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U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

eminetra.co.uk

211–220 of 273 posts

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#211

As much as I love to check hackernews, I’m not normally able to chime in with relevant information on most topics. I feel like this may be one where I can actually do that though as I’m former military and my job directly related to drones on a daily basis. Depending on what’s asked, I may not be able to answer but I’d love to help by sharing any knowledge or information on the subject that I can as I’ve gained so mu…

Would you still have signed up if you knew then what you know now?

I want to preface this with the fact that a few specific incidents left me disillusioned with the military and that I don’t think people really understand just how horrible war is. That being said I wouldn’t change the decisions I made. I truly believe the work that I did was a net positive and that my work contributed to saving the lives of both military members and civilians. Unfortunately not everything goes perfectly and I still struggle with those things mentally to this day. The things that do still haunt me aren’t the extremely hard to avoid tragedies, they were the events caused by poor leadership and people being placed in positions they didn’t deserve to be in. I think one thing most people don’t consider is that at the end of the day the military and government overall work and function very similarly to the businesses they work or have worked at. The big difference is that the incompetent manager doesn’t mess up part of a presentation, order, or whatever else you may be working on. It leads to innocent lives being lost to an avoidable situation and ends up being referred to as a tragedy.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We need to seriously examine our own morality for allowing these ghouls to basically genocide brown people. We are absolutely the baddies; between Iraq, Afghanistan and our air strikes on Syria, Libya, and Yemen during the same period killed 1 million civilians . We’re within an order of magnitude of the Holocaust, and we all just pretend everything is ok. I really don’t know why there aren’t more discussions of how…

It's not about morality per se, and rather about understanding the people, organizations, and mechanisms that allowed it to happen. Afghanistan wasn't my war (Iraq), but I've spent most of my lifes free time since I got my brain back (left the military) tackling this topic. I think it was Ge. Wesley Clark or maybe Col. Wilkerson who said something to the effect of "There was a policy coup, some very hard nosed people…

>>>Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers.

Glad to see you call out Wilson, I consider him possibly the worst President ever. Federal Reserve Bank? His fault. Federal income tax? His fault. European intervention? His fault.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We didn't use this term in Iraq, so I wouldn't call it "military jargon for child" like the article does. It is common for units to come up with code words for various things, especially when the topic is emotionally charged or could be used for propaganda or intel. For example, almost nobody would use the term "FKIA" over the radio, even on a secure channel; they might say "flowers" instead.

What's "FKIA"?

I'm going to guess friendly/ies killed in action.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#214
post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Checkout Ben Anderson's 2 part ~30 minute report from Afghanistan for Vice from around 10 years ago [0][1]. He was embedded with British troops and ANA during a patrol with a lot of gun fights. The British strafed an empty field, almost bombed themselves twice and once an Apache launched a Hellfire missile into a compound with British and ANA troops in it and hit a building where a family with small children were hid…

It's never malice. Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it." Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken. War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody he…

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Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#215
post #186
post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From another comment chain (credit to @belter), this seems like the original source: https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-fa... Comment chain (along with archive link for EU access): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299929

Given the video in the link that you sent - I wouldn't say that it's "accidental" - they said they killed anyone who met the "criteria" and the "criteria" was anyone who touched a walki talki because the Talian has taken the phones offline and they suspected ISIS was communicating via walki talki. This was described as basically killing for the sake of killing (agree) - but accidental makes it sound a lot less sinist…

They are describing a particular incident when they were aiming at a man carrying a walky-talky, but the missile instead struck a different motorcycle with two adults and toddler. So killing those three people were accidental.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#216
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-fa... This link was posted in another thread and seems to be the source that broke the news today.

Yea but you said the US "declared" "every" person w/ a radio a "target". This story doesn't show any of the 3 words I put in quotes. Edit: can I get an explainer on the downvotes to both my comments?

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Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “war on terror” was not meant to stop terrorism. It was meant to fan the flames and give the US an endless war that can be fought for generations. And it worked.

Source please.

Seems like plain old common sense to me. You’re never going to hear the US government say it. But that doesn’t make it untrue. It’s just an inconvenient truth.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#218
post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I always think it's interesting when Americans try to hide their news from foreigners. So much for being proud of your country, I guess?

Don't be silly; this is not anyone hiding anything. If a website survives based on advertising and needs to now pay a service to keep them up to date with the latest EU regs, then they may just switch on GeoIP filtering and be done with it.

And I'm sure it's just a happy coincidence that news about US military murdering civilians cant be accessed outside of the US :)

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#219
post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-fa... This link was posted in another thread and seems to be the source that broke the news today.

Yea but you said the US "declared" "every" person w/ a radio a "target". This story doesn't show any of the 3 words I put in quotes. Edit: can I get an explainer on the downvotes to both my comments?

You could try to explain what you think the difference between

> US declared every man with a walkie-talkie was a legitimate target.

and the policy described in the article is, attempting that will likely lead you to why you are downvoted.

Re: U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults

#220
Whole section about "Trump ended a rule requiring reports of all deaths from drone attacks" an not a single word about the fact that Obama made thous rules just before he left office.

This is not Journalism, if you fall for such political theater and intentionally placed stones for the next administration to look bad you are not a real journalist.

PS: I'm from Europe you can down vote anyway if you want ;)

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