I remember scanning the story about that leak and not being able to figure out what was new about it, so I didn't share it. I guess the NYT reporters didn't see a whole lot either?
this is a banal truism. it doesn't rebut the strong ties that the obama admin has in the nyt. google the word 'obama' on site: nyt. then ask who is kissing all that ass to get those leaks/scoops/etc.
Right, and if the comment had been more specific about these sorts of links (ie that the NYT and the Obama administration are not only both "the establishment" but the same flavour thereof) I wouldn't have thought it was silly.
Other new organizations hyped the fact that 90% of those killed were "unintended targets." But that's exactly what you'd expect when targeting officers in an insurgency. They are going to be surrounded by foot-soldiers.
It's certainly possible that among that 90% are too many civilians, but the leaks didn't provide any evidence of that.
You seem to be certain that the people targeted are actually "officers in an insurgency". After reading "The Drone Papers." stories I don't think we can take that as a given.
Unfortunately the laws of war aren't very helpful. The deaths just have to proportional to the military value of the target.
That's a long way of saying "it depends." Killing 1 civilian might be too many to kill a foot soldier at a Taliban camp in the tribal region of Pakistan. Ten thousand might be fine if it meant saving Afghanistan from Taliban rule, as long as that as low as coalition forces could keep civilian deaths.
"Ten thousand might be fine if it meant saving Afghanistan from Taliban rule, as long as that as low as coalition forces could keep civilian deaths."
The same thinking could then be applied to our "war or drugs" -- the killing of several thousand innocent Colombians could be easily justified in order to eradicate the cartels, albeit temporarily.
Do you find that a satisfactory trade-off as well?
I would love for you to cite where in the Drone Papers it says that the 'unintended targets' were 'foot soldiers' instead of civilians.
Of course, you can't; since the military automatically classifies any "military aged males" as combatants unless it can be proved otherwise (and there's a huge conflict of interest for them both militarily and politically if they do declare they killed a non-combatant).
How much we screw up and hit the wrong target is a totally different question from are we killing civilians without regard for them.
It's a difference between knowingly killing and accidentally killing. Legally, there is a huge difference. I'd argue morally there is too, but you can decide for yourself.
That opens up a whole other debate about whether the US is reckless with the targeting. But I think it's necessary to distinguish between the two types of civilian causalities.
> How much we screw up and hit the wrong target is a totally different question from are we killing civilians without regard for them.
No, it's not. When assessing weapon capabilities, precision and collateral damage are irremediably linked, with precision including actual chances of hitting the specified target.
In this case the weapon is the "droning process" as a whole; if the process hits the wrong target too many times, its precision is low and hence the likelihood of collateral damage is high.
These casualties cannot be justified as "accidental" once the weapon/process' capabilities and actual limits are clear: it would be like throwing a hand grenade in a crowd to hit a single person and then argue that other victims were "accidental" because the question of explosion radius is unrelated to effectiveness at the center of it.
Drawing this sort of distinction in reality moves the debate from the main question (should we use this weapon, given its known limits?) to other, often-unanswerable ones (how many collateral casualties can be filed as "accidental" while ostensibly respecting moral and legal thresholds?) that inevitably imply the previous question can only be reasonably answered in a certain way.
> It's a difference between knowingly killing and accidentally killing. Legally, there is a huge difference. I'd argue morally there is too, but you can decide for yourself.
I wonder if the victim's families give much of a shit about the difference in question here.
Even the intended targets are intended on the basis of tenuous guesses. An armchair guess about the nature of unintended targets is just about substance-free.
Imagine for a moment that the death toll and civilian casualty toll were exactly the same as our drone program except that instead of carrying out such killings using drones we were using remote detonated car bombs. Would that affect your judgment of the morality of the campaign?
No. IED's aren't terrorism unless they are directed at civilians (or used without regard to civilian casualties). For example, most IED attacks in Iraq were not terrorism because they were aimed at US troops.
Well, fist, US media does not seem to agree that "most IED attacks in Iraq were not terrorism because they were aimed at US troops".
Then, what's the difference? The fact that some people in an office at another country decided that a building has military relevance, instead of PR relevance?
Ok, some targets are clearly military. But lots of them aren't. And there's a huge amount of overlap between those "military, because we said so" targets and what most groups labeled as "terrorists" target.
I did not ask whether it was terrorism, I asked if it changed the moral calculus. There is a lot of ground between terrorism and the justified use of force, where drone based assassination falls is still an open question.
This was my initial thought as well and why war of this nature is so difficult. Let's say you know where a known terrorist is located. Do you send a drone or risk US/coalition soldier lives? You decide to send a drone and when its in range there are 20 other people around the area of the terrorist. Are they soldiers? Officers? Technicians? Drivers? Cooks? IT/Infrastructure engineers? Innocent bystanders in the wrong place at the wrong time? If you don't take the known terrorist out, are you willing to wait another 6-12+ months for another chance?
Who's responsibility is it to determine and separate the supporters from the innocent? The attacker's push is to label them enemy, while the defender would label as innocent. It's impossibly hard to do this at a distance, so therefore, are you willing to send troops on the ground and live with US casualties? Or are you willing to let the terrorist go and risk increased turmoil in the region?
Let's remember this is an extremely difficult task and job, and in the current state of affairs, I don't think there is a right answer.
While I completely recognise the complexities, where there is real risk of killing innocents (or clear ongoing pattern of mistakes), this likely outcome should negate the use of that method in my opinion.
There's no grey area in my mind here. It's disgusting to me that people could think its OK to accept killing civilians including children as collateral damage in occasional strikes, despite surely they are doing their best to avoid/minimise this. Even if stopping these strikes increases the risk to myself and my family I feel this is risk a moral society must accept. To do otherwise makes us terrorists too.
And so when a military patrol is moving down a crowded street are they surrounding themselves by civilians as well?
To imply that because some "target" that is a member of a community is intentionally surrounding themselves with civilians for some sort of protection is a little disingenuous in my opinion.
How about "why are we so motivated to go out of our way to make these hard choices in the first place?"
I think that's what got people riled up about drones. More than anything it is a symbol of our foreign policy, and the individual lengths as a nation we will go through to "get what we want."
These terrorists didn't decide to become terrorists last year. These are people who grew up there, and who have had more or less the same views throughout their lives. So before you assume they MUST be blown up by a drone, post haste, consider what makes then a threat now? Or are they just fodder for the war machine? We have a quota to fill. Pilots to keep busy. Before we had drones to blow them up with what did we do? Maybe we did nothing 99% of the time, except in cases where a real threat could be determined. Maybe we can go back to that.
You ask "are you willing to send troops on the ground and live with US casualties?" No. No I'm not willing. Because it isn't necessary. I want to be shown this new kind of war has some material benefit. I see no evidence for that.
I mean...we could fire cruise missiles or send bombers right? That would cause even more collateral damage.
How many innocent lives will be lost if we do nothing?
This leak isn't a big deal because everyone knows that waging war like this has collateral damage. So no one is surprised that innocent people get killed in military actions.
I think it would take a lot for people to care about this.
How many innocent lives will be lost if we do nothing?
The answer to this might surprise you. Is the whole strategy working or is it just making the whole region from Libya to Pakistan to Turkey less politically stable and more violent? It's not an easy question to answer, but we've been doing it your way since 2001 and the situation has got worse. I'd like to propose the radical strategy of "not killing people" and see how it works out.
People only accept "collateral damage" until it has a human face. The picture of the dead boy on a Greek beach turned around attitudes to the refugee crisis.
"The answer to this might surprise you. Is the whole strategy working or is it just making the whole region from Libya to Pakistan to Turkey less politically stable and more violent? It's not an easy question to answer, but we've been doing it your way since 2001 and the situation has got worse. I'd like to propose the radical strategy of "not killing people" and see how it works out."
I feel like this is hard to quantify. The thing is we are going to continue exploiting these regions and generally doing things that the people of these regions don't like.
We can't really have a live and let live policy where we keep fucking people over so I feel like that is kind of off the table. On the other hand, there haven't been any attacks on our soil or even high impact attacks really since we started blowing people up with robots.
If there was another high profile attack it would result in an intensely hawkish political environment where we would lose more civil rights and most likely blow up another country like Iraq. That would really kill a lot of people. So if blowing away a bunch of people in countries that barely have sovereignty keeps things in check then it isn't really the worst plan.
It is really not worth talking about idealistic ideas about:
A) not fucking over people
B) not doing anything
option B is way too politically dangerous for our leaders anyway, and it is obvious that A isn't going to happen. I think the best we can hope for is improvements in targeting for the assassination of people with interests that are opposed to US interests.
> Do you send a drone or risk US/coalition soldier lives?
Maybe you stop anything that carries the slightest risk of killing innocent people on foreign soil of countries you are not at war with?
This supposed us vs the evil terrorist mentality is used on all levels of force to treat other lives destroyed in the process as subpar and of little value.
What would your argument look like if a Pakistani drone killed a wanted murderer in your neighborhood taking down a family of five with two kids in the process?
If you're saying we cannot sit back and not get involved in this because we have a terrorist problem - let me remind you that we had/have Bin Laden and the Taliban (funded in the 80's), Isis (funded anti-Assad groups), instability in Iraq and Syria precisely thanks to US intervention in those regions.
Of course the existence of these groups is great for politicians and the military-industrial complex, since the former get to avoid issues at home and expand government powers and the later reap financial windfalls.
It's pretty clear that everyone only thinks the drone program is a valid approach "over there" in the "wild east". This is particularly clear when considering British jihadis; there haven't yet been drone strikes in, say, Leeds. But we've already crossed the threshold of a British national going to Syria and then being bombed by the RAF.
Surely this cuts both ways. Terrorists over in Syria and Yemen have a very limited capability to harm us. They can be effectively banned from planes once they're identified. They have no long range missile capability. (There's a problem of shortrange missiles being fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan, though). So the whole thing resembles colonial policing: the small group of westerners trying to balance power among the local factions for their own political advantage.
(Anyone going to suggest that drones should have been used in Northern Ireland? Or that when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found he should have been taken out with an airstrike in suburban Boston? No?)
Whether or not it's accecptable to kill a bunch of innocent civilians in the process of killing a guy because he might kill a different bunch of innocent civilians is not a difficult moral question to answer.
It's sad Iowa Governor Branstad got rid of our Air Guard and replaced the 132nd with drone pilots. Then even advertise they are manning Reapers from the DSM Airport/Camp Dodge at the top of the kill chain. http://www.132dwing.ang.af.mil/news/story.asp?id=123450496
The US Constitution delegated Congress with the enumerated power to issue letters of marque. This is murder.
54 comments
[ 3.4 ms ] story [ 142 ms ] threadIt's certainly possible that among that 90% are too many civilians, but the leaks didn't provide any evidence of that.
That's a long way of saying "it depends." Killing 1 civilian might be too many to kill a foot soldier at a Taliban camp in the tribal region of Pakistan. Ten thousand might be fine if it meant saving Afghanistan from Taliban rule, as long as that as low as coalition forces could keep civilian deaths.
The same thinking could then be applied to our "war or drugs" -- the killing of several thousand innocent Colombians could be easily justified in order to eradicate the cartels, albeit temporarily.
Do you find that a satisfactory trade-off as well?
Of course, you can't; since the military automatically classifies any "military aged males" as combatants unless it can be proved otherwise (and there's a huge conflict of interest for them both militarily and politically if they do declare they killed a non-combatant).
I didn't imply the Drone Papers said any such thing. I said it's what you expect from a drone program.
But while you are on the subject, the numbers in the Intercept piece suggest 10-20% civilians casualties in Yemn and Somalia.
And it states that 70% of those occur when there is a targeting fuck up. That suggests that accurate strikes leave relatively few dead civilians.
in other words:
"60% of the times, it works every time".
It's a difference between knowingly killing and accidentally killing. Legally, there is a huge difference. I'd argue morally there is too, but you can decide for yourself.
That opens up a whole other debate about whether the US is reckless with the targeting. But I think it's necessary to distinguish between the two types of civilian causalities.
No, it's not. When assessing weapon capabilities, precision and collateral damage are irremediably linked, with precision including actual chances of hitting the specified target.
In this case the weapon is the "droning process" as a whole; if the process hits the wrong target too many times, its precision is low and hence the likelihood of collateral damage is high.
These casualties cannot be justified as "accidental" once the weapon/process' capabilities and actual limits are clear: it would be like throwing a hand grenade in a crowd to hit a single person and then argue that other victims were "accidental" because the question of explosion radius is unrelated to effectiveness at the center of it.
Drawing this sort of distinction in reality moves the debate from the main question (should we use this weapon, given its known limits?) to other, often-unanswerable ones (how many collateral casualties can be filed as "accidental" while ostensibly respecting moral and legal thresholds?) that inevitably imply the previous question can only be reasonably answered in a certain way.
I wonder if the victim's families give much of a shit about the difference in question here.
Actually, the question I've got is why the U.S. is still meddling in the Middle East full-stop.
Then, what's the difference? The fact that some people in an office at another country decided that a building has military relevance, instead of PR relevance?
Ok, some targets are clearly military. But lots of them aren't. And there's a huge amount of overlap between those "military, because we said so" targets and what most groups labeled as "terrorists" target.
These drone strikes seem to be used without regard for civilian casualties.
Are they state-sponsored terrorism?
They've been described that way numerous times.
Who's responsibility is it to determine and separate the supporters from the innocent? The attacker's push is to label them enemy, while the defender would label as innocent. It's impossibly hard to do this at a distance, so therefore, are you willing to send troops on the ground and live with US casualties? Or are you willing to let the terrorist go and risk increased turmoil in the region?
Let's remember this is an extremely difficult task and job, and in the current state of affairs, I don't think there is a right answer.
There's no grey area in my mind here. It's disgusting to me that people could think its OK to accept killing civilians including children as collateral damage in occasional strikes, despite surely they are doing their best to avoid/minimise this. Even if stopping these strikes increases the risk to myself and my family I feel this is risk a moral society must accept. To do otherwise makes us terrorists too.
To imply that because some "target" that is a member of a community is intentionally surrounding themselves with civilians for some sort of protection is a little disingenuous in my opinion.
I think that's what got people riled up about drones. More than anything it is a symbol of our foreign policy, and the individual lengths as a nation we will go through to "get what we want."
You ask "are you willing to send troops on the ground and live with US casualties?" No. No I'm not willing. Because it isn't necessary. I want to be shown this new kind of war has some material benefit. I see no evidence for that.
How many innocent lives will be lost if we do nothing?
This leak isn't a big deal because everyone knows that waging war like this has collateral damage. So no one is surprised that innocent people get killed in military actions.
I think it would take a lot for people to care about this.
The answer to this might surprise you. Is the whole strategy working or is it just making the whole region from Libya to Pakistan to Turkey less politically stable and more violent? It's not an easy question to answer, but we've been doing it your way since 2001 and the situation has got worse. I'd like to propose the radical strategy of "not killing people" and see how it works out.
People only accept "collateral damage" until it has a human face. The picture of the dead boy on a Greek beach turned around attitudes to the refugee crisis.
I feel like this is hard to quantify. The thing is we are going to continue exploiting these regions and generally doing things that the people of these regions don't like.
We can't really have a live and let live policy where we keep fucking people over so I feel like that is kind of off the table. On the other hand, there haven't been any attacks on our soil or even high impact attacks really since we started blowing people up with robots.
If there was another high profile attack it would result in an intensely hawkish political environment where we would lose more civil rights and most likely blow up another country like Iraq. That would really kill a lot of people. So if blowing away a bunch of people in countries that barely have sovereignty keeps things in check then it isn't really the worst plan.
It is really not worth talking about idealistic ideas about: A) not fucking over people B) not doing anything
option B is way too politically dangerous for our leaders anyway, and it is obvious that A isn't going to happen. I think the best we can hope for is improvements in targeting for the assassination of people with interests that are opposed to US interests.
More innocent lives were lost in Iraq after we intervened than before. So my estimate would be: Fewer.
Maybe you stop anything that carries the slightest risk of killing innocent people on foreign soil of countries you are not at war with?
This supposed us vs the evil terrorist mentality is used on all levels of force to treat other lives destroyed in the process as subpar and of little value.
What would your argument look like if a Pakistani drone killed a wanted murderer in your neighborhood taking down a family of five with two kids in the process?
If you're saying we cannot sit back and not get involved in this because we have a terrorist problem - let me remind you that we had/have Bin Laden and the Taliban (funded in the 80's), Isis (funded anti-Assad groups), instability in Iraq and Syria precisely thanks to US intervention in those regions.
Of course the existence of these groups is great for politicians and the military-industrial complex, since the former get to avoid issues at home and expand government powers and the later reap financial windfalls.
Surely this cuts both ways. Terrorists over in Syria and Yemen have a very limited capability to harm us. They can be effectively banned from planes once they're identified. They have no long range missile capability. (There's a problem of shortrange missiles being fired from Pakistan into Afghanistan, though). So the whole thing resembles colonial policing: the small group of westerners trying to balance power among the local factions for their own political advantage.
(Anyone going to suggest that drones should have been used in Northern Ireland? Or that when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev was found he should have been taken out with an airstrike in suburban Boston? No?)
The US Constitution delegated Congress with the enumerated power to issue letters of marque. This is murder.