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

eminetra.co.uk

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

#261

Post by didntknowya »

dmos62 wrote: post #98
ricardobeat wrote: post #71

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

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 not malice. it's more the recklessness and carefree attitude towards collateral damage just because of the war mindset. like "looks like a threat, let's bomb it in case. if any innocents get hurt everyone will understand it's just a casualty of war"

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

#262

Post by didntknowya »

blitzar wrote: post #95
ricardobeat wrote: post #71

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

> “We killed two innocent men and a charger,” the U.S. official wrote in a personal journal that day, using the military jargon “charger,” which means child. Got to wonder why the need to replace a 5 character 1 syllable word with a longer 7 character 2 syllable word, a little easier to stomach than saying, writing, or feeling like you just killed a child?

same reason casinos uses chips instead of cash. it reduces the emotional connection by introducing an apathetic layer.

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

#263

Post by gus_massa »

coding123 wrote: post #256
gus_massa wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But our country tries to prevent that at ALL COSTS. I agree. Allcaps included. > We do so by making sure other countries are stable. Ehh... that part is more dubious. For example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Central_Intelligence_...

What am I supposed to be looking at here. I see an operation to capture Osama. Black sites, some weird other stuff. But I am not finding a specific example of something causing instability (at least on purpose).

I counted at least three (successful) coup d'état, and I'm not sure if I should count also the operations in Cuba. Also, there are many items about guerrilla and anti-guerrilla support. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_and_state-sponso...

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

#264

Post by nexuist »

iJohnDoe wrote: post #231

Think about this for a second. Your family is walking into Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and all get killed by a missile from the sky. Or you send your children off to school and the school gets accidentally hit by a missile. Killed in an instant and the family of those victims listed above have no idea why and have zero recourse. If this started happening on US soil on a daily basis, I wonder if more people would care…

This did happen on US soil: https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/may/10/move-1985-bo...

Police brutality is our domestic version of drone strikes. No chance to defend yourself and zero recourse.

Do we care an adequate amount about it? Maybe, although it seems to not be the culture's cup of tea right now as much as it was in 2020.

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

#265

Post by nexuist »

arminiusreturns wrote: post #232
secondaryacct wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One would say: why isnt Afghanistan sending drones to Phoenix or San Diego? What led to this country / group of combattant to be so behind. Im French and I live in China with a child born here. The two militaries I paid taxes to maintain are able to find ways to resist US aggression to a point where it would become really painful to treat us like they treated Afghanistan, and we are just as old as Afghanistan. At som…

This person actually just called for Afghanistan to request assistance from China in attacking the US... I don't even... wow... Straight out of /r/sino

> We understand the [British|Soviets|Mujahideen|Americans] is a huge threat to most of us, we're ready to help, if only you make simple compromises.

It's kind of funny to think of Chinese citizens meming themselves into another Forever War the same way Americans did 20 years ago.

Even without context, you have to be seriously ignorant to believe that the right solution is starting a war in Afghanistan!

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

#266

Post by robertlagrant »

queuesorcs wrote: post #201
robertlagrant wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "go GTA" Is this an actual thing people think drone operators do? Surely the same that would happen to any military personnel who did the same with their weapons, except with a drone there's perfect camera footage to evidence it as well.

One of the other major things that made me want to offer any information I can is the lack of knowledge on the topic I’ve seen posted on here and places like Reddit. I just would never attempt to have an actual discussion on Reddit though. When you have a topic so shrouded in secrecy and the only articles that people see about them are articles like these, it’s not too surprising though. There’s just so many variable…

I still don't see what's unusual about drones. What stops fighter pilots from doing the same thing?

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

#267

Post by eurasiantiger »

mleonhard wrote: post #258
ricardobeat wrote: post #71

Having watched a few documentaries on the war, from multiple periods, my first thought was “who did they target with these drone strikes?” seeing as they usually had no idea who or where the enemy was. The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.

Google is complicit. In 2017-2018, Google Cloud division developed software for the US military to watch drone footage and classify things like "man with a radio". Diane Greene, Urs Holzle, and Jeff Dean got up and lied about it to me and other Googlers in a meeting in April 2018. Specifically, they said it was only a $9M project, but it was already negotiated to $18M and on track for $270M of extensions. They also s…

Do you know what keyhole can do?

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

#268

Post by ashwagary »

watwut wrote: post #242
2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Nobody goes, "hey, this compound is 100% only women and children, let's bomb it." Actually, people do. That happens fairly regularly in conflicts. Civilians are often a target by policy. Plus, by neglect - superiors not caring what this or that sociopath does. In Afghanistan case, there was period when per policy anyone with walkie talkie counted as valid target. Phones did not worked. So there is fair chance some…

Didn't they knowingly bomb weddings? Is he saying the US was surprised that innocent women and children were at weddings?

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

#269

Post by sangnoir »

inglor_cz wrote: post #254
sangnoir wrote: post #247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Robot warfare is a logical endpoint of such development Robot vs. Robot is unlikely to settle wars - we may as well play chess rather than wage war and humans have too much bloodlust to solve differences that way. What is likely to happen is having country A's robots in country B's homeland killing humans, while battling country B's robots in A's homeland. What constitutes a "war front" will be really confusing whe…

The goal of a war usually isn't to rack the highest bodycount, but to break the opponent's will. IDK how this works with fully robotic armies, but some devastation of the homelands is probably expected. The concept of a war front has been already muddled since the advent of airplanes.

> The concept of a war front has been already muddled since the advent of airplanes.

True, but airplanes have to fly back. I'd say cruise missiles, then UAVs/drones and loitering munitions have continued to blur the lines. Having loitering bots of war on the ground will be a further escalation.

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

#270

Post by loonster »

sangnoir wrote: post #246
loonster wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Back when I enlisted, I decided that I would rather live with the regrets of joining than the regrets of not joining.

If you may indulge me as someone who's not martially minded, may you please give a few examples of what could be the regrets of not joining?

It was simply something that I wanted to do. Not joining would not be true to myself.

A friend and I were having a discussion about the merits of the war. He was antiwar, and I was not opposed to it. During the discussion he asked me "Why don't you join up then?"

I didn't have an excuse. Either I need to change my political beliefs, I am a coward and a hypocrite, or I should join. I joined.

My political beliefs have since changed. I am much closer to a libertarian now than I was before. I still am not antiwar, sometimes violence is the answer.

I learned firsthand the meaning of "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."

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