Drones - its a method - who cares?

[Freewill]

The Killed-at-16 Transparency Test: Obama Owes Us Answers About This Dead American
What is the White House hiding about the demise of a boy they say they didn't target but admit to blowing up?

The Killed-at-16 Transparency Test: Obama Owes Us Answers About This Dead American - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic

My gosh he looks like a terrorist that needs to be taken out. And yes they did target him.

 

[Stephanie]

Gibbs is right. The parent made a bad choice, placed the child with enemies of America, and the child paid a horrible price for the parent's bad choices.

holy smokes....anyone remember John Walker Lindh

 

[Kondor3]

"...yes they did target him."

And we know this how?

 

[JakeStarkey]

Gibbs is right. The parent made a bad choice, placed the child with enemies of America, and the child paid a horrible price for the parent's bad choices.

anyone remember John Walker Lindh

Bad choices led to consequences.

 

[Indofred]

When exactly did America go to war with children in Pakistan?

I assume when an American drone attack murdered the first one.

 

[Intense]

Drones - its a method - who cares?

If its illegal and/or morally wrong to kill someone - then its illegal and/or morally wrong to kil them. It doesn't matter how they were killed, does it?

On the other hand - if its legal and/or morally right to kill someone - such as legitimate military targets - then why is it wrong to use a method which places U.S. servicemen at a minimal risk?


Seems to me that the same folks who were fine with us setting Baghdad on fire using smart bombs and - at the same time - placing U.S. pilots at risk - are against using unmanned aircraft to conduct more surgical strikes of military targets. Do you guys want U.S. servicemen to die, or do you just hate Obama?

It is a fair question, though you do put your OP at risk with that asinine baiting question at the end of the post. The problem with using drones to kill in Foreign Countries, that we either have not declared War on, or received permission from is plainly evident in relation to International Law, no? Additionally there is the concern of collateral damage. These concerns seem rational to me personally, without regard to which Political Party is in control of the White-House. My concern here is why it doesn't bother you. Clearly in Targeting People for Assassination, there should be at the least a Legal Process involved with both accountability and oversight. Does this threaten you? How? Why?

 

[Indofred]

When exactly did America go to war with children in Pakistan?

when Bush invaded?

Bush invaded Pakistan? Are you for real?

He did.
The invasion was restricted to drones, illegally entering another country's airspace to kill people but it was still an invasion.
You lot would complain if Mexico did it to you.

 

[Freewill]

I disagree. Targeting first responders is a horrendous tactic.

Blind drone strikes I find reprehensible as well (that is bombing people or a group of people because they look like bad guys, not because you have intel on the whereabouts of someone who is a target).

Do you understand target recognition, acquisition, and delivery? Or recon by fire?

You have little concept of what you are discussing

Did these guys use those terms?

[ame=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0]Collateral Murder - Wikileaks - Iraq - YouTube[/ame]

That is really a sad video.

It apparently happened spontaneously and wasn't something ordered by the WH or the CIA.

What must they think of us?

We are still doing it through the drone program with orders from the WH and the CIA.

 

[Freewill]

Freewill has a poster of Osama on his wall.

I understand your confusion but that is a poster of your mama not OBL.

Sorry I am against killing children and you are all for it in the fake attempt at security.

 

[Indofred]

Using aircraft to kill civilians is terrorism but using aircraft to kill civilians is a much needed form of defence against terrorists.

All Americans have the right to trial expept the ones who you chose to execute without trial.

Can anyone see the problems here?

 

[tinydancer]

Gibbs is right. The parent made a bad choice, placed the child with enemies of America, and the child paid a horrible price for the parent's bad choices.

Oh, any further talk about lack of due process, etc., merely witnesses that the person talking such has not a clue how the law works or how military operations work.

He was never "placed with enemies of America". Never. He was an innocent murdered by a drone.

An American child from Denver looking for his father.

He was a boy who hadn't seen his father in two years, since his father had gone into hiding.

He was a boy who knew his father was on an American kill list and who snuck out of his family's home in the early morning hours of September 4, 2011, to try to find him.

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made.

He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

How Team Obama Justifies the Killing of a 16-Year-Old American - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic

 

[Billo_Really]

Using aircraft to kill civilians is terrorism but using aircraft to kill civilians is a much needed form of defence against terrorists.

All Americans have the right to trial expept the ones who you chose to execute without trial.

Can anyone see the problems here?

Yep!

 

[tinydancer]

To have the ability to assassinate a citizen of America without a trial is just flat out wrong.

Assassinating Children - YEMEN DRONE MASSACRES

Abdulrahman al-Awlakiby Jacob G. Hornberger

The extraordinary power of the U.S. government to assassinate people has, once again, been manifested in the assassination of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki.

No, that's not Anwar al-Awlaki, the American Muslim cleric whom U.S. officials recently assassinated in Yemen. That's Abdulrahm al-Awlaki, the 16-year-old son of Anwar al-Awlaki.

There are several things that are especially fascinating about the U.S. government's assassination of this American teenager, who apparently traveled to Yemen looking for his father before his father was assassinated:

First, the U.S. government has assassinated a minor.

Second, no one except the assassins knows why they assassinated the boy.

Third, the people who planned and carried out the assassination — from President Obama, to the Pentagon, to the CIA — aren't talking.

Fourth, nobody can force them to explain why they killed the boy.

Noam Chomsky - Deterring Democracy: Assassinating Children - YEMEN DRONE MASSACRES

 

[Quantum Windbag]

Because you folks are trying to approach it as a legal issue, when, in fact, the drone is merely a piece of technology.

If you wish to discuss the war making powers of the CIC, go ahead, but the technological argument is not going to support your case.

You seem to think that drones somehow change the fact that people are being killed.

They do not.

 

[Quantum Windbag]

I will ask the questions I think we all know the answers to do those of you who support the drone strikes now did you support their use when the program was used by President Bush? If these same strikes were being done under the orders off a President McCain or Romney would be supporting them?

Just because your answers are dependent on which party is in control does not mean mine are.

 

[Kondor3]

I am not convinced that the Obama Administration intentionally targeted the 16-year-old kid.

And the US does not cruise the low-altitude skies over Yemen looking for campfires to shoot $80K missiles at.

When the story comes out...

My money is on an Intended Kill against some valid Terrorist Target.

An Intended Kill that went wrong in some way.

Up to and including (perhaps even primarily due to) Bad Intelligence.

Again.

 

[NYcarbineer]

I am not convinced that the Obama Administration intentionally targeted the 16-year-old kid.

And the US does not cruise the low-altitude skies over Yemen looking for campfires to shoot $80K missiles at.

When the story comes out...

My money is on an Intended Kill against some valid Terrorist Target.

An Intended Kill that went wrong in some way.

Up to and including (perhaps even primarily due to) Bad Intelligence.

Again.

There was a legitimate target in that strike, I've posted it several times but the rightwing inmates here simply ignore that fact because it ruins their myth;

it's like the fundamentalist religious nuts who think the Earth is 6000 years old - no amount of fact will change their minds.

 

[NYcarbineer]

I am not convinced that the Obama Administration intentionally targeted the 16-year-old kid.

And the US does not cruise the low-altitude skies over Yemen looking for campfires to shoot $80K missiles at.

When the story comes out...

My money is on an Intended Kill against some valid Terrorist Target.

An Intended Kill that went wrong in some way.

Up to and including (perhaps even primarily due to) Bad Intelligence.

Again.

Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in 2006 by an air attack on a safehouse in Iraq.

In that attack his wife and child were also killed.

No one around here who is throwing a hysterical piss and moan fit over the death of that 16 year old had so much as a peep of complaint about the killing of that child. Not one of them ever called Bush a murderer for that.

 

[Indofred]

I am not convinced that the Obama Administration intentionally targeted the 16-year-old kid.

And the US does not cruise the low-altitude skies over Yemen looking for campfires to shoot $80K missiles at.

When the story comes out...

My money is on an Intended Kill against some valid Terrorist Target.

An Intended Kill that went wrong in some way.

Up to and including (perhaps even primarily due to) Bad Intelligence.

Again.

A New York cop is on the street and sees someone he thinks is a very dangerous mass murderer who he's been hunting down.
He shoots the man and kills him.

Oh, bugger, wrong guy - No worries; could have happened to anyone - carry on.

Would that happen and, if it did, would the cop get away scot free?

 

[Indofred]

I am not convinced that the Obama Administration intentionally targeted the 16-year-old kid.

And the US does not cruise the low-altitude skies over Yemen looking for campfires to shoot $80K missiles at.

When the story comes out...

My money is on an Intended Kill against some valid Terrorist Target.

An Intended Kill that went wrong in some way.

Up to and including (perhaps even primarily due to) Bad Intelligence.

Again.

There was a legitimate target in that strike, I've posted it several times but the rightwing inmates here simply ignore that fact because it ruins their myth;

it's like the fundamentalist religious nuts who think the Earth is 6000 years old - no amount of fact will change their minds.

The 9/11 Pentagon attack was against a legitimate military target so I assume it was fine to kill a load of civilians in the process as they simply got in the way.

Or not?