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Make America Great Again
Join Date: Oct 2006
Location: Springpatch
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American drones are inefficient, terrorize civilians, and create more terrorists.
This. Is an absolutely devastating read.
Even if you buy into drones. Even if you don't mind the complete lack of checks and balances on their usage. Even if you don't mind their liberal usage. Even if you think the sacrifices being made are excusable and necessary blowback. Your tax dollars go into this program that seemingly creates as much antipathy towards us as it extinguishes. It creates terror while pretending to be fighting it. And ths study from NYU shows the tremendous civilian cost that goes into it. The drone program creates a warfare that America would already be trigger-happy to use. But add into the fact that there's no checks on this power, no conceivable way to exhaust it, and no attempts from either party to even remotely slow it down... and this becomes a practice whose blowback seems tailor made for civilian psychological destruction, if not outright physical destruction. Death from above, in robot form. The sad thing is, the human fingers on the button turn out to be as indifferent as the drones themselves. http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...a-drone-deaths New Stanford/NYU study documents the civilian terror from Obama's drones New research shows the terrorizing impact of drones in Pakistan, false statements from US officials, and how it increases the terror threat Glenn Greenwald Tuesday 25 September 2012 08.18 EDT A vitally important and thoroughly documented new report on the impact of Obama's drone campaign has just been released by researchers at NYU School of Law and Stanford University Law School. Entitled "Living Under Drones: Death, Injury and Trauma to Civilians From US Drone Practices in Pakistan", the report details the terrorizing effects of Obama's drone assaults as well as the numerous, highly misleading public statements from administration officials about that campaign. The study's purpose was to conduct an "independent investigations into whether, and to what extent, drone strikes in Pakistan conformed to international law and caused harm and/or injury to civilians". The report is "based on over 130 detailed interviews with victims and witnesses of drone activity, their family members, current and former Pakistani government officials, representatives from five major Pakistani political parties, subject matter experts, lawyers, medical professionals, development and humanitarian workers, members of civil society, academics, and journalists." Witnesses "provided first-hand accounts of drone strikes, and provided testimony about a range of issues, including the missile strikes themselves, the strike sites, the victims' bodies, or a family member or members killed or injured in the strike". Here is the powerful first three paragraphs of the report, summarizing its main findings: ![]() Whilte noting that it is difficult to obtain precise information on the number of civilian deaths "because of US efforts to shield the drone program from democratic accountability", the report nonetheless concludes: "while civilian casualties are rarely acknowledged by the US government, there is significant evidence that US drone strikes have injured and killed civilians." But beyond body counts, there's the fact that "US drone strike policies cause considerable and under-accounted for harm to the daily lives of ordinary civilians, beyond death and physical injury": ![]() In other words, the people in the areas targeted by Obama's drone campaign are being systematically terrorized. There's just no other word for it. It is a campaign of terror - highly effective terror - regardless of what noble progressive sentiments one wishes to believe reside in the heart of the leader ordering it. And that's precisely why the report, to its great credit, uses that term to describe the Obama policy: the drone campaign "terrorizes men, women, and children". Along the same lines, note that the report confirms what had already been previously documented: the Obama campaign's despicable (and likely criminal) targeting of rescuers who arrive to provide aid to the victims of the original strike. Noting that even funerals of drone victims have been targeted under Obama, the report documents that the US has "made family members afraid to attend funerals". The result of this tactic is as predictable as it is heinous: Quote:
Perhaps worst of all, the report details at length that the prime excuse offered by Obama defenders for this continuous killing - it Keeps Us Safe™ by killing The Terrorists™ - is dubious "at best"; indeed, the opposite is more likely true: ![]() All the way back in 2004, the Rumsfeld Pentagon commissioned a study to determine the causes of anti-US terrorism, and even it concluded: "Muslims do not 'hate our freedom,' but rather, they hate our policies." Running around the world beating your chest, bellowing "we're at war!", and bombing multiple Muslim countries does not keep one safe. It manifestly does the opposite, since it ensures that even the most rational people will calculate that targeting Americans with violence in response is just and necessary to deter further aggression. A one-day attack on US soil eleven years ago unleashed a never-ending campaign of violence around the world from the target and its allies. Is it really a challenge to understand that continuous bombings and civilian-killing assaults over many years, in many Muslim countries, will generate the same desire for aggression and vengeance against the US? Time and again, those who have attempted to perpetrate attacks on US soil have cited the Muslim children and other innocent human beings extinguished by Obama's drones. Recall the words of the attempted Times Square bomber, Pakistani-American Faisal Shahzad, at his sentencing hearing when the federal judge presiding over his case, Miriam Goldman Cedarbaum, asked incredulously how he could possibly use violence that he knew would result in the deaths even of innocent children -- as though she were literally unaware that her own government continuously does exactly that: Quote:
Perhaps most importantly, the report documents the extreme levels of propaganda used by the western press to deceive their citizens into believing pure myths about the drone campaign. As I've argued before, the worst of these myths is the journalistic mimicry of the term "militants" to describe drone victims even when those outlets have no idea who was killed or whether that term is accurate (indeed, the term itself is almost as ill-defined as "terrorist"). This media practice became particularly inexcusable after the New York Times revealed in May that "Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants." Incredibly, even after that radical redefinition was revealed, and even after the Obama administration got caught red-handed spewing demonstrable falsehoods about the identity of drone victims, US media outlets continued to use the term "militant" to describe drone victims. The new report urges that this practice stop: ![]() Significantly, the report says the prime culprit of these evils is what it calls the "dramatic escalation" of the drone campaign by the 2009 Nobel Peace laureate - escalated not just in sheer numbers (in less than four years, Obama "has reportedly carried out more than five times" the number ordered by Bush in eight years), but more so, the indiscriminate nature of the strikes. As Tuesday's Guardian article on this report states: it "blames the US president, Barack Obama, for the escalation of 'signature strikes' in which groups are selected merely through remote 'pattern of life' analysis." The report is equally damning when documenting the attempts of the Obama administration to suppress information about its drone victims, and worse, to actively mislead when they deign selectively to release information. Recognizing the difficulty of determining the number of civilian deaths with exactitude - due to "the opaqueness of the US government about its targeted killing program" as well as the inaccessibility of the region - it nonetheless documents that "the numbers of civilians killed are undoubtedly far higher than the few claimed by US officials." In other words, the administration's public statements are false: "undoubtedly" so. As the LA Times summarizes the study's findings today: "Far more civilians have been killed by U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas than U.S. counter-terrorism officials have acknowledged." (The report is particularly scathing about the patent unreliability of the New America Foundation and its leading drone-and-Obama cheerleader, Peter Bergen, also of CNN, who has been amply rewarded with lucrative access by the administration he dutifully defends. Echoing a recent article by the Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf and an analysis from the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the report concludes that scrutiny of Bergen's key claims "has since revealed omissions and inconsistencies in New America Foundation's dataset, calling its widely publicized conclusions into question." It documents "several other glaring omissions from New America Foundation's data" used to depict Obama's drone campaign as far more benign than it actually is.) Finally, the report notes the threat to democratic accountability posed by the Obama administration's refusal to allow any transparency or judicial oversight regarding who the president orders killed: "The opaque position of the US government on civilian casualties is also emblematic of an accountability and democratic vacuum." In that regard, the report - as its final paragraph - quotes the question I have often asked about this state of affairs, an answer to which I have never heard from Obama's drone defenders: ![]() What has always made that question particularly pressing for me is that American progressives cheered loudly when a similar question was posed by Al Gore in a widely celebrated 2006 speech he gave on the Washington mall denouncing the Bush/Cheney assault on civil liberties: Quote:
Democrats spent several days at their convention two weeks ago wildly cheering and chanting whenever President Obama's use of violence and force was heralded. They're celebrating a leader who is terrorizing several parts of the Muslim world, repeatedly killing children, targeting rescuers and mourners, and entrenching the authority to exert the most extreme powers in full secrecy and without any accountability -- all while he increases, not decreases, the likelihood of future attacks. This new Stanford/NYU report is but the latest in a long line of evidence proving all of that. |
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#61 | |
Make America Great Again
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But that's a fair point. The thing is, however, is that nearly all of the terrorists and attempted terrorists aren't citing our freedoms when they attack us. They cite our policies, most notably our drone programs. Even Osama Bin Laden himself said our policies were what drove his marketing of Al Qaeda. |
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#62 | |
One Groovy Cat
Join Date: Aug 2001
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It's easy to say it's our middle east policies, one of which being Israel, but what if that's a huge talking point. I am having a hard time taking them for their word. I think a reasonable case can be made that it's our policies, but I truly believe it is our beliefs they find objectionable. |
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#63 | |
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And yet we're targeted far more than everybody else. It is our policies. |
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#64 |
Supporter
Join Date: Aug 2000
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They aren't all bad people but there also doesn't appear to be enough good Muslims to stand up to the bad ones.
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#65 | |
The 23rd Pillar
Join Date: Sep 2002
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Quote:
Nothing has changed since then. They still hate us for our freedoms (as well as our policies that bring our civilizations into contact), not in an intellectual way but in the same way that people like you like to say that the religious right hate gays, although I suspect that there's more real hatred among street rabble Islamists than the typical pro-life American.
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#66 | |
The 23rd Pillar
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#67 |
The 23rd Pillar
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Is that why they killed Theo Van Gogh? Did he launch an airstrike or were they targeting him in response to some kind of drone attack?
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#68 | |
The 23rd Pillar
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#69 |
Be HEALED!!!!!!!
Join Date: Feb 2002
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Same for us, who is over there killing people without much regard for human life?
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"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father ... And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." "If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson |
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#70 |
Be HEALED!!!!!!!
Join Date: Feb 2002
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Dick Cheney/George Bush???
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"Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father ... And then will I profess unto them, I never knew you: depart from me, ye that work iniquity." "If the people let government decide what foods they eat and what medicines they take, their bodies will soon be in as sorry a state as are the souls of those who live under tyranny." - Thomas Jefferson |
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#71 | |
Make America Great Again
Join Date: Oct 2006
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Something that pervasive and negative from such a diverse, heterogenous region goes far beyond who wears what, and who dances with whom. It goes right into America's shit policies for the entire region, from propping up dictators to both directly and indirectly terrorizing them to, yes, our no-questions-asked support of Israel. Which is why extremist assholes figured out that was their best sales angle if they wanted new recruits. You need look no further than Osama Bin Laden or Anwar Al-Awlaki, two of the most gifted recruiters for Al Qaeda. |
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#72 |
Make America Great Again
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I will be voting for Barack Obama, yes.
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#73 |
Make America Great Again
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The gaping holes in our defense can be and should have been repaired as a criminal matter.
Instead, American dialed up the "War on Terror" rhetoric, went big on the Battle for Our Very Civilization. Which attracted Muslim jihadists like flies to a purple light. |
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#74 | |
The 23rd Pillar
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#75 |
The 23rd Pillar
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Shame on you. I can't imagine the level of cynicism it must take to vote for a war criminal.
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