to explain about a controlled demolition? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zv7BImVvEyk
      - PavlovsCat 13y ago
        or: http://wtc7.net/ http://wtc7.net/ Fires have never before or since destroyed a steel skyscraper. The team that investigated the collapse were kept away from the crime scene. By the time they published their inconclusive report in May, 2002, the evidence had been destroyed. Is any of the above untrue? Why did the government rapidly recycle the steel from the largest and most mysterious engineering failure in world histor? [..] ? Why indeed? That's just scraping the surface, and attacking the ones who ask the questions you kinda should ask yourself, is just being silly. It's been nearly 12 years now, there is no excuse anymore, the shock wore off; "you" accepted Gitmo, so you can deal with this. Wo/man up.

mtgx 13y ago

Sometimes I wish Americans felt what real blowback was. Americans kill so many people abroad, and then they're shocked that there's a "terrorist attack" every 10 years or so, against them. That's nothing. Imagine having these wars with a country that can really fight back. Imagine having that war close to home. I think, then, Americans would be a lot more cautious about sending over attacks to other countries without caring what happens. That's the problem. Americans are very sheltered from the wars they start for the most part, so they let their government do whatever. Americans aren't still thinking 9/11 happened because they hated them for their freedoms, do they?

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
VMG 13y ago
> Sometimes I wish Americans felt what real blowback was. The typical reaction of a nation is not "Oh well, we better stop doing that then".
- nitrogen 13y ago
  Exactly, so why does the USG think it will work in the opposite direction?
  - LekkoscPiwa 13y ago
    Europe is very pacifistic by the US standards precisely because of the wars and totalitarian states experienced in the past. Remember, the "historical memory" doesn't vanish with a generation that experienced Nazism or Communism. It is passed on to the next generations. My guess is that what USG is claiming is that given the US had the same sad and tragic historical experiences as the Europeans did, they would have thought twice before engaging in all the wars. Just to give you some perspective: I live in Poland. 20% of the population - 6 million (not 10,000) civilians - was killed in WW2 by Germans and Russians. Our neighbors. We lived through it. We have quite good relations with both countries. Now - forgive me the language - but how many Poles look at your 9/11 - it's a non-event. And you go like crazy on a 1000-year war with billion Muslims because some idiots blew up a couple of buildings. I'm sorry but that's how I and I'm sure many in Europe perceive it. Completely and totally overreacted. Just bring the responsible before the Court give them the due process and hand them or something. You are totally inexperienced as a nation with just 200 years of history with the phenomenon called "shit happens" and totally, totally overreact to the point it just looks comical. You are like this big fat guy with a machine guy at a bar doing shooting-frenzy trying to kill a fly.

chrischen 13y ago

And probably, to some degree, because it's happening to people who aren't traditionally regarded as Americans. For example, despite having earned citizenship, a lot of people would still regard me as Chinese instead of American. And even people in China would claim I'm still Chinese, not American, because they see an American as a white male of european descent.

ekianjo 13y ago
Well, nobody should be considered "American" in the first place since it's a country made by immigration (apart from native indians). And the principle behind America is that you can be born "American" without being born in the country. But I know what you mean, there's the principles on one hand and the reality on the other.
- Sven7 13y ago
  "Nationalism is the biggest disease on the planet. Nations have the wrong granularity. They’re too small to be global and too big to be local, and all they can think about is competing." - Nicholas Negroponte
  - guelo 13y ago
    Yea but nation states have done wonders for the advancement of humanity. The conundrum...
    - alan_cx 13y ago
      So did the steam engine, but its pretty much redundant now.
      - lifeisstillgood 13y ago
        Steam engines were replaced only after the invention of a much more efficient engine (internal combustion). What is the much more efficient boundary of government that is not a nationstate ?

throwmeaway33 13y ago

To play devil's advocate: (and this isn't to excuse the US's actions, but to illustrate a major difference between what happened and what you're talking about) The big difference in this case is that we have tacit (or maybe even explicit) consent from the Yemeni government to hunt Al Qaeda. So the representatives of the people of that country are allowing us to kill these people basically on their behalf. (which doesn't make it OK, but is a major differnce) It's not just that we are bullying Yemen into allowing us to bomb people in their country - it's that the Yemini authorities (and probably most of the population) don't want these people operating in their country but they lack the resources and infrastructure to stop them themselves; and that's where we come in. Bare in min that we also give Yemen a lot of military aid so that we DON'T HAVE TO come in and do their law enforcement for them. In this case that wasn't sufficient and we intervene on their behalf To make your example comparable you would need to have a person that is evading US authorities, operating in the US, and that we are completely incapable of stopping (and only some other country could do it for us?)

firat 13y ago
Bullshit. Here is why: Yemeni government != Yemeni people. The authorities, probably, don't mind letting US drones kill people, simply because it won't be them getting killed. Imagine the US military firing tear gas and water cannons on protesters in Turkey and saying "It's OK, your government gave us permission". The major problem in the Middle East is that, the governments can get away with not giving a fuck about the people.
- throwmeaway33 13y ago
  "Imagine the US military firing tear gas and water cannons on protesters in Turkey and saying "It's OK, your government gave us permission". " I think you're having reading comprehension issues. It's not just that the gov't are requesting help. The reason we are involved in Yemen is because the Yemini gov't is incapable of exerting it's own will b/c they are weak and poor. Their interests are also strongly tied to our interests - so that's why we intervene. Your example has is not at all analogous. The Turkish gov't is not incapable of tear gassing and water cannoning protesters, so they fail the first criteria of being incapable of carrying out their will. The example also fails the second criteria for intervention - that it's strongly in the US's interest. "Yemeni government != Yemeni people" Who else can you appeal to in Yemen to get permission to operate drones? And are you seriously suggesting that the Yemeni people are supporting Al Qaeda? If they are, then they become the "enemy". The way it works for other nations is we tell them: 1 - You will fight Al Qaeda in our country 2 - If you are incapable, we will help you do it by providing military aid. 3 - If you are still incapable we will us our own armed forces to make sure you are able to. 4 - If you are not willing to fight Al Qaeda or are actively defending them they we will intervene anyways. The last point either leads to the case of the Taliban where we destroy them because they are defending Al Qaeda, or to Pakistan where they are forced to accept our help.

lifeisstillgood 13y ago

I respect your views and comments and the above is correct and mournful and valid. But it suffers from something too common around here - dispassion. Looking at the wider, geopolitical implications, a step back from the facts and keeping things on the level of "people" - not that person. I read your comment first, then dived into the article. I expected to agree with you, but I just felt mounting horror, outrage and a realisation that things are beyond a line I never knew existed. So here is my comment Jesus H Fucking Christ on a Stick! We are blowing up American Citizens sitting in cafes and legally it's "untouchable". Are we that fucking removed from reality that its ok to murder people with no trial or comeback. It seems its ok to blow away the son and grandson of other country's government ministers and not expect a war, a prison sentence, or even a mention on CNN Are we that fragile as a civilisation that the tiny amount of damage terrorism presents is actually a threat? What did I miss - I thought we had industry, welfare, science and ingenuity. Stop murdering people. I am writing to my MP but mostly I would like some figures - there was a twitter thing that reported gun murders. Can we do the same for drone murders?

cinger 13y ago
http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/ they have an amazing datastore of all of the known drone strikes http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drones/ http://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/category/projects/drone... if you click into a specific country, they give detailed accounts of the events, like location, and how many dead, down to the number of civilians versus presumed militants, and also a detailed description of what occurred i remember reading of one where the drone bombed a shelter with presumed militants inside, one person survived, crawled out of the wreckage and began to run into the desert, the drone circled around and tracked and followed the man for twenty minutes as he ran away and finally shot him dead there are so many that I had to go into their archive to find the one spoken about in this article, and it is a very detailed account: YEM034 October 14 2011 ♦ 7-9 people killed, including 16-year and 17 year old boy ♦ 2 teenage children reported killed A second drone attack then struck either a vehicle or a restaurant area. PBS Frontline later filmed at the scene of the attack, the footage showing the ruined foundations of a small building along with a nearby crater. Abdel- Rahman Anwar al Awlaki, the 16-year old son of al-Awlaki, died... the article is written by NASSER al-AWLAKI... Also initially reported killed was militant Ibrahim al-Bana. Doubts have since been raised about al-Bana’s death. A statement from Abdel-Rahman’s family read, ‘he left with some friends for dinner under the moonlight when an American missile landed, killing Abdel-Rahman and his friends‘. In a separate statement, the family said: ’On October 14th, 2011 Abdulrahman, along with some of his tribe’s youth have gone barbecuing under the moonlight. A drone missile hit their congregation killing Abdulrahman and several other teenagers’. A second teenager and family member, Ahmed Abdel-Rahman al-Awlaki, 17, is known to have died. Five to seven others were also killed, including Sarhan al-Qusa (aka Farhan al Quso) brother of AQAP leader Fahd al-Qusa or Quso, according to a member of Awlaki’s tribe. Reuters later claimed that the dead men were planning to renounce al Qaeda before they were killed. Elders claimed that four other Awlaki tribal members died in the strike. Two weeks after the strike, AQAP released leaflets stating that Ibrahim al-Bana had not been killed. Ansar al-Sharia also reported in its second October newsletter that Bana’s death was ‘a lie’. In a statement, Yemen security officials said the air strike was among five that targeted al Qaeda positions in Shabwa, adding that al-Bana was wanted internationally for planning attacks both inside and outside Yemen. ‘He was one of the group’s most dangerous operatives,’ it said. The Washington Post reported that it was JSOC rather than the CIA which carried out the attack: When pressed on why the CIA had not pulled the trigger, US officials said it was because the main target…an Egyptian named Ibrahim al-Banna, was not on the agency’s kill list. The Awaki teenager, a US citizen with no history of involvement with al Qaeda, was an unintended casualty. In interviews, senior US officials acknowledged that the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why. In April 2012 the Toronto Star featured an interview with Nasser al-Awalaki, grandfather of Abdel-Rahman and former Yemen government minister. In it he said that former Yemen President Saleh had sent him a message insisting that he had had no role in his grandson’s death: ‘Tell Dr. Nasser I swear to God that I have nothing to do with the killing of his son.’Nasser al-Awlaki also said he would be taking legal action: ‘I am only a university professor and I’m not the kind of guy who would enlist tribal people. My only chance now is to go to court and I hope as far as Abdulrahman at least, they will be fair to us. They cannot claim he’s collateral damage.’ In April 2013 Jeremy Scahill added further controversy to the attack, reporting: A former senior official in the Obama administration told me that after Abdulrahman’s killing, the president was “surprised and upset and wanted an explanation.” The former official, who worked on the targeted killing program, said that according to intelligence and Special Operations officials, the target of the strike was al-Banna, the AQAP propagandist. “We had no idea the kid was there. We were told al-Banna was alone,” the former official told me. Once it became clear that the teenager had been killed, he added, military and intelligence officials asserted, “It was a mistake, a bad mistake.” However, John Brennan, at the time President Obama’s senior adviser on counterterrorism and homeland security, “suspected that the kid had been killed intentionally and ordered a review. I don’t know what happened with the review.”‘ And in May 2013 US Attorney-General Eric Holder told US lawmakers Abdulrahman was ‘not specifically targeted by the United States’. In a letter, Holder explained Anwar al Awlaki was a legitimate target and that ‘[US] citizenship alone does not make such individuals immune from being targeted’. He said three other US citizens, including Abdulrahman, had been killed by US drones during Obama’s presidency. Abdulrahman’s grandfather discusses his death in a July 2012 interview for ACLU and CCR Type of action: Air assault, drone strike Location: Azan, Shabwa References: CNN, GlobalPost, Business Insider, Yemen Post, ABC, AFP (via Taiwan News), Reuters,Press TV, AP, Washington Post, Long War Journal, LA Times, Reuters, Yemen Post, Time Magazine, Antiwar.com, Empty Wheel, Salon, Al-Awlaki family statement, EmptyWheel, Toronto Star, PBS Frontline, CNN, The Nation (US), Department of Justice i was first turned onto this site[1] from an app that attempted to text you every time a new drone strike was posted to this site, the APPL app store refused its submission a number of times citing "The features and/or content of your app were not useful or entertaining enough" .[1]. http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/ http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/08/drone-app/

TimJRobinson 13y ago

Can someone (with better writing skill than I) please write about this story with the names and places changed to an American restaurant with american people inside then at the end mention "The names and places of this real event have been changed to illustrate a point. This is what is happening in other countries every day, I want to bring light to the terrible things American drones are doing on foreign soil" etc. So few Americans seem to care because to them it's just "some brown people on the other side of the world", showing it in the context of their own homes will make them realize how terrible these drone strikes really are.

DrewVarner 13y ago
How's this look? http://avarner.org/TheDroneThatKilledMyGrandson.html http://avarner.org/TheDroneThatKilledMyGrandson.html

rayiner 13y ago

> The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us. It's not that it's far away from us, it's that it happens to others. In this case, to the family of a terrorist that, while born in the U.S., spent a decade waging war against the U.S. on behalf of Al Qaeda while eluding every attempt to bring him to justice. The U.S. reserves the right to have different rules for us versus others like every other people in the history of the world.

arh68 13y ago
Do you have a good test for 'us' vs 'others' other than citizenship? What should it be based on? What should we call 'us', and what should we call the 'others'? 'Citizens' & 'Foreigners' seems to be pretty good already.
- rayiner 13y ago
  I think citizenship is a good general rule, but like every rule it has corner cases. But citizenship guarantees you due process, not a trial regardless of the circumstances. At some point, it becomes impractical to provide a trial (e.g. consider a police man killing a suspect because he presents an imminent deadly threat). We did give civilian trials to terrorists like John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla who were American citizens in our custody. But Al Awalki evaded our attempts to give him judicial process for a decade. Does citizenship mean that you can't be touched as long as authorities can't bring you in alive?
  - arh68 13y ago
    I think it's a false dichotomy to either use kid gloves for citizens or secret hit lists. To compare with the recent Snowden extradition attempt, charges were filed and authorities were notified. Why should Snowden & Anwar be apprehended any differently? To quote Wikipedia, > Yemeni authorities offered guarantees they would not turn al-Awlaki over to the U.S. or let him be questioned. This demands explanation from the State Dept why they didn't pressure Yemen like they recently did to countries offering relief to Snowden. US-Yemen relations cannot be evinced in an Internet comment, but it appears to me the US was quick to pull the trigger when other options were not fully exercised. The least they could have done was charge him, right?

roc 13y ago

> "The American citizenry tends to be OK with this kind of thing as long as it happens far away from us." The LAPD destroyed a home and burned a suspect alive, while having no good reason to suspect he was even alone. And not only was there very little outrage, but many were actually cheering this on. And this, after the LAPD had multiply-revealed their snap-judgment to be dangerously-poor and restraint to be non-existent, having opened fire on innocent citizens in two separate instances, unprovoked, despite none of the citizens nor vehicles remotely matching the suspects description. Do you really expect the reaction to have been much different, if that cabin was destroyed by hellfire missile, rather than the reckless-to-intentional over-application of tear-gas? The citizenry is, to an appalling degree, OK with this sort of thing so long as the government can convince them that only "very bad people" are being targeted. (cf Ruby Ridge, Waco) Sadly, I don't see them having too much additional trouble doing that, should they start using armed drones instead of SWAT teams.

rayiner 13y ago
The Dorner example is actually very apropos. Many people were cheering on the LAPD in that case. Some people were appalled by the cowboy run-and-gun methods of the police. I think very few people, however, would call their actions unconstitutional.

joyeuse6701 13y ago

I wrote out something long and convoluted for this but I'll simplify it: Either wiping the 16 year old off the face of the earth without due process was justified or it wasn't. Justification could be (for the sake of argument): serious threat to national security / several lives at stake / not feasible to apprehend physically (jurisdiction, unfriendly government etc etc.) If upon scrutiny the reasoning behind his demise were not justified: proper adjustments must be made and compensation and punishment doled out. else continue addendum: People seemed ok with this when it was Osama, but not this guy. Seems like the method was less of an issue and it mattered much more about who it was. I agree with that sentiment.

rayiner 13y ago
You're ignoring the obvious justification: the strike was targeted at different Al Qaeda officials that he was traveling with: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/yemeni-security-forces-fire-on-protesters-in-sana.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/16/world/middleeast/yemeni-se... ("Airstrikes, believed to have been carried out by American drones, killed at least nine people in southern Yemen on Friday, including a senior official of the regional branch of Al Qaeda and an American, the 17-year-old son of a Qaeda official killed by the United States last month, according to the government and local reports on Saturday.").
- shadowfox 13y ago
  How much of such "collateral damage" is acceptable in your opinion?
  - rayiner 13y ago
    As a practical matter, the collateral damage is a lot lower with drone strikes than they were in Clinton's day when we lobbed cruise missiles at countries, or before that when we'd do targeted bombings.
userulluipeste 13y ago
"People seemed ok with this when it was Osama, but not this guy. Seems like the method was less of an issue and it mattered much more about who it was." In the case of Osama bin Laden a team was deployed and as far as I know they have not annihilated the entire family. In this case a drone was used to wipe out a group of people. The method is therefore very different and if that boy "was not specifically targeted" (which leaves him as collateral damage) then the method is also a very poor choice.

Bulkington 13y ago

Legit concern for a nuclear bomb on an American soil? Plug that into the decision matrix. It's the only possble justification I can come up with for kill lists and domestic spying. Not even the 9/11 attack justifies current scope of anti-terror programs, and the precedent for a 'new normal.'