Four drone operators have turned into whistleblowers, calling for an immediate end to the drone war

First, I am not the one who brought Constitutionality to the debate, a drone operator did. I highlighted what he said.

Second, what is the point of even debating you if you won't even talk about current, relevant American laws like the AUMF that should strictly designate who can be targeted or not, and you're off saying I'm the one who has fallacious logic because you're inventing jurispendence based on historical precedents that have little or no bearing to the situation at hand, beyond showing that America once preferred capturing combatants to killing them.

Are you giving up the boat on the rest of the argument minus the constitutional one?

re: Constitutional arguments

Can you trace how the Civil War resembles the current War on Terror? Are you alleging that the War on Terror merits the designation "when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public safety may require it." Is America even at "war"? Did you delibrately choose a period of American history where Constitutional rights were suspended to prove...what point?

jesus (As you say).

 

Yeah, and he cited AUMF to do so.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/23/us-justification-drone-killing-american-citizen-awlaki

This drone war was a continuation of Bush's drone wars and dubious legal legacy:

http://www.defenseone.com/politics/2014/09/obamas-dramatic-reversal-bushs-laws-war/94169/

Anyways, if you want to end the drone war, we're on the same side now. I don't want to waste more time on partisan politics, especially with someone as one-sided in their denial.

 

First of all, drone attacks can be much better regulated. Kill lists can go through the judicial process. There can be an emphasis of capture over kill, especially with American citizens. They could be confined to certain theaters, and they don't have to rely on such bad SIGNIT intelligence. There could be much higher bars for dubiously legal targeted killings. You can be against the current implementation of the drone war and not be against drones completely given how poorly executed it has been. (90% inadvertent casualties with little to no oversight)

Secondly, given that the drone war has only seemed to increase instability and terrorism in nations where it is deployed (see: Yemen, Somalia), doing "nothing" is in fact correlated with avoiding increasing the # of terrorists.

"Nothing" is better than the current status of the drone program.

AQAP is now active in 1/2 of Yemen and has grown from hundreds to thousands of members. I don't know how in any world that qualifies as success. Now we have people on the outside AND inside of the drone program who have helped explain why that may be.

 

what, you're the one who brought up the Civil War and is now acknowledging the absurdity of doing so

Also, if you had been reading more closely, I started the topic with:

it was literally two words away from the one point you seem fixated about. If you don't want to debate the AUMF, an American law, then fine, but it is very much a scope of the current topic of whether or not to end the drone war and has been from the beginning.

If you want to talk pre-9/11, start your own thread, but maybe you'd start looking into who funded AQ and the Taliban in the first place, who gave Saddam WMD and support in targeting that WMD, and Middle East policy from the 50s onwards, you know, a whole bunch of ideas that really don't have that much to do with four drone operators calling for an end to the drone war.

I'd happily engage you there. Are you really implying that asking you to click two buttons is "muffling the debate" when you've been selectively ignoring what this debate has been about from the beginning?

 

...
Refuse to discuss the ethical, policy, and moral implications of the drone policy beyond saying "America and its allies aren't perfect".

Refuse to discuss the violation of the AUMF discussed in further articles, and refuse to acknowledge Executive Order 12333.

Refuse to discuss your misguided attempt to mount a Constitutional argument by referring to a period of war where Constitutional rights were expressely suspended.

Refuse to discuss this and its relationship to the aforementioned article 3 of section 2 of the Constitution as well as the Fifth Amendment:

https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-complex/

Go and claim that I am muffling the debate by signing off with "This debate is over".

 

don't forget about attributing blame to Obama or Bush

 

This is a fair statement. I can only say drone strikes are correlated with increased instability. You're right to point out the causal link may be fuzzy. Upon reflection, I don't think you can use the evidence to say drones have improved the situation, but neither can you really use it to force the implication that drones have made the situation deteriorate, at least without more evidence.

Anecdotally, many people have cited it as a factor they see making things worse. But that is anecdotal.

 

Deploring the extrajudicial killing of 90% of targets inadvertently in areas where ISIS does not even operate does not equal "take no action". You cannot claim with a straight face that ISIS is even the target of most of these strikes when the United States cannot even respect its own AUMF authorization and is using drones to kill local insurgent groups in theaters of war where ISIS does not even operate. This is not only illegal but entirely irrelevant to your ideal point of "highly surgical drones that only target and kill top ISIS leaders". That doesn't happen. It took whistle-blowers and military leaks to find out.

Instead, because the United States government is using drones in an opaque manner without legal precedents or international norms, they not only risk the Wild West with other nations embracing drone programs, they risk host countries kicking them out entirely from Pakistan to Yemen. I mean, is there even a host country now in Yemen?

Now, with regards to action, what is the point of droning random insurgents where the real funding comes from host nations that are still "steadfast" allies of the West? It's the money that props up angry people. Kill all of the leaders you want, I don't exactly see how the next generation of jihadis is not going to pop up so long as the oil money flows. That's been the cycle since the 1980s: I don't think more of the same is the solution. You can't reform a religion by killing 90% random people, and 10% fanatics who want to die. You can reform it by killing off the money that shelters theocratic regimes from change.

 

I'm glad we agree on this point.