Trump approve raid without sufficient intel or support

Big fan of Obama but was there ever any outrage on here when he was bombing civilians ?

 

Did we impeach Obama when the first service member was killed?

But im glad to know you would rather Pence over Trump. I promise you Pence will give you legit reasons to be upset. You know this. I know this. and most of the left knows this.

Now quit throwing a temper tantrum for the sake of throwing one.

 

I think I see this same pattern emerging all over. Trump is a cowboy the way Bush Jr was accused of being (debatable how much that really applied then). Trump's decision-making is utterly amoral. He only cares about collateral damage when he is the one personally suffering it. He will do whatever it is he thinks will help accomplish his goals with no concern at all for the ethics of how he does it, the damage it inflicts on others, or the unintended consequences.

I don't want to jump to too many conclusions on this or any one anecdote, since I don't have the familiarity to really make a judgement. But, I think we're going to see a robust tapestry after awhile of many many incidents where he has chosen achieving his own goals over safeguarding the lives, livelihoods, and wellbeing of other people (including the general welfare of the nation which is what he's supposed to be seeking in the first place).

Not a ton, but yeah there's definitely been criticism of Obama from leftists for being too imperial in accepting collateral damage in drone strikes. Probably peaked around that time he ordered a strike on a US citizen that had joined al-Qaeda. Not worth my time to find you a link though.

I'm champing at the bit to get Pence. I get that some people are afraid of his social conservatism, his religiosity, etc. That doesn't bother me. He doesn't have a mental disorder so far as I can tell, which makes him more fit to the president than the current guy. I'd rather have Pence for 8 years than Trump for 4.

 

That was Anwar al-Awlaki, and it's being reported that his brother-in-law (one of the heads of Al Queda in the Arabian Penninsula) was one of the targets of the raid and was killed. Also being reported but not verified that Anwar's 8-year-old daughter (a US citizen) was there visiting her mother and was also killed during the firefight.

 

I'm going to replace Space Ghost posts with clips from one of the best cartoons ever made to cover up the abomination posts with the same name.

 

Agreed. Besides for Pence to do what he really wants to do (LGBT rights, Anti-Abortion laws) that stuff has to go through the courts.

I think there is a rational side to Pence and I think he respects the US Government...I don't think Trump does.

 

This. There is no empathy or humility by Trump and there never will be.

This is who Trump is and what his administration will govern like..... for better or worse.

 

I was waiting for someone to post this story

Obama Killed a 16-Year-Old American in Yemen. Trump Just Killed His 8-Year-Old Sister.

IN 2010, PRESIDENT Obama directed the CIA to assassinate an American citizen in Yemen, Anwar al-Awlaki, despite the fact that he had never been charged with (let alone convicted of) any crime, and the agency successfully carried out that order a year later with a September 2011 drone strike. While that assassination created widespread debate — the once-again-beloved ACLU sued Obama to restrain him from the assassination on the ground of due process and then, when that suit was dismissed, sued Obama again after the killing was carried out — another drone killing carried out shortly thereafter was perhaps even more significant yet generated relatively little attention.


Two weeks after the killing of Awlaki, a separate CIA drone strike in Yemen killed his 16-year-old American-born son, Abdulrahman, along with the boy’s 17-year-old cousin and several other innocent Yemenis. The U.S. eventually claimed that the boy was not their target but merely “collateral damage.” Abdulrahman’s grief-stricken grandfather, Nasser al-Awlaki, urged the Washington Post “to visit a Facebook memorial page for Abdulrahman,” which explained: “Look at his pictures, his friends, and his hobbies. His Facebook page shows a typical kid.”




Few events pulled the mask off Obama officials like this one. It highlighted how the Obama administration was ravaging Yemen, one of the world’s poorest countries: just weeks after he won the Nobel Prize, Obama used cluster bombs that killed 35 Yemeni women and children. Even Obama-supporting liberal comedians mocked the arguments of the Obama DOJ for why it had the right to execute Americans with no charges: “Due Process Just Means There’s A Process That You Do,” snarked Stephen Colbert. And a firestorm erupted when former Obama press secretary Robert Gibbs offered a sociopathic justification for killing the Colorado-born teenager, apparently blaming him for his own killing by saying he should have “had a more responsible father.”


The U.S. assault on Yemeni civilians not only continued but radically escalated over the next five years through the end of the Obama presidency, as the U.S. and the U.K. armed, supported, and provide crucial assistance to their close ally Saudi Arabia as it devastated Yemen through a criminally reckless bombing campaign. Yemen now faces mass starvation, seemingly exacerbated, deliberately, by the U.S.-U.K.-supported air attacks. Because of the West’s direct responsibility for these atrocities, they have received vanishingly little attention in the responsible countries.

In a hideous symbol of the bipartisan continuity of U.S. barbarism, Nasser al-Awlaki just lost another one of his young grandchildren to U.S. violence. On Sunday, the Navy’s SEAL Team 6, using armed Reaper drones for cover, carried out a commando raid on what it said was a compound harboring officials of al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. A statement issued by President Trump lamented the death of an American service member and several others who were wounded, but made no mention of any civilian deaths. U.S. military officials initially denied any civilian deaths, and (therefore) the CNN report on the raid said nothing about any civilians being killed.

But reports from Yemen quickly surfaced that 30 people were killed, including 10 women and children. Among the dead: the 8-year-old granddaughter of Nasser al-Awlaki, Nawar, who was also the daughter of Anwar Awlaki.

 

con't


As noted by my colleague Jeremy Scahill — who extensively interviewed the grandparents in Yemen for his book and film on Obama’s “Dirty Wars” — the girl “was shot in the neck and killed,” bleeding to death over the course of two hours. “Why kill children?” the grandfather asked. “This is the new (U.S.) administration — it’s very sad, a big crime.”

The New York Times yesterday reported that military officials had been planning and debating the raid for months under the Obama administration, but Obama officials decided to leave the choice to Trump. The new president personally authorized the attack last week. They claim that the “main target” of the raid “was computer materials inside the house that could contain clues about future terrorist plots.” The paper cited a Yemeni official saying that “at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed in the raid,” and that the attack also “severely damaged a school, a health facility and a mosque.”

As my colleague Matthew Cole reported in great detail just weeks ago, Navy SEAL Team 6, for all its public glory, has a long history of “‘revenge ops,’ unjustified killings, mutilations, and other atrocities.” And Trump notoriously vowed during the campaign to target not only terrorists but also their families. All of that demands aggressive, independent inquiries into this operation.

Perhaps most tragic of all is that — just as was true in Iraq — al Qaeda had very little presence in Yemen before the Obama administration began bombing and droning it and killing civilians, thus driving people into the arms of the militant group. As the late, young Yemeni writer Ibrahim Mothana told Congress in 2013:

Drone strikes are causing more and more Yemenis to hate America and join radical militants. … Unfortunately, liberal voices in the United States are largely ignoring, if not condoning, civilian deaths and extrajudicial killings in Yemen.

During George W. Bush’s presidency, the rage would have been tremendous. But today there is little outcry, even though what is happening is in many ways an escalation of Mr. Bush’s policies. …

Defenders of human rights must speak out. America’s counterterrorism policy here is not only making Yemen less safe by strengthening support for AQAP [al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula] but it could also ultimately endanger the United States and the entire world.

This is why it is crucial that — as urgent and valid protests erupt against Trump’s abuses — we not permit recent history to be whitewashed, or long-standing U.S. savagery to be deceitfully depicted as new Trumpian aberrations, or the war on terror framework engendering these new assaults to be forgotten. Some current abuses are unique to Trump, but — as I detailed on Saturday — some are the decades-old byproduct of a mindset and system of war and executive powers that all need uprooting. Obscuring these facts, or allowing those responsible to posture as opponents of all this, is not just misleading but counterproductive: Much of this resides on an odious continuum and did not just appear out of nowhere.



It’s genuinely inspiring to see pervasive rage over the banning of visa holders and refugees from countries like Yemen. But it’s also infuriating that the U.S. continues to massacre Yemeni civilians, both directly and through its tyrannical Saudi partners. That does not become less infuriating — Yemeni civilians are not less dead — because these policies and the war theories in which they are rooted began before the inauguration of Donald Trump. It’s not just Trump but this mentality and framework that need vehement opposition.

 

Yes, I know Pence is a grade A religious zealot, but he is at least a politician that is not tied to White supremacy.

And no, I won't get over ****, I will fight this with every fiber of my being until Trump is tossed out on his ass where he deserves to be.....he is as unpresidential as they come and I am flabbergasted that even 48% of Americans were too stupid to see this coming.....sure doesn't bode well for our education system.

DD

 

The raid had been planned for months....under the Obama administration. The only reason the raid took place under the Trump administration was that they were waiting for the moon to be right for it. Seriously, you crazy kids are going to have to stop jumping the gun here.

 

-Bush invading Iraq was a horrible miscarriage of power.
-Obama's drone strikes were unethical.
-Trump's actions thus far have been morally lacking, a miscarriage of power, and unethical.

The foreign policy of this country has been bad since Bush decided to invade Iraq and has never gotten better.

Let's keep killing children all over the Middle East and then continue to wonder why our security is at risk.

Great plan.

 

Benghazi!!!!

 

Don't forget the Iran Iraq war that we helped fuel.

 

Other than 9/11 not that many American's have died due to terrorism. Not that many. There have been way more deaths for muslims, so I don't see how much risk we have due to terrorism. There are many other things that pose a much greater risk.

 

More will die under Trump because of his idiotic way of dealing with the world.

DD

 

Because we have a better security system than Europe.

 

I think this was a serious post and it is downright laughable.

BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI
BENGHAZI

We haven't heard very much about BENGHAZI, now that the election is over.