I saw this elsewhere. It's weird: there's something so enticing about being sure* to get your target that I think makes the monstrousness easier to ignore. Like, if it were "drop a bomb on his house, and there will be 9 innocents killed, and a 50% chance of getting the guy," you'd be much likely to say yes--killing innocents for maybe no reason at all seems too evil. But once you have this (illusory?) certainty, then you shift the calculus and make more excuses.
At least, that's how it feels to me. The routinization of drone strikes with terrible war crime rates derives from at least feeling like you're achieving your goal. Ties into lots of dumb human behaviors/rationalizations, like cabbies working more hours on slow nights. Related to the sunk cost fallacy, I guess--people die in war, but as long as we're getting the bad guys....
*more or less
The routinization of drone strikes with terrible war crime rates derives from at least feeling like you're achieving your goal.
Was there a goal? I forgot what that was.
"Not intended targets" is not the same as "innocent bystanders". If you hit the truck that a Taliban leader is riding in, you'll kill five other Taliban footsoldiers who weren't intended targets.
They also serve, those who sit on the tailgate.
I assume 3 should be read as a nitpick rather than dismissive move-along-citizenning.
enough guys in uniform show up in his office to say it's really important, it's bombs away.
That's about as coherent a strategy as I've heard from this administration.
Anyway apparently bombing a hospital to maybe kill one intel agent is totes okay right? I mean what if he went on to be Hitler but with nuclear weapons?
Isn't this sort of thing exactly how Bill Clinton found himself declining more than once to kill Bin Laden?
What if Jason Bourne had been sent back in time to kill someone but he couldn't bring himself to do it because the target had family around when he got there and then he let the guy live and the guy turned out to be Hitler?
Strategic bombing of civilian targets has been official US military policy for over 70 years now. Do we really need to embarrass ourselves by performing this craven circus of phony disbelief every time the military does EXACTLY WHAT THEY'VE BEEN TELLING US THEY'RE GOING TO DO?
Obviously, you send Borne back in the to kill the guy who rebuffed Hitler's application to art school, not Hitler.
Killing art teachers doesn't run the same risk of finding yourself emotionally attached.
Gestartpo: Ve haff vays uff makink you paint!
Caution: Autoplay video at the second link. If that doesn't warrant a hellfire missile I don't know what does.
Also 3 is my first thought.
5: no, not a nitpick. Citing the 90% figure is deliberately misleading, because the people doing it know that everyone who reads it will make that mistake. The percentage of civilians killed in drone strikes is actually lower than 15% according to the Bureau for Investigative Journalism.
Quick poll, while we're at it: total number of civilians killed by coalition forces in Afghanistan? Don't google: just put down your instinctive estimate. I'll bet you pretty much everyone here is at least one order of magnitude high.
The Bureau of Investigative Journalism has lots of data on it's site, though I'm not finding the 15% figure. Doing the math myself based on their numbers I get figures as high as 25% (Pakistan) and as low as 3% (Afghanistan)
I'd have guessed about 25%, which is why the 90% figure sets of my bullshit alarm.
I'm glad the Bureau of Investigative Journalism is trying to do this work, but their note on sourcing indicates that they are primarily relying on news reports.
The majority of our information stems from news reporting. Commonly cited international media sources include CNN, MSNBC, ABC News, Reuters, the BBC, Associated Press, the Guardian, the Telegraph, the Independent, TIME, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Fox News, the Nation, the Atlantic, Salon, Xinhua, Army Times, Bloomberg, AFP, NPR, Al Jazeera, and Al Arabiya.
They also list local media sources for each country.
We certainly know that the media have long relied on liars for information on this subject.
Here's John Brennan in a statement that's an actually an attempt at walking back his previous statement that no civilians had been killed in drone strikes:
"Fortunately, for more than a year, due to our discretion and precision, the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths resulting from U.S. counterterrorism operations outside of Afghanistan or Iraq, and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way," Mr. Brennan said.
I'm sure they looked real hard for evidence, but I am amused by the construction of this sentence: "the U.S. government has not found credible evidence of collateral deaths ... and we will continue to do our best to keep it that way."
The New York Times itself doesn't seem to have a great deal of confidence in its own ability to tally up civilian deaths.
Mr. Zenko said that an average of separate counts of American drone strikes by three organizations, the New America Foundation, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and The Long War Journal, finds that 522 strikes have killed 3,852 people, 476 of them civilians. But those counts, based on news accounts and some on-the-ground interviews, are considered very rough estimates.
That count puts it at 12 percent.
Here's the NYT again with a note on methodology:
Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties ... It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
I tried to google the answer to 16.2 and it's hard to get a clear answer.
Is it sexist that I immediately discounted the (high) civilian casualty count which some Professor at the University of New Hampshire put together because he is a Professor of Women's Studies? Probably.
23:
Daniel Larison at American Conservative has been all over this for weeks, maybe months. His kind of conservatism has no use for any of the candidates, and he makes cogent cases against nearly everything done in our name in the region.
Dems like Patrick Leahy actually come in for more of his approval than anyone else on this stuff.
I think it weird that somehow we ended up in alliance with al Qaeda, and no-one seems to have noticed.
25 I know. You'd think the Republicans would be making a lot out of it but no. And that should tell you something, I suppose.
I'm pissed that now we're fucking with Zaidis, my second favorite sect, on behalf of Wahabis, my least favorite, for no good reason.
Yeah, I dig the Zaydis too. Wahhabis suck. A pernicious evil ideology.
Oh, man, I messed up. I actually do like the Zaidis, but it's the Ibadis who I was thinking of who are my second favorite.
S'alright. I dig the Ibadis too. And weird religious diversity in general. Wahhabis still bite the big one though.
Let's all list our favorite sect acts.
I just thought of a completely novel sect act.
Holy shit but that Jeffrey Goldberg article is some pretty fucking heinous racist shit. Never mind that a Palestinian family was burned alive in their own home a few months ago with complete impunity or that women and children are routinely shot down on the street with similar lack of consequences, or the ongoing price tag attacks . Fuck him. And fuck Josh Marshall too. Fuckers.
Much love for Hirak, as you can imagine. But given the choice I'd rather have the Houthis in Sana'a than the preceding mob. This is based on my sophisticated analysis that anything that upsets the Saudis has my conditional support.