In one five month period of Obama's drone war in Afghanistan, 90% of killings were accidental.

I'm not sure what a normal citizen can do at this point. Some are totally for it as a replacement for troops on the ground while maintaining a twisted display of power projection.

Others carry no such nuance and want to display any and every measure of strength we have.

With such polarized deadlock, the ones who have reservations can weasel their way out of doing anything when these leaks and news comes out.

 

I would authorize special forces assassination squads and bounties for the leaders of any group that plots or threatens to kill Americans.

The other alternative is invasion or bombings, which have their own downsides.

 

Disgustingly immoral and shameful. Americans as a whole either love war or are so simple to fool into supporting wars, especially when there are no casualties.

There are reports that some of the the drone "pilots" who check into a typical American office stateside with a lot of computers and flat screens, and who have coffee and donuts while deciding to who to vaporize today, are starting to get some PTSD from their days at the office killing mostly innocent civilians thousands of miles away.

 

USA is 77% Christians, a Christian nation essentially. For US government officials, the %'s are surely even higher. Jesus taught non-violence. Something doesn't add up.

Any you can't say separation of church and state because many of those religious officials want more church in the state.

 

I'm going to need additional sources and a more thorough review to accept a 90% accidental kill ratio.

 

It could certainly happen, a lot of terrorists intentionally surround themselves with people, including innocents like children, so that if you wanted to take them out the chances of collateral damage is as high as possible. All it takes are one or two incidents where the strike is only going for one person but that one person has a fairly large group of people around them for "protection" and the numbers get pretty twisted. It really depends on the target as to if high collateral damage can be acceptable or not.

 

You can spin this from accidental to access to a dental plan. 90% of the public enrolled.

 

Well it is only what the internal reports from the CIA/Pentagon's own experts concluded in the leaked study.

Would you prefer to rely on Fox and Pentagon/CIA pr flacks at press conferences? Or mainstream media interview with government officials.

BTW would 75% accidental kill ration be ok with you?

 

Depending on who they are targeting a 99% accidental kill ratio can be acceptable. There's a whole lot of information that is unavailable that would have to be known to have an informed opinion on the issue.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/...-whistleblower-edward-snowden-daniel-ellsberg

A very good treatment of the leaked drone documents.

*****
Classified documents published by the Intercept include pages from a 2013 study of the drone program by a Pentagon taskforce. The documents came from “a source within the intelligence community who worked on the types of operations and programs described in the slides”, the Intercept said.

“It’s pretty remarkable stuff,” said Micah Zenko, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.

“In some ways it reconfirms and illuminates much of what we knew, or thought we knew, about a lot of these programs, like that the administration firmly prefers kill over capture despite claiming the opposite, and that there’s not ‘a bunch of folks in the room’, as Obama calls it – that there’s a clear, bureaucratic process for this.

“It clearly shows, as we’ve known, that the United States does not know who it’s killing.”

The White House and National Security Council declined to comment on the leak.

“The report the Intercept story references is an internal classified document,” said Pentagon spokeswoman Linda Rojas. “As a matter of policy we don’t comment on the details of classified reports.”

The CIA maintains a drone assassination program separate from the Pentagon program, although Barack Obama has called for bringing the CIA program inside the Defense Department. That effort has stalled.

The Intercept report revealed, among other new disclosures, that at one point in 2012 Obama had approved 20 people for assassination in Yemen and Somalia. More than 200 were killed by drones in those countries that year, according to the Bureau of Investigative Journalism.

It revealed that the military labels unidentified people it kills in targeted strikes as “enemies killed in action”, although victims may be family members or associates of actual targets – or may just have been nearby, or mistakenly targeted.

 

How do you kill the intended target and only the intended target by a bomb from tens of thousands ft? You don't.

 

Then they should probably try another way. Killing innocent people is never acceptable.

 

That's ideal. I don't know if ever possible. Maybe when we have insect size flying drone that can deliver pinpoint payload.

The article here doesn't said innocent. Just not targeted. That might very mean innocent. I would think that the data set can be more that targeted vs not. Some of these high value target are tracked for months and I would assume they know a bit about who are with the intended target.

 

Pick one:

1.Allow ruthless theocrats to take power and kill thousands of people

2. Engage US ground troops and kill thousands of people

3. Diminish the leadership and genocide as much as possible with as little risk to US troops as possible and kill hundreds of people

4. other, please specify

 

5) Other, have a small group of folks elected by corporations that make profit on drone war, create a system that makes war virtually painless for the folks who make their weapons.

Create a perfect cool feed back loop in that the same drone war, creates more terrorists than it eliminates so there is always an alleged need to engage in more drone war. Of course there is always the need to make, at a profit, more drones or the missiles that kill mostly innocents.

Have the corporate elite that profit off the weapons, use their affiliated media conglomerates and pr/ propaganda techniques to argue that it always 1. 2. 3. above so be content and happy to live in the country that benefits from the drone war economy.

 

Other ways involve either not doing so and allowing the terrorist organizations to grow in strength or sending in ground troops which can cause collateral damage along with getting your troops killed.

Killing a low level terrorist probably isn't worth killing 10 "innocents", but at a certain level as you go up the chain of command it becomes more than worth it.

 

Nope...

This **** is prime recruitment material.

Here is a simple equation

dead non-combatant Muslims = more terrorists.

It's like slaying the head of a hydra.

 

It's strange because I haven't been all that concerned about drones. It seemed like there would be less collateral damage than dropping huge bombs when going after one or two people.

But these statistics aren't promising at all.

 

I actually think both of these sentiments are accurate.

I am not entirely sure what the solution is.

I do know that killing innocent people will only strengthen the divide between the West and the citizens in the Middle East. The more innocent people are killed (on either side), the easier it is to believe the extremists claims.