> [there are x persons] President Obama ha[s] authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate
US special ops are the President's weapon. It doesn't make sense to say "yesterday I authorized my gun to kill a man"; what you want to say is "yesterday I killed a man".
President Obama didn't "authorize targeted killings" or whatever you want to call those.
He (and Bush before him) assassinated people, assassinates them without trial or due process, while smiling and holding babies and making jokes at the White House correspondents dinner, and complaining about the gun culture and mass killings.
The same day of the Umpqua College shooting (10 dead), US drones in Afghanistan targeted a hospital and killed 22 people (12 staff, 10 patients including 3 children).
If Obama really wants Americans to get rid of their guns, maybe he should start with his own.
But of course he won't, so forgive me for not listening to whatever he has to say.
The same day of the Umpqua College shooting (10 dead), US drones in Afghanistan targeted a hospital and killed 22 people (12 staff, 10 patients including 3 children).
Deplorable though it was, the Kunduz hospital strike was done by an AC-130, not drones. Also, it was not, by any stretch, a "targeted killing" in the sense of the attacks targeting specific individuals that the article addresses. It had absolutely nothing to do with that program, in fact.
If you want to hyperbolize, make apples-to-oranges comparisons, and beat your chest about things you can't really do much about from behind a keyboard, that's fine. But please try to get your basic factual narrative straight.
Shrug, the actual detail of the Kunduz massacre not being a drone is utterly irrelevant. The actual detail of using a drone rather than another type of airstrike is also irrelevant. The systematic and intentional killing ("collateral damage") of tons of civilians for an endless war is relevant.
Look up all those times we droned weddings, killing dozens. Certain people at those weddings were targeted, not that it mattered for the attendees.
You need to understand how this game works. The word mistake does not mean what you think it means, just like "collect" and "interrogate" doesn't mean what you, and everyone else, thinks it means.
How convenient that it was a "mistake". Reminds me of the time the US "mistakenly" bombed Al Jazeera's offices. [1]
So the US will offer full support of the MSF's calls for a War Crime tribunal investigation?
What really amazes me is that no matter what information comes out, no matter how stark the facts, how brutal the reality, how corrupt the politics, how illegal the tactics, there is always a band of American apologists ready to step up justify cold blooded murder.
> What really amazes me is that no matter what information comes out, no matter how stark the facts, how brutal the reality, how corrupt the politics, how illegal the tactics, there is always a band of American apologists ready to step up justify cold blooded murder.
Well, that's not so much an American thing, it's very general. I wouldn't even restrict it to nations only, it's a general "tribe" thing. It can even apply to video games and music, sports, and so on.
The worst part to me is that conflicts can very well be driven where people on all sorts of sides "reason" (it really has to be put in quotes I think) this way. With the result that attempts at fairness, any objections to double standards makes a person a perceived traitor to everybody deeply invested on the self-delusion of any of the sides.
From "Notes on Nationalism" by George Orwell: (as most if not all of his writings, it's available on the web and well worth a read)
> The nationalist not only does not disapprove of atrocities committed by his own side, but he has a remarkable capacity for not even hearing about them. For quite six years the English admirers of Hitler contrived not to learn of the existence of Dachau and Buchenwald. And those who are loudest in denouncing the German concentration camps are often quite unaware, or only very dimly aware, that there are also concentration camps in Russia. Huge events like the Ukraine famine of 1933, involving the deaths of millions of people, have actually escaped the attention of the majority of English Russophiles. Many English people have heard almost nothing about the extermination of German and Polish Jews during the present war. Their own antisemitism has caused this vast crime to bounce off their consciousness. In nationalist thought there are facts which are both true and untrue, known and unknown. A known fact may be so unbearable that it is habitually pushed aside and not allowed to enter into logical processes, or on the other hand it may enter into every calculation and yet never be admitted as a fact, even in one's own mind.
Yes, "patriotism" (a mind disease) is endemic to the US, and it produces legions of useful idiots who are unwilling to admit grotesque/gaping faults in their motherland. These are the same people you see on the TV reading the news and playing the role of "topic expert".
Funny how military action causing completely foreseen and accepted civilian deaths is categorised as a "terrible mistake", and contrasted with a "purposeful killing of civilians". Drone strikes on weddings or bombings of hospitals are as calculated and purposeful as can be, and the fact that innocent civilians will die is accounted for, if not an explicit goal. It's just that we can slap the label "collateral damage from targeted precision strikes" on them.
Your summary is not commensurate with the story you linked.
Something can be both a “terrible mistake” and also a violation of international law.
At a high level, it seems unlikely that American military leaders would intend to bomb a hospital, considering the horrible human toll and subsequent political and public relations disaster.
Perhaps the investigation will turn up a more complete story about why the hospital was targeted.
They don't really feel the blowback of a PR disaster when 1. most are uninformed, and 2. of the few informed there are enough people like you who will cover for them and give them benefit of the doubt. If a hospital on US territory is bombed, it would be out of the question whether it was simply an oopsie. But if in the carriage of justice and liberty some humanitarian workers find themselves collaterally damaged, it was a "terrible mistake", which the men with grave furrowed brows, clean suits, and heavy burdens to bear no doubt weighed against imminent national security concerns.
I’m certainly not “covering for them”. The bombing of the hospital is a violation of international law, and whoever made the call to bomb it should be court-martialed and held accountable. On the other hand I don’t think it is reasonable to presume that the hospital was targeted deliberately by someone in the US military without further knowledge of what happened. US military leaders aren’t all sadistic cartoon villains sitting around twirling their mustachios and cackling about civilian deaths.
If it is true that some of our “allies” on the ground in Afghanistan directed the US military to bomb that location, as was reported somewhere I read, then that is no excuse for such a colossal fuckup – especially considering that the MSF had previously told all sides the hospital’s coordinates – and whoever in the US military took that information at face value should take proper responsibility, and whoever directed them should also be dealt with.
If instead it was, as themgt speculates, a deliberate choice by someone in the American military to target the building with full knowledge that it is a hospital, then that person should be tried for war crimes.
> it seems unlikely that American military leaders would intend to bomb a hospital
while I'm not 100% sure about that (it seems unthinkable for a human being, but people's judgement can get pretty out of whack in wrong environment), let's assume for the sake of argument that your military leaders are sane.
even then, all it requires is the bare minimum of military leader people closing their eyes for just long enough.
and if you believe they wouldn't do that intentionally, then we'll disagree about that. you don't get that position without the ability to look the other way with laser-sharp focus. it's part of the job (and it's disgusting).
but they would say "you don't know what it's like". meditate on that for a bit. this world, huh?
People tend to get hung up on the mistaken idea that Congress's power to declare war requires the use of magic words in the legislation in which it is exercised (e.g., that it has to use the words "declare" or "war"), but this is not the case. A Congressional "Authorization for the Use of Military Force" is a declaration of war (perhaps -- as was the case with both the 2001 open-ended 9/11 AUMF and 2003 Iraq AUMF -- a conditional declaration of war conditioned on a determination to be made by the executive, but a declaration of war nonetheless.)
Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists[1]:
"IN GENERAL- That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."
The wording is vague, however it would be most commonly interpreted as a war against Al-Quaeda. It could possibly but improbably be interpreted as a war against anyone.
Not really. The 9/11 terrorists (those who participated in the actual hijackings) did not live in Germany -- or anywhere -- after the acts, so Germany clearly wasn't harboring them.
At the time they lived in Germany (before the attacks), the officials in the country obviously did not know of their plans.
The key words are "the President...determines"; the condition in the AUMF is not on an activity on the part of the potential enemy, it is a decision by the President.
Given that, any other vagueness is fairly irrelevant; its pretty much a blank check no matter what things like "harbored" mean. Which is why even President Obsma has said it should be repealed.
That's interesting: surely almost none of the state violence still being committed under this law is aimed at persons who had anything to do with 9/11, right? As for organizations, isn't Al Qaeda just a brand now?
The obvious intended consequence of that wording was for the enemy to be an abstraction, to be extended as needed. It's much easier to justify going to war once, and simply readjust who exactly you are warring against as required.
> That's interesting: surely almost none of the state violence still being committed under this law is aimed at persons who had anything to do with 9/11, right?
Its all being targeted at people or organizations the President -- whether Bush or Obama -- has determined have the requisite relationship to 9/11. The accuracy of that determination is immaterial to the AUMF, which isn't contingent on the actual relation of the targets to 9/11, but on the President's determination of the relation.
The huge false equivalence you are making is Obama is waging a war against a truly evil organization. But the college shootings are senseless violence purposely used on innocent people.
You can throw in the hospital attack. But that attack obviously wasn't purposeful. It also wasn't a drone. It was ground support strike, something Obama wouldn't be involved in.
You can blame Obama for keeping us in the war. In that respect he is responsible. But the hospital was bombed during a major battle against the Taliban, who were attempting to take the 5th largest city in Afghanistan.
Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better. People like the Umpqua shooter are killing good people to make the world worse, on purpose.
You're right in that's a false equivalence; but the response of Obama about the two events that happened the same day was striking.
He has no control whatsoever about crazy people who shoot other people on campuses; and yet that's what he chose to talk about.
He has a lot of control about what targets US armies bomb, drones or no drones. And yet he has almost nothing to say about that.
But my point is not even this. My point is Obama actually loves guns... when they're his own.
Everyone who uses guns thinks they're doing God's work -- and nobody is.
"Evil" is just a point of view when used as an epithet. The only thing that separates us from true evil is certainly not the assertion that one is right and the other, wrong.
It's the rule of law. Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all.
Obama talks about military issues all the time. He talked about them today, explaining why he's decided not to withdraw troops from Afghanistan for the time being (meaning during his tenure). To expect him to talk about the issues you care most about to the exclusion of all others is simply childish.
It's the rule of law. Get rid of due process, and evil is everywhere, or nowhere at all.
The US is, by law, engaged in a militarized conflict with radical Islamic groups. If you actually care about this issue as you profess to do, then you could try urging Congress to rescind the Authorization for the Use of Military Force which legally invests the executive branch with the power to carry on such activities.
Personally, even if the US withdrew into its own boundaries like a tortoise tomorrow I would not expect global peace to break out as a result. there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum (and arguably this is already happening in Syria, where Obama has opted to minimize US involvement). As military options go, our drone policy minimizes harm while being consistent with our existing objectives. Of course it minimizes harm for Americans more than for the populations of places where drones are deployed, which creates a significant political surplus that may actually worsen radicalism. On the other hand, if we were to eliminate that surplus by putting an equivalent number of American lives at risk by deploying them instead of drones, experience suggests it would result in significantly greater harm to non-combatants, based on how badly things have turned out for people in Iraq.
> there are other actors with geopolitical interests of their own who would cheerfully move in to fill the resulting vacuum
So the argument for perpetual and unwinnable warfare is - if we don't someone else will? You think that's worth the live's of US service members and the inevitable collateral damage inflicted in war zones? I feel like I'm missing part of the picture.
Personally, a better way of combating radical islam has less to do with drones and more to do with education and opportunity.
There are degrees of warfare, and the sort we are conducting at the moment is pretty mild compared to things like carpet-bombing Viet Nam ~50 years ago. I do favor a soft power strategy involving education and opportunity but civic societies are not things that come into being overnight, they can require decades or even centuries to take root. It would help, of course, if we didn't maintain alliances with semi-totalitarian states like Saudi Arabia.
On the other hand, I don't think that peace and enlightened democracy are necessarily the natural state of mankind - I favor Hobbes over Rousseau, and think the latter's glorification of primitive society rather facile, notwithstanding the fact that he meant well.
As hands off as the war is it still costs more than it's worth. The benefit is not only zero, at the end of the day we have more enemies than we started with - along with all the human collateral. Obama could literally have taken that entire operations budget, spent it on hookers and coke, and we'd still be better off.
I'm not sure what the natural state of mankind is, but the increasing flow of information is forcing us to act rationally and remember we have a public reputation that may follow us forever. Accountability is quickly becoming forced on us by the internet and smartphones so it'll be interested to see how this all turns out.
As hands off as the war is it still costs more than it's worth
That's very hard to measure. ISTM that in international relations things tend to either muddle along rather badly with gradual incremental improvements that roughly track economic growth, but when they go bad (ie resulting in war or massive political change) they tend to do so quickly and catastrophically (in the sense of a major discontinuity rather than mere badness, although more often than not it's bad).
And while I share your reservations about the US as a global hyperpower whose policing of international relations can frequently result in backlash (not unlike its internal policing culture...) I'm also inclined to look back at the era prior to the formation of the US and note that when there's no clearly dominant actor on the scene you have endemic peer conflict.
the increasing flow of information is forcing us to act rationally
I'm more pessimistic than you about this. It is easier then ever to make rational decisions thanks to all that information and accumulated insight, and I do think the US is maturing as a society. But there's an argument that irrational political behavior is rationally rewarding for voters who know they have very little influence over the political process and take their vote as an opportunity to express their disgruntlement through perversity. Bryan Caplan has a very good book about this called The Myth of the Rational Voter, if you like economics.
Fallacy, eh? Remember when the DOJ had a secret interpretation[1] of Section 215 of the PATRIOT Act: A federal court and even the author of the Patriot Act itself have revealed that the meaning of “tangible things” was not quite as the NSA had interpreted it, and the massive data collection was not the purposed of the provision[2]
It's a description of what is already happening. But even the first step on that allegedly fallacious slope is an unacceptable one, so that's kind of moot.
Because the campus killings score political points and that is the only game he plays. He certainly isn't going to hand points to opponents; here or at home. He portrays a random shooting as an epidemic while totally ignoring the violence in minority areas of US cities where far more die than in the college shooting.
Its all politics. Obama loves guns when they serve his political interest. He doesn't love those he owns, he uses those which support his position.
>Why is it obvious that the attack on the hospital wasn't purposeful?
Because there is no motive.
From the story you quote "It's unclear whether commanders who unleashed the AC-130 gunship on the hospital — killing at least 22 patients and hospital staff — were aware that the site was a hospital or knew about the allegations of possible enemy activity."
What is more likely. The US suddenly decided to murder a bunch of universally beloved Doctors or they fucked up bigtime?
>I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me.
I find it hard to believe that you can't understand why I'd think killing a bunch of Talibani is great for the world.
Doctors Without Borders has said that all sides in the conflict were repeatedly told the exact location of their hospital, yet it was attacked anyway. That makes it more difficult to dismiss as a mistake, and we will have to wait for the investigation(s) to know what happened.
Regarding the hospital: I just noted that you jump conclusions on this issue even while investigation has not been finished yet. You just hope or want to believe that the US military didn't bomb the structure on purpose.
> I find it hard to believe that you can't understand why I'd think killing a bunch of Talibani is great for the world.
Look, we all reject the goals of the Taliban, I think we're here on the same page. But the problem I have with what you are saying is this:
Military campaigns usually have political or economic goals. The US declared their war on terror as the political goal when they started the military campaign in Afghanistan. Later they added building a democracy as a political goal in Afghanistan.
For this they had to undermine their opponents ability to fight their political goals and in the process they destroyed military infrastructure, weapon caches, communication and of course people were killed.
Killing is part of operations in war, but not the main strategy or goal. Whenever it is, you'll usually see genocide, ethnic cleansing and the likes.
Like the Jihadists raging in Syria right now. They are killing the "unbelievers" right now for a (in their distorted view) better world. And once you are killing for a better world, why not celebrate the act of killing by inventing new cruel ways of killing and even filming it? (like ISIS does)
I can't read the US presidents mind, but I'm absolutely sure that he would reject your line of thinking for the exact same reasons. He probably thinks about it as a way to undermine the terrorists capabilities of achieving their harmful goals. I for one reject the means he is using to achieve HIS goals, but I do not believe that he is a crazy person believing in killing for a better world!
The motive is actually obvious. MSF treats all patients regardless of what "side" they are on in a conflict. The Afghans/US felt/believed that MSF were treating wounded Taliban and decided to destroy the hospital as an act of reprisal/total war.
They attacked the hospital purposely, but (it is claimed) because their Afghan allies were taking fire from there, not because it was a hospital. Now if they (or anyone) bombed a hospital in order to lower morale and inconvenience enemies by preventing any medical activities from taking place, that would indicate a very different purpose.
>> Obama is trying to kill people to make the world better...
> I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me.
reply
Let's apply your lost of words to WWII. Do you believe it was unjust or unfair to kill Germans in the service of stopping that war? Are you still at a loss for words?
That is just your opinion. Almost all US military intervention since 2001 has resulted in a lot of evil and this evil is continuing to this day and will do so for a very long time. You actually created the power vacuum which IS is exploiting.
The US has fought ISIS from day one, and before Obama left Iraq they had been reduced to nothing more than a few armed mafioso collecting protection money and robbing banks. And if anyone created the Taliban, it was the ISI. The worst the US did was join a Middle Eastern and Pakistani coalition to arm and train them against a brutal Soviet occupation.
That's interesting. Wouldn't that logic excuse the "weapons" though? A common nazi excuse after WWII was that they were just obeying orders. That excuse seems to have been wildly disregarded.
Edit: Yes, I am very aware both parties should then be considered morally responsible.
The Nuremberg trials established that 'just obeying orders' is no excuse, that acting as the tool of another does not absolve a person. That doesn't mean the person giving the orders isn't at least as guilty as the person who carries them out.
That's right, but it does mean there is a totally valid distinction between "authorizing" killings, and carrying them out yourself. The top level comment is blurring lines that shouldn't need to be blurred.
A leader ordering murder is both a murderer and someone ordering murderer. Someone fulfilling that order is a murderer.
Usually, the general use of language tries to hide this. Presidents "order killings", and people "pull the trigger, but the orders come from elsewhere". Nobody involved feels like a murderer, opposed to all of them.
> If you hire a hitman to kill your spouse, both you and the hitman are guilty of murder.
That's generally because of laws which explicitly make procuring, soliciting, etc., a crime that is actually committed an offense for which the perpetrator can be punished as a principal of the solicited, procured, etc., offense; that is, the law recognizes that the acts involved is meaningfully distinct, but assigns the same culpability to those distinct acts.
So, the analogy to law sort of undermines the idea posited upthread that it doesn't make sense to distinguish the act of authorizing from the act of performing what has been authorized.
The law isn't an intelligent being that makes its own choices. It is an artifact created by humans, who have a reason for making it such. Humans have considered, in the US, that hiring a hitman to kill a target is murder, so they have ensured the law reflects such. Since an entire rewrite of the law isn't possible for every change, it sometimes means that the law will have to have less than perfect patches applied. But to suggest that the way it is reasoned about in law is the way it is meant to be makes as much sense as looking as a kludge and saying that the kludge is what was wanted, ignoring all the factors that lead to the genesis of a kludge.
Testing susceptibility to peer pressure in an individual mind is very a interesting idea.
Unfortunately, we can't accurately test it _yet_. A huge amount of data and tests -along with massive improvements in the understanding of the human brain- would be required to make a complete snapshot, without which testing isn't possible. We can't eve be sure this theoretical test is possible.
This alone wouldn't prove that their hands are clean, just that they wouldn't be as much to blame as someone who didn't succumb to social pressures and had more of a choice in the matter.
> This alone wouldn't prove that their hands are clean, just that they wouldn't be as much to blame as someone who didn't succumb to social pressures and had more of a choice in the matter.
I don't think this is the real deal behind that decision. We've established that people are generally pretty susceptible to authority and peer pressure. Moreover, military training exists primarily to increase it. But the effect that legal clause has is that it counteracts this susceptibility by removing any doubt you could have that you'll be on the hook if you follow orders telling you to commit atrocities. It reduces the effect of peer pressure.
I have trouble with that phrasing, but I also have trouble with the phrasing that you suggest, too.
I have trouble with the word "authorize" because if he authorized the assassination, then (to me at least) that implies that the operator could choose to act or not. Was the operator able to choose? If not, then it's more than an authorization.
Maybe "ordered" is more correct, but I have my suspicions that word goes too far in the other direction.
This is just nitpicking. You "just" kill a person with a gun, but you don't "just" kill a person with a missile. Any complex weapon system will require you to "authorize" the launch. Similarly here, "authorizing to assasinate" should be read as "deployed a very complex weapon". Obviously, in no way this absolves one from responsibility.
> He (and Bush before him) assassinated people, assassinates them without trial or due process, while smiling and holding babies and making jokes at the White House correspondents dinner, and complaining about the gun culture and mass killings.
Reminds me, when I saw him interview with Jon Stewart a few weeks back, I was thinking "look at him, he's trying! such a nice man" (actually he was mainly avoiding making excuses).
Then I thought of the character of the Smiler in Transmetropolitan, and remembered.
Yesterday, part of a Nine Inch Nails lyric sprang out at me, and I had to think back of that scene:
"Don't try to tell me that some power can corrupt a person, you haven't had enough to know what it's like."
A lot of powerful people explain away the cognitive dissonance between their promises and their actions with some variation of the above, in different words. And the others, I fear, are just clever enough to not say it out loud. And what are they supposed to do? Have you ever listened to the raving rationalisations of a heroin junkie? If you think that's of a fault in their person instead of a product of their environment, then I suppose you haven't had enough to know what it's like.
We should treat addiction and abuse like the health problem it is, not a criminal problem. And we should start with the power elite.
Agreed entirely; drone strikes are called "signature strikes" much of the time specifically because of how unified their political and tactical appendages are.
Sure, the swipe of the pen or an "okay, go for it" is a few steps divorced from lasing the missile yourself, but it's part of the same causal chain, and that is how responsibility should be assigned.
When Obama says something meaningful, you can assume that it is a lie... like stopping the militarization of local city police forces with MRAPs and such (or not renewing the (un)"PATRIOT" Act..
There are a few interesting anecdotes about this huge story -
This is the same leak that Glenn Greenwald describes to Edward Snowden in Moscow (-> -> -> -> POTUS), meaning this story has been in the making for at least 1.5 years.
Second, this quality and quantity of leaks is incredible and can only be attributed to a news organization that takes security as a paramount consideration, setting up proper secure channels to enable technically apt whistle-blowers to approach them with confidence.
Props to The Intercept for some fine journalist work.
Oh, so that's what that scene was about! I re-watched it now and it really is incredible. Screenshots of some of Greenwald's notes (they don't say much):
My gut says a majority, I believe that the war is truly inward. A flagging system wouldn't be too difficult. You could even flag people who aren't dead and yet haven't raised a flag in some time-frame (Unibomber). Statistical analysis, the data's all there. Set up keys that resemble the analyses's output. Find what you're looking for. Unfortunately, those keys are controllable. You'll always find people who fit a certain profile, you will always find who you're looking for. Unfortunately, you'll require some vagueness to ensure that the net you've cast doesn't have holes too large.
I'm inclined to at least consider the possibility that other foreign governments are helping out with making this information available because it suits their own interests. The notion that Snowden and Greenwald are plucky little protagonists doing everything on their own against the malign might of the US government is a peculiarly American narrative in that it doesn't consider the possibility that any non-Americans could be involved in shaping public perceptions in the US.
This is insane. By your logic: "I'm inclined to at least consider the possibility that the Russians are polluting American's precious bodily fluids because it suits their own interests..."
Leaking supposedly confidential information to the press is hardly a novel technique in espionage, or in any social context for that matter, eg feeding a juicy tale to the village gossip to embarrass a rival. Machiavelli made a systematic study of such techniques centuries ago. What do you find so insane about it?
What is insane to me, is the reasoning behind suggesting "X is beneficial to Russia. Therefore Russia is doing X" without producing a shred of evidence.
I am inclined to at least consider the possibility that you are a NSA/GCHQ agent[1] attempting to discredit and diminish the reputation of Snowden and Greenwald.
So you're criticizing me for a suggestion I never made, about a country I never mentioned, and then you suggest my reasoning is insane? I think you need to work harder at this. If you can't countenance the possibility that your political hero figures could themselves be subject to manipulation then you're essentially adopting a religious attitude towards them.
Unfortunately I am too marginal a person to be hired as a disinformation agent; I'm just your friendly neighborhood sociopath reminding you that it's helpful to look both ways before crossing the street.
I apologize unreservedly if I read more into what you said than you meant. However, your original comment was
I'm inclined to at least consider the possibility that other foreign governments are helping out with making this information available because it suits their own interests
In my mind, Russia is congruent with 'foreign government' and is the first that came to my mind. Perhaps you could specify which foreign governments you were thinking of? I will rephrase my take on your allegation to "X is beneficial to country A. Therefore country A is doing X", which is a crazy thing to say without evidence.
> Unfortunately I am too marginal a person to be hired as a disinformation agent
I hope this shows the point I was making: I made an unfounded allegation that put you on the defensive just by raising the specter of it being a possibility (in your words "I'm inclined to at least consider the possibility".) It is this Bill O'Reilly-style insinuation that I objected to.
> If you can't countenance the possibility that your political hero figures could themselves be subject to manipulation
I countenance this possibility in the same manner that I countenance the possibility of Obama secretly being a muslim: the probability for both is non-zero, but I'm not going to waste cycles worrying about it. My attitude to both is "support your allegation with some proof or GTFO."
I don't think my statement added what he said: I only special-cased his generalized statement by substituting "foreign government" with the first one that came to my mind (the runner-up was China). See my other reply to sibling comment
Are you sure these are the same documents/from the same source? (As far as I recall, those were from a drone pilot, that's done a few tv appearances already?). Or that was my impression, anyway.
[Bad form to comment before I've read the story, but just wanted a clarification - if this was an assumption or something that's been stated clearly by one of the people involved?]
In Citizenfour (the scene I was referencing but neglected to mention) GG explicitly mentions this slide, as well as the existence of another whistleblower. Of course the situation might be more complicated than that, but it's clear the story was in the making for quite some time.
I also recall Laura Poitras mentioning the work that Jeremy Scahill was doing on this topic at one of the Q&A's she did.
- IMEIs are used to track targets. Can IMEIs be spoofed?
- Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target.
>Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target.
You are conflating what the US considers enemies before targeting and after a strike. The US doesn't just bomb any random male 18-49.
But when the US does target what it thinks is a legitimate target, it counts any unknown males killed in the strike as enemy. It doesn't use that assumption to do the strike. Only to count the enemy v. civilian kill total.
And it's a pretty reasonable assumption, depending on the circumstance. If the US drone strikes a Taliban hide out, the unknown males there were very likely foot-soldiers of the Taliban. If you accidentally blow up a wedding, then counting all the men is essentially lying.
But your sex and age don't make you a target. You being near a target doesn't really make you a target either. It makes you a tragic accident.
Unless the Taliban want to line up like 18th century foot soldiers, there are going to be people killed who aren't involved. Sending in ground troops would only make it worse.
And it's not like the Taliban aren't a real threat to Afghanistan. They just took over the 5th largest city in Afghanistan two weeks ago.
"We're not going to apologize for this, because you hung out with someone who was on our list, who we think was in this area, and so clearly you deserved being bombed by a drone. What? You borrowed your friend's phone? Oh well. Jackpot."
> And it's not like the Taliban aren't a real threat to Afghanistan. They just took over the 5th largest city in Afghanistan two weeks ago.
Why are we concerned with Afghanistan? There are literally dozens of other countries that are an actual threat to our National Interests (note: I did not say national security), so if we're going to go after countries, there are lots of other countries that should be ahead of a country half a world away.
One thing that sending in ground troops would do is hopefully reignite the debate as to whether we should be in that country at all.
A major problem with drones is that it allows us to make enemies without having to actually commit to a war. These Drone strikes are essentially a line-item on our defense department budget, and the CIA drone strikes are part of a black-budget we don't even know what it contains, let alone able to debate it.
If we're basing drone strikes on groups we're unfriendly with taking over countries, then we've got a lot of targets to go after.
The problem with not minding our own business and starting wars around the globe is that we continually get blowback, but we don't learn from it. It was "to keep the world safe for Democracy", then "safe from Nazis", then "Safe from communism", and now "safe from international terrorism", yet there is no debate in our congress about how our policies fuel any of these things.
When will there be a 'war' to keep the world safe from us?
> One thing that sending in ground troops would do is hopefully reignite the debate as to whether we should be in that country at all.
Agree, but you're only part way. We really need to bring back the draft. On the ground in Iraq in 2008, watching ‘drone’ feeds of SF soldiers on missions on one screen and the stock market crashing on the other screen, all I could think about was “Don’t people care? There are soldiers risking their lives in foreign countries, doing things in America’s name, and all the TV talks about is houses and stock prices.”
The number of contractors in country was probably 3 to 1 or more compared to military - Kenyans providing internal security, Filipinos working in the commissary, Pakistanis working in the chow hall, and Americans driving F-350s all over doing maintenance or whatever. The SF guys hated their contractor counterparts who took none of the risk they did and made a $1,000 a day just to provide a little training for the Iraqis. Being a pilot on a ground job, I hated the contract pilots making $20k a month for a job I easily could have done.
Until we’re all in it together, we won’t see change. As long as Americans can get upset, then turn off the TV and forget about it, nothing will happen, the military and civilian worlds will continue to drift apart. And a private, separate military is not good for this country.
Yup. No one cares until its their kid or the neighbor's kid getting shipped off to some far away warzone. While I disagree with the draft on moral terms, I think pragmatically it is the only way to properly align the incentives of the populace against wars that don't matter. Otherwise, the government can wage whatever wars they want and no one will be that bothered (as we've seen).
This cannot be stressed enough. A robotic military allows the government to wage wars with impunity because the average voter just doesn't care. If you have skin in the game, it would be different.
Perhaps a remedy for this would be to force the ranking members of congress to function as consuls, and make them live in Afghanistan for the duration of the conflict?
That's true, but look how poorly we behave when we go in with troops instead, qua Iraq. The upsides (such as they are) of drone war are that it's very limited in scope and stimulates a conversation about objectives and interests, such as we are having now. As soon as you send troops in somewhere, a large swathe of the public stops even pretending to think about those issues and goes straight into 'support our troops, crush the enemy' mode, completely detached from any kind of strategic, fiscal, or ethical considerations.
My problem with this perspective is that you're suggesting we go out of our way to put more people (US soldiers) in danger.
If we (the US, or the military, or what have you) determine that a certain military act is justified, I think the approach should be to do it in a way to minimizes the danger as much as possible.
I can't imagine going to a soldier (who might be your son) and saying, "Hey, so, we could do this with a drone, but we'd prefer instead to put your life on the line."
Right now we can see that the more we can outsource the wars, the less public cares about them. Which incidentally also means the other side has to figure out a more drastic way to make us stop. Drones are terrorist-breeding machines.
>it counts any unknown males killed in the strike as enemy. It doesn't use that assumption to do the strike.
Imagine for a moment that someone (be it some foreign agency, US police, army or whoever) did the same in America, to American citizens. Would you be outraged by your explanation?
"Hey, it's not like they're targetting them specifically. They're just deciding that they were all enemy combatants post-factum."
I wouldn't be. That's the basic rationale of terrorists (both the foreign and domestic varieties). I don't think the Boston bombers were motivated by a specific hatred of athletics fans, or other demographic characteristics of their victims; they just knew it was a big static crowd with lots of media and weak security. The primary product of a terroristic enterprise is 'a scene of carnage' intended to communicate an experience of trauma to as wide an audience as possible.
If someone was bombing America, the way they were tallying the enemy combatants wouldn't really be a huge concern, to be honest.
Let's say the Michigan Militias sack Windsor, Canada. And Canada drops a bomb on their clubhouse. And a bunch of redneck young men are killed. You gotta assume they were part of the militia.
You should be, but for a different reason than if they were targeting those people specifically. Both are atrocities, but precision is very important in such discussions, otherwise we will turn into an angry mob.
May want to review that stance in light of the fact that, like most countries, all male American citizens age 17-45 are legally part of the US Militia (and, until creation of the National Guard, were expected to be suitably armed & trained). When one country is at serious war with another, targets may not just be active combatants, but anyone officially positioned to become one. There are relevant & valid axioms, held to by warring parties, which do not differentiate between "combatants" and "non-combatants". In an existential crisis, fine distinctions are often discarded. Ugly memes, yes.
> Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target.
As an American citizen I'm so ashamed that we do this.
Arguably you wouldn't object to taking out nearly any random person on the other side of the world who you didn't know personally. That's not the point.
It's a lot easier to just randomly assassinate people across the world than to come up with a sound policy that protects our interest while also obeying our values as a people. Historically, western culture has not condoned execution without trial.
The notion of just lumping anyone within an age range into the category of combatants is so antithetical to what the US ought to stand for, that it's really quite shameful. It's only a small degree away from the ethos of so-called terrorists, who just try to kill anyone they can.
What it boils down to is that the US is practicing terrorism abroad. I'm sure there would be circumstances where I'd approve of drastic measures, but at this point I'm very far from convinced that such tactics are remotely necessary or appropriate.
> Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target.
A German newspaper wrote, that males with an age of 12 years up are considered legit targets.
Off-topic, but do you know any phones that can be easily hacked to change the IMEI? I know technically it's possible, and I know the hacks exist because I've seen shady sites offering the service, but I'd like to get a phone where I could rotate the IMEI myself when I change SIMs, so it would not be quite so easy to map the SIM to a person by watching for common IMEIs.
I guess the best bet would be something that runs OsmocomBB, but AFAIK that's not really a good choice for a day-to-day phone.
I was going to say the exact opposite; that it's in no way trivial and that possessing the tools and information to do so is illegal in a number of European countries.
More information would be greatly welcomed :)
Edit: On reflection that sounds extremely dodgy... I got curious a few months ago and couldn't turn up much, so I'd certainly classify it as more difficult than trivial... but then I am still curious.
I believe it was easier and possible in older phones. For example if you get an SL45 somewhere, I remember you had to flash your IMEI (or any IMEI) after the firmware change - otherwise it failed to register on the network. That would suggest it wasn't only as software level.
On those older phones the radio and phone application tended to be highly combined and running on the same processor, so re-writing the firmware would require you to reprogram hardware identifiers (there's a handful of embedded PCs at the moment where the ethernet MAC address isn't actually stored in NV memory so also has to be set on boot). -but yeah, you _need_ IMSI and IMEI as minimum to register on a network.
As far as I know, nearly every "modern" or smartphone has distinct separation between OS+applications and the radio world to the point where they're not only running separate firmware (anyone flashing android images will have seen this) but they're running on physically separate CPUs.
The other sad thing about the older phones (I've got a 6310 and a 7110 on my desk at the moment) is that they often don't support A5/3 encryption, so you can't actually use them on most modern networks (I believe it's the encryption; if anyone else knows better please tell me) -so if you're desperate to change the IMEI for some reason you can't just use an ancient handset to do it. It also means I can't throw off the shackles of this modern world and re-live 1990's hardware :(
I guess my original question could be better phrased as "does anyone know if it's possible on a _modern_ handset -and as it's device specific; which ones?"
I also feel I should point out a couple of "good" reasons for the macro operators not wanting people to have the ability. As it's the hardware identifier, it's used to blacklist stolen handsets -and anything that discourages kids from stealing my phone at knifepoint is probably a good thing. Different handsets also have all sorts of odd network quirks too. For macro operators, being able to profile how different handsets behave on their network can be extremely useful just for the sake of keeping the network running properly.
My sudden paranoid realisation though is that if you're a TLA, being able to go from IMEI to make/model of handset and therefore know exactly what exploits to use, must be quite useful o_0
Currently, there is a special inquiry going on in the German Bundestag (Federal Parliament). An ex-drone pilot is reporting about the work he did in the US miltary base in Ramstein Germany.
It is utterly shocking and disgusting.
I fail to see why this is not murder. According to press articles reporting about this inquiry, boys from the age of 12 were cleared to be killed by drones.
In my little happy world, there is only one reason when you are allowed to use violence - and that is self-defense (to protect you or others).
And according to German law and probably the law of many other countries, your self-defense is only justified if the attack on you is (1) unlawful, (2) happening right now (has started or is immediately impending) and (3) if the means to counter the attack are within reason.
The killing via drones makes me feel very, very uncomfortable. I don't think it is compatible with human rights or any reasonable constitution.
EDIT:
The following is a quote from the inquiry - quoted by the German Bundestag [1].
"In diesen Einsatzgebieten hätten alle männlichen Personen im Alter von über zwölf Jahren als legitime Ziele gegolten. Wenn ein Opfer jünger gewesen sei, sei das aber auch nicht besonders tragisch genommen worden. Man müsse das Gras mähen, bevor es wachse, habe es dann geheißen. Mit anderen Worten: Aus Kindern wären später ohnehin Terroristen geworden."
My clumsy translation:
"In these areas of operation, all male persons above the age of 12 were considered legitimate targets. If a victim was younger, however, it was not regarded as a big deal. You have to mow the grass, before it grows, it was said. In other words: Children would have become terrorists later anyways."
Logically, if the U.S. feels justified in targeted drone strikes against legitimate threats to national security, what's to stop China or Russia from doing the same? Arent there some legitimate scenarios where U.S. and Chinese national security interests are in opposition?
Who has the "moral high ground", if such a thing exists, in such cases?
> Logically, if the U.S. feels justified in targeted drone strikes against legitimate threats to national security, what's to stop China or Russia from doing the same?
Um, nations have been using military force of whatever kind they have available -- and doing so in whatever ways minimize what they have at risk for what they stand to achieve -- for a very long time, longer than the US has been around.
Its not like Russia or China would refrain from using drones, where available, just because the US hadn't done it first.
> Who has the "moral high ground", if such a thing exists, in such cases?
The moral high ground is highly subjective, and generally perceived as being strongly linked to the validity of the justification.
Not that the moral high ground matters all that much in practice if the outrage level isn't tied to groups with both the capacity and the will to do something about it which influences the national interest calculation.
One legitimate scenario is the US support for Jihadist organizations that operate all around the globe including in China. (Uyghur region)
I think it is pretty clear who has the moral high ground on this one. For me this aspect of US foreign policy is by far the most disgusting, even more than the assassinations.
You can see for yourself how the US demands from Russia to stop their military campaign in Syria now that the Jihadi groups are losing ground.
Superior nuclear capability? (And no, I don't think this sets a great precedent. Then again, it's not really something new to perform war crimes against "3rd world nations" -- but it does seem horribly out of place in our (thankfully) more educated times (as in, all of us are far more educated now, than previously)).
The worst part, is that with all three big players lobbying warheads around in Syria, we might be closer to a third world war than we've ever been before.
Well, this is basically what's now happening in Syria; the Russians are carrying out strikes on US-backed anti-Assad fighters using (among other things) cruise missiles launched from the Black Sea.
For me the most grave offense of our current president was taking out Anwar al-Awlaki in 2011. I understand he was not a good individual, by any means, but he was an American citizen which entitled him to all of the protections afforded under The Constitution.
Programs like these are what undermines any legitimacy our country has left.
What should the US have done instead? He was planning and committing terrorist attacks and there was no way to simply arrest him. Why should the US be obligated to allow Americans to commit war crimes when they are unreachable by law enforcement?
What law did the US break? The guy was a member of Al Queda. Congress explicitly initiated a war against Al Queda. The guy wasn't in a place where US law enforcement could reach him. Which is kind of the definition of being at war.
I don't see this in CNN top yet, BBC is also silent(though UK citizen was killed by an US drone). However, RT and other media independent of western governments already have this on main page. Let's think why dear HNers.
Well, I don't personally have a problem with Al-Jazeera. In the "editorial interference from the government" tables, Al-Jazeera makes an appearance but it is far, far below RT.
Motive is the big reason. It's not like America is killing people for fun or some petty economic gain. America is killing people that American believes they are at war with. Hell, America is killing people who believe themselves to be at war with America.
But drones only work when you have total air supremacy. Any halfway decent airforce can protect against the huge drones America fires missiles from.
> It's not like America is killing people for (...) some petty economic gain. America is killing people that American believes they are at war with. Hell, America is killing people who believe themselves to be at war with America.
Bujać - to my, panowie szlachta...
O, my untutored simple friend,
mate from this land, or other land!
Know that the bells for these alarums
kings strike, with girls with ample charms,
Know it’s all hogwash, lies perverted,
And when these call out: ‘Shoulder arms!’
That somewhere from the ground oil spurted,
With dollars soiling the bright colours;
That in their banks there’s something rotten,
They smelled some moneybags, it looks,
Or cooked some scheme, the oily crooks,
For higher import tax for cotton.
Drum on the pavement with your gun!
Ours the blood, the oil is theirs!
And through each capital and town
Scream out, to guard your cash blood-won:
‘Tell us another, noble sirs!’.
-- Julian Tuwim - Do prostego człowieka (To the Simple Man).
Thanks for sharing that; this was written in 1929 for those who were wondering. Also, the regime the criticism was most likely targeted at (Józef Piłsudski who was in power at that point due to a military coup), exercised its military actions at least partly in an attempt to prevent Poland from becoming either Soviet or Prussian, a danger far more existential for the Polish nation-state than terrorism is to the US.
> Motive is the big reason. It's not like America is killing people for (...) some petty economic gain.
Is that so? And what do you base that idea on? [ed: I see a more charitable reading of your statement is possible - I do not believe it is for petty economic gain no. More like deciding the future of the world economy and access to/control over natural resources.]
> (...) drones only work when you have total air supremacy. Any halfway decent airforce can protect against the huge drones America fires missiles from.
Very important point. Committing war crimes with drones in Yemen is like shooting fish in a barrel. Except of course for all the dead kids.
It's perhaps more interesting what kind of precedent this sets for inevitable proxy wars across the Middle East and Africa -- when cruise missiles, drones etc fired by Chinese/Russian contractors kill US/NATO contractors.
It's not like America is killing people for fun or some petty economic gain.
How do we know this, again? The folks who have said this are legally bound not to say anything else. So they're not particularly believable. The Snowden revelations about PetroBras hacking somewhat (but not totally, admittedly) makes me very suspicious that network penetration goes on for petty economic gain. Why wouldn't that leak into drone strikes?
Because we are talking about the known drone strikes. We know, generally, where they occur and who they target. People in the tribal Pashtun-Pakistan area, Al Qaeta in Yemen, and Somalia.
If America is waging some secret economic war, it's been covered up extremely well. Spying is easily covered up. It's certainly possible. But that's hard to a reason to presume it's true.
You could suppose there is an insane person in our government who is killing for fun, but that has all the usual logical pitfalls of a conspiracy theory.
As for economic gain (not sure what is meant by "petty" economic gain), that has been a large part of the source of most international conflicts over the past few hundred years anyway. So that just sounds false.
Far it be from any person to do things just because they can. They're all saints w/o blemish, protestants at that (i.e. they don't enjoy the work, rather they suffer with their victims).
Whatever the job description, you will get people gravitating to it who enjoy that kind of work. It's not controversial that cooks enjoy cooking, and programmer enjoy programming. And it's not unusual that they stay after hours and do some extra work just for fun. Why would you think jobs that involve killing and torture be any different?
> Why would you think jobs that involve killing and torture be any different?
Why don't I think an exceptional job is an exception? It seems self evident to at least consider the possibility that killing people and cooking are fundamentally different.
They just don't use drones; instead, there will be a traffic accident or a suicide. Or a single-car traffic accident, where it's unclear if the driver wanted to commit suicide or not.
The main thing that "stops" people from committing acts of war is that you cannot really keep it a secret for too long, and then you will have started a war. Pakistan is different, because while we wage war against their citizens, the central government (a) is only nominally in control of those areas, and (b) is given a metric ton of money each year by NATO, and they don't hate money. If they didn't have nukes, the war against Pakistan would be much more brazen (cf. Ukraine).
True. The bombings happen near the border though, they're probably easy for the government of Pakistan to ignore, or maybe even convenient.
Moreover, from what I can find on-line, Pakistan seems to have just over a hundred warheads, most in the few dozen kiloton range, none exceeding half a megaton. They can't do any real damage with that. Maybe blow up a few cities in the US, at which point the rest of the world would turn them into a flat sheet of glass visible from orbit, and the only good thing that would come from that for anyone would be increased albedo of Earth helping combat the global warming. There is no MAD situation with Pakistan.
Those drone strikes are, mostly, done with the authorization and approval of the target country. They don't like their militants either. This issue is a lot more complex than "GUISE GUISE OBAMA KILLIN KIDS FOR FUN." The US cooperates with local intelligence, foreign governments, etc to find and eliminate these targets.
From a practical point of view, the alternative would be boots on the ground fighting that would guarantee vastly more innocents killed.
I thought it has been known for years that the US govt uses drones to execute military and assassination targets. And the public has no insight into how these decisions are made.
This may reveal internal details, but I don't know how different from what the world has known for years?
I know it's a tangent, but I'm actually blown away by the quality of the website itself. They've managed to use modern techniques like header background video and fading in of navigation elements in a way that is classy and reserved. It doesn't lag up my browser; it doesn't make jarring movements that cause UI elements or content to jump out of line of the eye.
The best part? It actually helps add to the point they're trying to make. It's... chilling, serious, international-stakes stuff here. Kudos on perfect execution of the full package.
I too was pleasantly surprise, especially since it actually works well on mobile Chrome with nice big text that is actually readable. As far as I can tell all of the graphics are responsive and there weren't any annoying ads that bumped the scroll position.
Only concern is that pinch to zoom is disabled but the typography makes up for that for probably >95% of readers.
I actually think this is a confusing change. Before I read this comment, I read the first article as linked, which ends abruptly and I was left a bit unsatisfied. (I ignored everything after the article, which I always do on news articles, like a regular person.) The page layout doesn't really make it clear that there is a higher level until you get to the end and scroll past the comments.
Plus, the article linked is titled "The Assassination Complex" not "The Drone Papers", like the original link and the current title of the HN Story.
Plus, the initial image of Obama and Bush hugging in scary black and white makes me think that this is more of a hit piece on Obama, which is not exactly accurate.
Also, the first article does not really introduce the series very well.
Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence.
I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power.
Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate juggernauts. These people only response to power and will not hesitate to kill you, imprison you, or otherwise destroy your life.
Voting, by design, won't change something the majority of people want to keep happening: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-str... ("Fifty-eight percent of respondents expressed approval of U.S. drone strikes, while only 35 percent disapproved. This included nearly three-fourths of Republicans, slightly more than half of Democrats and 56 percent of independents.").
"Insiders" and "corporate juggernauts" are a red herring. The problem isn't them--it's your family and friends and coworkers. The problem is the people you walk past on the street every day, your kids' teachers, maybe even the guy at the grocery store register. The problem is us and our moral justifications for these sorts of interventions abroad.
You seem to assume that public opinion is an independent variable, but it's not. It shifts in response to elite opinion, media coverage, how poll questions are asked, and no doubt other things. It is as much an effect as a cause of the forces that shift policy; only in dramatic cases does it become causal. Appealing to public opinion to predict that the status quo will persist is therefore a historical fallacy.
There's an example of this in Boswell's Life of Johnson. Here is Johnson, the great English Tory, arguing in 1769 that general warrants are a non-issue because the public doesn't care:
[Johnson] would not admit the importance of the question concerning the legality of general warrants. "Such a power (he observed) must be vested in every government to answer particular cases of necessity; and there can be no just complaint but when it is abused, for which those who administer government must be answerable. It is a matter of such indifference, a matter about which the people care so very little, that were a man to be sent over Britain to offer them an exemption for it at a halfpenny a piece, very few would purchase it." This was a specimen of that laxity of talking, which I had heard him fairly acknowledge; for surely, while the power of granting general warrants was supposed to be legal, and the apprehension of them hung over our heads, we did not possess that security of freedom, congenial to our happy constitution, and which, by the intrepid exertions of Mr. Wilkes [1], has been happily established. [2]
It's striking how modern Johnson's arguments about general warrants—the mass surveillance issue of his time—sound now. He was probably correct about the public and could have cited polls had they existed. Yet that was far from dispositive: the American Revolution was imminent, and to Boswell, writing 20 years later, it is so obvious that Johnson was on the wrong side of history that he hastens to make clear that he (Boswell) wasn't.
Most of whom don't know anything or don't have time to care. The aggregate will of majority is bullshit - the votes are not boolean, but have a third, undefined state, which happens also to be default.
This also means that if you make people care, turn the issue into a hot topic that people start tying to their identities, they'll eagerly vote your way.
What information do you think is missing? If you look at the poll, half of Americans are "very concerned" about civilian casualties from drone strikes, another 30% are "somewhat" concerned about them. Yet, 60% still support them. That doesn't strike me as ignorance, it strikes me as a broadly-shared value judgment.
Well, I know that there are children starving in Africa, and can say this is sad and I am "very concerned", but otherwise it has close to zero emotional impact on me. It's an abstract issue. I actually feel about drone strike victim stronger, because I've seen the pictures, read the stories, seen the math.
The point is, this issue is totally disconnected from the lives of most people. You need to get them invested emotionally. Make a blockbuster movie. Harry Potter and The HellFires of Voldemort. Or something. Invite the Pakistani that lost his arm, leg and half of the family to US drone strike. And then keep pounding at people with the topic.
If we can't get people to care about this more than they care about "slut shaming" or Ferguson or Comcast, we truly have failed as a civilization.
Well, why should people necessarily care about this issue more than about any of those? Also, just because people do not agree with you, does not always mean they do not care.
Sure, there are many innocent victims of drones -- but your opponents can just as easily showcase equally innocent victims of Taliban or of Al Qaeda or of whatever group the people killed by drones belonged to.
> Well, why should people necessarily care about this issue more than about any of those?
Because their government is murdering innocent and helpless people in cold blood?
Yes, I sometimes forget that for general population, morality is inversely proportional to the square of distance...
> Also, just because people do not agree with you, does not always mean they do not care.
I know. I'm sure there are people who after careful consideration of their values and information available to them decided to support the drone strikes program. But I don't believe their number is anywhere near 60% of US population, or even 60% of people who responded to that poll.
The optimist in me likes to at least entertain the notion that the large scale effort to justify, sanitize and in some cases morbidly celebrate the failing of the long term US foreign policy has some part to play in shaping public opinion.
But if you are absolutely correct that those numbers represent the general values of the American people then can it be argued that once rewarded with enough material gain, an entire population can and will turn positively evil based on most people's moral compass in order to ensure their continued quality of life?
How do you define "positively evil"? If there are people whose objective is to destroy our quality of life (material or otherwise), is it immoral to make an effort to eliminate them?
Now, I do have serious doubts whether the drone program actually serves that purpose, but are you suggesting that we should ignore legitimate threats to our well-being, or perhaps that there are no such threats?
I wasn't suggesting that there are people out there who actively want to destroy our quality of life. All things being equal, most foreigners couldn't care less how we make our living as long as it's not off their backs. Throughout recent history, however, that's exactly how certain US conglomerates have made much of their fortunes. There are no legitimate threats to our well being other than those created by our own military excursions overseas.
The most unfortunate part in all this is that the rewards for middle class in all this are sort of superficial. I believe that the US would still be a great economic power with many of its citizens enjoying a comfortable life even without the enormous projection of military power overseas. Maybe lacking a few billionaires and some minor trickle down economic benefits, but by and large, regular people in US would still be as innovative, productive and successful as ever.
So if US had never bombed a number of countries or organized a number of coups or ended sanctions against Iran, Cuba and Russia tomorrow, the average American would hardly feel the difference or be any more threatened. But unfortunately political power in the US is not controlled by average citizens.
Well, it appears we just have to disagree here. I see very immediate and legitimate threats to our (and our allies') well-being from the likes of Iran or Russia (I might agree with you on Cuba as it stands now -- but let's not forget the missile crisis, which has probably been the largest threat we've faced yet).
I am all for peacefully negotiating mutually-agreeable solutions, but the key to having those negotiations in the first place is a credible threat of force, not folding at the first opportunity.
You could argue for the right to defend yourself, but since we're making a moral argument here, you should also make sure that your defense inflicts damage to those who are a danger to you, and not to innocent bystanders. Also a defense that makes more enemies is a pretty crappy defense, both from moral and practical point of view.
(Of course we're skipping the part of the more likely real reason for drone strikes - more people pissed off == more terrorists == more need to defend == more money for military-industrial complex. You can play this game safely as long as your enemy isn't very powerful.)
So that's one position to take in the discussion of how much responsibility falls on voters when the various types of consent manufacturing are in play.
In theory, with hypothetical fully informed voters, everyone would agree with your stated position. But when you have massive misinformation campaigns aimed at voters and various attempts at swaying public opinion with psychological tricks (which we know will change some X% of voters' behaviour) I don't feel like it is that clear.
Clearly some of the responsibility is lifted from the individual voters and put on those manipulating them isn't it? Individuals have no control over how susceptible they are to manipulation. If the majority of people want X to keep happening but are tricked into voting for Y because they think they are voting for X, I don't place the responsibility for this error entirely on the voters. I place a lot of on those "insiders" and "corporate juggernauts" doing the manipulation.
- Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist.
- Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy. We need to turn aiding the program to be Worse Than Hitler, no matter the dronesplaining and hellfireblaming they're doing.
- Help develop counter-drone tech and make sure it becomes widely distributed among people in the affected areas. Warning: this will likely paint you as a valid target.
- If you know anyone over at Hollywood, pitch for turning the problem into a movie. Not a documentary, but a good action movie. Big productions with top actors have a way to influence public around the entire world much stronger than anything a news station could ever tell. Get a good writer for the script and make sure the protagonist personally suffered from the strikes - say, his entire family was killed in a strike that targeted them because over at the US nobody gives a shit about confirming intelligence anymore.
- Put your money where your mouth is. It's easy to talk, much harder to do anything meaningful if it costs you something, but the latter is what really sends a clear signal. Put a "do no drone strikes" clause in your software license. If you own a shop or a restaurant, refuse to serve Air Force / Intelligence officers until they get their shit together. Yes, you'll probably affect directly everyone but the parties responsible - but this is a situation where guilt by association actually works. They will be talking about you over at watercooler or shooting range. Maybe someone higher up in hierarchy will start thinking about it and push feedback upwards. Yes, you'll lose some customers to competition that won't follow suit, but you already know they're greedy cowards, don't you?
> It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy.
lol really impressed you managed to pull stuff about feminists in here
I really try to be considerate to SJW movement, but let's be honest - it seems to have some incredible power of rallying up people towards a cause and scaring companies into doing its bidding. If we could redirect this power towards the drone strikes issue, we could maybe see some changes happening. And in the longer run, maybe the drone issue could have a chance of becoming something important to people, like racism or suffrage in the past.
That was too indirect. I didn't even think of the connection until you brought it up. It needs to be straightforward. Bad US Government droning the good guys audience symphatizes with. Direct enough that media would call it "controversial".
Voting in the US reminds me of that old parenting tactic of an illusion of choice for kids who don't want to go to sleep: "Do you want to wear the blue pajamas or the red pajamas?"
Feeling empowered by having a say in the completely unimportant choice of pajamas, he is going to sleep whether he actually wants to or not. Ina similar manner, whoever you vote for, some foreign country is getting invaded and bombed for strategic or political reasons.
The argument that democracy doesn't work because Nazis is a really bad one. The only thing that argument shows is that you have a embarrassingly superficial knowledge of German history.
Democracy doesn't work because it's obvious that it doesn't work. It takes like five minutes of concentrated thinking to figure out its basic problems. The best thing you can say about democracy is that it's the system with least bloody failure modes out of the systems we know. Belief that it "works" is just a propaganda all of us are constantly exposed to since primary school.
I think representative democracy and then specifically representative democracy with FPTP has been shown not to work, primarily because of the principal-agent problem and also the spoilt vote effect which in turn ensures a two-party system (i.e. Duverger's law).
Direct democracy with smaller electoral districts and a saner voting system could be more efficient, or at least have much higher response times. Of course you're still stuck with the self-fulfilling bottleneck that voters will seldom pick anything outside their cultural zeitgeist, but then it keeps the electoral system well contained and lets people focus more easily on actual activism.
The best thing you can't say about Winston "I am strongly in favour of using poisoned gas against uncivilised tribes" Churchill is that he wasn't Hitler or Stalin or the more freedom-loving but less talented people. I think his cute quote about democracy is similar, it sounds insightful until you compare it with anything more serious.
Democracy relates to various implementations of it like "blogging" does to "Wordpress version X.Y", and to various modes of control like an email from a friend does to spam containing a virus. There is a grey area, too, plenty of emails from real friends with viruses attached by intermediate servers.
I'd say the best thing you can say about democracy is that it scares power shitless, even when it's hardly effective and comes from the guts of people more than adult and focused thought and organizing. Once we ever being implemented without anyone who doesn't want it to work being involved, we can talk benchmarks. As it is, it's like writing a program in C, then letting a bunch of cats walk over the keyboard, then compiling, and saying C sucks.
That depends on what you consider "working". I would certainly consider most modern democracies to work, some slightly better than others. Certainly all modern democracies are stable and not threatened with catastrophic failure.
The democracy in the Weimar Republic didn't work by any reasonable definition because it was horribly designed. If the Nazis hadn't happened, someone else would've almost cetainly destroyed it sooner rather than later.
> Certainly all modern democracies are stable and not threatened with catastrophic failure.
What would you call climate change, or coming energy crisis, or degenerating trust of public in authority leading to things like anti-vaccination movements? I consider them existential threats to technological civilization. Those problems are issues of coordination, and they play right into failure modes of modern democracies. In this sense I consider them not "working".
I agree that there are times when it fails, although I am not so sure we would agree on when exactly that happens. But it's a bit of a stretch to say that anything not perfect does not work -- particularly since there isn't that much agreement about how it should work.
I guess people usually vote on domestic issues. Unless a war has direct consequences on the domestic level(draft,too many soldiers getting killed,cost of war...), they don't care.
The problem is not voting. Voting is a right but also iMHO a duty. The problem is usually the political offer. You have 2 parties on the national level, they agree on almost everything except minor stuff like gay marriage so voting for one or the other has very little impact on foreign policies.
On the federal level, it looks like democracy actually work better and independent candidates can win elections.
Voting certainly helped Nazis, though they did other things too.
If you read up on my country, the popular support for fascist movements fizzled in 1930, but before that the country was in some danger. Many politicians and military men had their plans aligned for different scenarios, depending on where the popular opinion turned.
I think general philosophy, values and leadership play a huge role there. People sense that kind of stuff, and it turns into actions by the masses.
Just curious, are you this upset because it's the US or because you genuinely care that those responsible for the problems get away "without consequence"?
Voting for a major party candidate does not matter, since both major parties strongly support the status quo. I'd say 80% of the power structure influencing US politics strongly agrees with the status quo. It follows that anyone who can get elected president has essentially promised to continue the status quo.
However, I do think that voting for 3rd party candiates could help over time. If even 10% of Americans voted for a 3rd party candidate in a presidential election, things would start to change. If there were two viable 3rd party candidates things would change faster.
It seems that the 50% of eligible citizens who choose to vote very much prefer to vote for a major party candidate. This goes along with the general herd behavior of animals like us, and also makes sense in light of the massive amplification of differences between the parties. So much money is spent to magnify (and dignify) the smallest differences between candidates/parties so that the average person can come to think that his/her vote for one of those parties (and for the status quo) mattered.
The main reason we don't have much dissent is because of the vast efforts by the powerful and the media to focus on the delegitimization of nearly all institutions other than the US Government. NPR will cover nearly any story but never ask questions about the trustworthiness or legitimacy of any part of the US Government.
The occupy movement helps disempower private institutions, the NY Times stories about China flooding helps alienate us from other humans who live in China. And the presentation of the third world is much, much worse. There is a massive bias toward government institutions over private ones... Occupy is nowhere near as hard on the corrupt regulators as it is on the firms. All this helps squash dissent.
The Intercept seems to be one of the first efforts to offer the mainstream media consumer an alternative view. The internet has (so far) made it easier for powerful interests to shape opinion, but that may start to change as groups like The Intercept have the budget to do the kind of high quality reporting that can be tough to ignore.
But with so much money riding on continuation of the status quo, there will always be lots of influential people (academics, politicians, pundits, business leaders) who will completely ignore things like this in favor of focusing on one of the many silly issues covered by mainstream television and newspapers. As a case in point, Zuckerberg would absolutely never make a public statement supporting this reporting, since his interests are already quite closely tied to continuing the status quo. Similarly, Bezos now owns the WaPo but would never syndicate this coverage.
So more than voting, the issue is lack of dissent.
As an aside, the most telling aspect of this is when the US president suffers through a (very rare) interview. The journalist simply will not ask tough questions and the atmosphere is one of utter groveling and supplication. Of all things, I can't believe we are willing to live in a society where this happens... but it's considered such a rare honor to do a one hour on-on-one with a president that of course only the most ingratiating journalist (if one can call them that) would ever get the chance.
> [there are x persons] President Obama ha[s] authorized U.S. special operations forces to assassinate
US special ops are the President's weapon. It doesn't make sense to say "yesterday I authorized my gun to kill a man"; what you want to say is "yesterday I killed a man".
President Obama didn't "authorize targeted killings" or whatever you want to call those.
He (and Bush before him) assassinated people, assassinates them without trial or due process, while smiling and holding babies and making jokes at the White House correspondents dinner, and complaining about the gun culture and mass killings.
The same day of the Umpqua College shooting (10 dead), US drones in Afghanistan targeted a hospital and killed 22 people (12 staff, 10 patients including 3 children).
If Obama really wants Americans to get rid of their guns, maybe he should start with his own.
But of course he won't, so forgive me for not listening to whatever he has to say.