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Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

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Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#41

Post by 3131s »

csallen wrote: post #32
educar wrote: post #5

If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. Brainwashed by years and years of media programming. One man's terrorist is another man's hero. The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity. If the bombed people retaliate, they are terrorists. The truth is not black/white. Same way U.S data surveil…

> If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. People don't know the half of it, and in my experience, they don't want to know. It's comforting to feel like the good guys. The media is complicit, in that it intentionally leaves out relevant facts that might make us look bad. For example, take Iran. In 1953, we overthrew their democratically-e…

> Our "defense" of Vietnam.

And most people only think of Vietnam itself regarding that conflict, yet Cambodia and Laos were absolutely decimated too. The US dropped more tons of bombs on Laos and Cambodia individually than the combined amount dropped by the allied forces in WWII. There are still 80 million unexploded bombs in the Laos countryside. Landmines sold by the US and China to the Lon Nol government and the Khmer Rouge respectively were up until recently killing 1000+ Cambodians a year. If you've seen these places and met the people there, it's hard to imagine.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#42

Post by dcposch »

deepnotderp wrote: post #29
dcposch wrote: post #11

i'm disappointed that hardly any members of the media or Democratic party establishment talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. we have a long list of names. the executive branch of our government curates the list unilaterally and in secret. then, we cross names off the list by killing them. sometimes, they're American citizens. often, they're in countries we're at peace or even allied with. there are chil…

>i hope the technologists who created this infrastructure think about that when they try to sleep. Yes, because people flying planes instead of drones is so much better, right? (/s) The problem isn't in the technology people, it's in who's using it. Obama and Trump's expansions of these programs is what the problem is.

The problem is both. Obviously prime responsibility lies with the decision makers--but that doesn't absolve the many people who are making a lot of money building these systems.

Systems which they know will be used to kill people extrajudicially, invisibly, far from any war zone; people whose deaths will never even be acknowledged.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#43

Post by cyberferret »

csallen wrote: post #32
educar wrote: post #5

If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. Brainwashed by years and years of media programming. One man's terrorist is another man's hero. The U.S routinely bombs other sovereign countries and this is show cased as a "hero" activity. If the bombed people retaliate, they are terrorists. The truth is not black/white. Same way U.S data surveil…

> If you still think of the world as divided into good and evil, then I have to break it to you that you have been played. People don't know the half of it, and in my experience, they don't want to know. It's comforting to feel like the good guys. The media is complicit, in that it intentionally leaves out relevant facts that might make us look bad. For example, take Iran. In 1953, we overthrew their democratically-e…

I was living in South East Asia when the USS Vincennes incident took place, and it was widely reported there. But I do remember when I returned to Australia, hardly anybody knew about what had happened. That was my first introduction to 'curated news' by various countries.

Of course, a few years later when the family of the Captain of the Vincennes was targeted in a failed car bomb attack, we heard a bit about this 'terrorist' activity. I thought it interesting that when Western forces eradicate an entire family of a suspected 'terrorist' via anonymous drone strikes, it is considered merely collateral damage, a byproduct of a dutiful and patriotic thing to do, but when Iranian operatives attempt to retaliate against someone who murdered 290 of its citizens in their own airspace, it is an underhanded terrorist activity.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#44

Post by kurttheviking »

lend000 wrote: post #40
kurttheviking wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'm disappointed that i haven't seen a single member of the media or Democratic party establishments talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. I have been hearing and reading about the expansion of Obama's drone program for years in "the media". Some quick Googling shows several examples. - http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democ... - http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-…

Sure, they throw the issue a bone every once in a while, but was it even within an order of magnitude as the amount of airtime given when Bush was doing the bombing? (you can even look at the amount of stories coming out now, in the two weeks that Trump has been doing what Obama did non-stop for nearly a decade.) It's a little disingenuous to link to five stories from five different sources over a five year period an…

> It's a little disingenuous to link to five stories from five different sources over a five year period and claim that the magnitude of the ongoing stories has been fairly captured over the last eight years.

I tried to explain that was a quick Google of resources that most people consider to be "the media". The OP had suggested not "a single member" to which the counter point is, fairly I believe, minimal evidence to the contrary.

To make a claim about relative magnitude would require us to establish "how much is enough" and I do not believe that was the point in question -- as I am unsure how we could ever make such a determination.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#45

Post by ronnier »

kurttheviking wrote: post #19
dcposch wrote: post #11

i'm disappointed that hardly any members of the media or Democratic party establishment talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. we have a long list of names. the executive branch of our government curates the list unilaterally and in secret. then, we cross names off the list by killing them. sometimes, they're American citizens. often, they're in countries we're at peace or even allied with. there are chil…

> i'm disappointed that i haven't seen a single member of the media or Democratic party establishments talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. I have been hearing and reading about the expansion of Obama's drone program for years in "the media". Some quick Googling shows several examples. - http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democ... - http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-…

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20str...

Interesting how that became so popular lately.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#46

Post by jcranmer »

dcposch wrote: post #11

i'm disappointed that hardly any members of the media or Democratic party establishment talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. we have a long list of names. the executive branch of our government curates the list unilaterally and in secret. then, we cross names off the list by killing them. sometimes, they're American citizens. often, they're in countries we're at peace or even allied with. there are chil…

> i'm disappointed that i haven't seen a single member of the media or Democratic party establishment talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program.

You must not read a lot of media then. Pretty much every source of media I read on a regular basis has commented about the drone assassination program, Obama's expansion of it, the questionable legality of it (particularly as it applies to US citizens), and generally pointed out problematic aspects of it.

Even Democrats have complained about aspects of it:

http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/04/24/democrats-repu...

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#47

Post by ronnier »

megous wrote: post #26

Other thing that is massively underreported on much bigger scale than actual air strikes are civilian casualties. Presumably so that Americans, or Russians or whoever of the other N countries that bomb people regularly can justify killing thousands of civilians in middle east a year by mistake. It is not a mistake though, it's a calculated acceptable collateral murder where the government determines some acceptable r…

Over the last couple of weeks we suddenly care about casualties again

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20str...

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#48

Post by megous »

amenghra wrote: post #36
sytelus wrote: post #21

Wow... 1,700 air strikes just last year alone. That's more than 1 air strike every 6 hour for entire year! I'm wondering how much damage is being inflicted on civilians here. Not just people getting killed, but people becoming homeless or their livelihood getting destroyed. If these are not ultra-precise air strikes then we would be giving birth to future heavily disgruntled middle east population.

Some countries use cluster munition for some of their strikes. The usa last did this in 2009. The opposite of precise...

Cluster munitions are bad, but you have to consider that people often try to hide in houses, in cellars during air raids in the city. Cluster munition will not do much to those people, other than being insanely noisy and terrifying. What will kill those people is a bomb that will drop the house on them.

Indiscriminate killing is a function of decision making process, not the munition itself.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#49

Post by lazaroclapp »

fsloth wrote: post #28
andrei_says_ wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The older I get the more interesting and sensible Chomsky gets. Until a few years ago I was perceiving him as boring and monotone and now I am seeing a fierce warrior of truth* holding language as his weapon. This 9 min. excerpt on propaganda terms in the Media is especially appropriate. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vmoXze-Higc *I don't mean some objective truth out there but a viewpoint which is rooted in his very…

I wonder what aspect of Chomsky makes him uninteresting. Maybe it's that his message - trying to point out the human flaws of his governmemt - goes so much against the grain of hollywood aided propaganda that people presume it's either minute details or just wrong?

In my experience, the only country in which Chomsky is seen as uninteresting or nitpicking is in the U.S.

That's not to say there are no complexities to whether or not a Pax Americana is better than the alternative (based on previous U.S. govts.), or that all governments records are equivalent when it comes to propaganda or human rights (for their own citizens). But no other country sees the U.S. unequivocally as "the good guys". A few see it as "the less-bad guys", but plenty of countries in Latin America saw the U.S.S.R. as "the less-bad guys" by comparison too.

Re: Thousands of deadly U.S. military airstrikes have gone unreported

#50

Post by khuey »

ronnier wrote: post #45
kurttheviking wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'm disappointed that i haven't seen a single member of the media or Democratic party establishments talk about Obama's expansion of the drone program. I have been hearing and reading about the expansion of Obama's drone program for years in "the media". Some quick Googling shows several examples. - http://www.npr.org/2013/04/28/179597464/leading-senate-democ... - http://www.npr.org/2012/06/20/155389081/are-drones-…

https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&q=Drone%20str... Interesting how that became so popular lately.

There was a relevant recent event for that spike ...
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