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Congrats on being a voice of reason. Like anything, this has upsides & downsides, and it doesn't help anyone to completely ignore one side. Upsides: At least f

by jfoster 13y ago

Congrats on being a voice of reason. Like anything, this has upsides & downsides, and it doesn't help anyone to completely ignore one side. Upsides: At least for the moment, they appear to be targeting people who are genuine threats to many other people. Downsides: It can be a slippery slope, and how can people be sure such power isn't being abused? Perhaps one way to mitigate the downsides might be for the agencies involved to be extremely transparent about each case, releasing everything that led them to the decision that they took.

rurounijones 13y ago
"It can be a slippery slope". (A) Killing your own citizens with (B) secret laws / justifications using (C) zero / secret "evidence" and (D) No oversight by a group outside of those who are ordering the killings can be a slippery slope? That is not the slippery slope, that is the ditch at the bottom once you have slid all the way down.
- jfoster 13y ago
  If those people were plotting to kill hundreds/thousands of your more innocent citizens, then you could do a lot worse. The problem is where you draw the line.
  - rurounijones 13y ago
    In legal terms (and I use that loosely) they have already decided that they have that right, so in that sense we have already reached the bottom. Now, implementation wise you are correct in that things could be worse. However in the "We are the government and we can do this" sense...ditch. (It must be said that the nice thing about the large-scale implementation problem is that the US population would rise up against that, but that is small comfort for the victims in the "small enough that 'Joe Average' doesn't care about it" death-list.)
  - grey-area 13y ago
    If those people were plotting to kill hundreds/thousands of your more innocent citizens And if they weren't?
    - jasonlotito 13y ago
      I don't know of any case where they specifically targeted people they thought were innocent. Can you provide anything to support that claim?
      - pantaril 13y ago
        From http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-kil... : "The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen...The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said only that Abdulrahman was not “specifically targeted,” raising more questions than he answered." I don't know if it is common for u.s. army to kill people without targeting them but if it is the case they should better learn how to aim.
      - grey-area 13y ago
        Almost every drone strike kills several people - usually only one of those people is the intended target. In many cases (including the one linked) they have admitted that the people killed were not the target. Not as an apology (those are rare, they don't feel the need to admit mistakes because of course the missions and targets are secret), but simply to say that those people were not the intended target, just collateral damage. Here's another well-known example of firing on a crowd: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.lukeharding http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.luk... By the time you're firing missiles at a restaurant, you have accepted that as long as your target is killed, some innocents will die with them. Any civilians, waiters, passers by etc who are caught in the blast are clearly just the cost of doing business. The attacks don't happen in a war zone or under cover of war, except the eternal and ill-specified 'war on terror'. If you want to argue that is not specifically targeting innocent people I'd respond that they are indiscriminately targeting innocent people in the hope of hitting their targets, which is worse. It's remarkable to me that people still try to defend these attacks - if missiles were used on targets in a town on the US, killing several bystanders, there would be outrage, and rightly so. For the civilians on the ground, it is equivalent to suicide bombers taking out a crowd, some of whom are off-duty troops - the two acts have very similar consequences.
  - foqiwjoqafi 13y ago
    who's going to draw the line for the USA? This shit is 100000% hypocrite, what the FUCK would happen if any other country had killed so many innocents as the US do all the fucking time with it's stupid hypocrite bullshit everywhere? Nothing fucking happens, just look at the data of how many innocent people including children drone strikes have taken. Why doesn't this have any weight in anything? Oh, I know, all the flashlight is always just pointed at any nutter in your country that managed to get a 3 to 5 bodycount or wathever and spin the shit out of this mess as to justify what you do. No wonder there's people plotting against you.
kubiiii 13y ago
A huge donwside is that it creates 10 potential terrorists seeking revenge for every suppressed potential threat.
- jfoster 13y ago
  That's a good point, it might do that. (haven't seen evidence, but it does sound plausible)
  - chii 13y ago
    And the response, of course, would be to kill those, and also the new ones that arise out of these killings. Until, the population is subdued. Or, when the number gets to be big enough, we declare a war, and the pwn the country.
  - prawn 13y ago
    CIA analyst on al-Qaeda: "They hate us for what we do, not who we are."

by jfoster 13y ago

rurounijones 13y ago

"It can be a slippery slope". (A) Killing your own citizens with (B) secret laws / justifications using (C) zero / secret "evidence" and (D) No oversight by a group outside of those who are ordering the killings can be a slippery slope? That is not the slippery slope, that is the ditch at the bottom once you have slid all the way down.

jfoster 13y ago
If those people were plotting to kill hundreds/thousands of your more innocent citizens, then you could do a lot worse. The problem is where you draw the line.
- rurounijones 13y ago
  In legal terms (and I use that loosely) they have already decided that they have that right, so in that sense we have already reached the bottom. Now, implementation wise you are correct in that things could be worse. However in the "We are the government and we can do this" sense...ditch. (It must be said that the nice thing about the large-scale implementation problem is that the US population would rise up against that, but that is small comfort for the victims in the "small enough that 'Joe Average' doesn't care about it" death-list.)
- grey-area 13y ago
  If those people were plotting to kill hundreds/thousands of your more innocent citizens And if they weren't?
  - jasonlotito 13y ago
    I don't know of any case where they specifically targeted people they thought were innocent. Can you provide anything to support that claim?
    - pantaril 13y ago
      From http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-killed-my-grandson.html?_r=0 http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-kil... : "The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen...The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said only that Abdulrahman was not “specifically targeted,” raising more questions than he answered." I don't know if it is common for u.s. army to kill people without targeting them but if it is the case they should better learn how to aim.
    - grey-area 13y ago
      Almost every drone strike kills several people - usually only one of those people is the intended target. In many cases (including the one linked) they have admitted that the people killed were not the target. Not as an apology (those are rare, they don't feel the need to admit mistakes because of course the missions and targets are secret), but simply to say that those people were not the intended target, just collateral damage. Here's another well-known example of firing on a crowd: http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.lukeharding http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.luk... By the time you're firing missiles at a restaurant, you have accepted that as long as your target is killed, some innocents will die with them. Any civilians, waiters, passers by etc who are caught in the blast are clearly just the cost of doing business. The attacks don't happen in a war zone or under cover of war, except the eternal and ill-specified 'war on terror'. If you want to argue that is not specifically targeting innocent people I'd respond that they are indiscriminately targeting innocent people in the hope of hitting their targets, which is worse. It's remarkable to me that people still try to defend these attacks - if missiles were used on targets in a town on the US, killing several bystanders, there would be outrage, and rightly so. For the civilians on the ground, it is equivalent to suicide bombers taking out a crowd, some of whom are off-duty troops - the two acts have very similar consequences.
- foqiwjoqafi 13y ago
  who's going to draw the line for the USA? This shit is 100000% hypocrite, what the FUCK would happen if any other country had killed so many innocents as the US do all the fucking time with it's stupid hypocrite bullshit everywhere? Nothing fucking happens, just look at the data of how many innocent people including children drone strikes have taken. Why doesn't this have any weight in anything? Oh, I know, all the flashlight is always just pointed at any nutter in your country that managed to get a 3 to 5 bodycount or wathever and spin the shit out of this mess as to justify what you do. No wonder there's people plotting against you.

kubiiii 13y ago

A huge donwside is that it creates 10 potential terrorists seeking revenge for every suppressed potential threat.

jfoster 13y ago
That's a good point, it might do that. (haven't seen evidence, but it does sound plausible)
- chii 13y ago
  And the response, of course, would be to kill those, and also the new ones that arise out of these killings. Until, the population is subdued. Or, when the number gets to be big enough, we declare a war, and the pwn the country.
- prawn 13y ago
  CIA analyst on al-Qaeda: "They hate us for what we do, not who we are."