Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The Drone Papers

theintercept.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 226 posts

Re: The Drone Papers

#121

Post by anigbrowl »

DominikR wrote: post #111
rhino369 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Why is it obvious that the attack on the hospital wasn't purposeful? This article by associated press indicates that they attacked the hospital on purpose. http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:5e20fcd92aee49e69... > 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.

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.

Re: The Drone Papers

#122

Post by dragonwriter »

Lawtonfogle wrote: post #72
MrJagil wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you hire a hitman to kill your spouse, both you and the hitman are guilty of murder.

> 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.

Re: The Drone Papers

#123

Post by jsn117 »

cryoshon wrote: post #107
kafkaesq wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 nothi…

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 matt…

So comparing a terrible mistake in an active war zone to a purposeful killing of civilians is..what exactly?

Re: The Drone Papers

#124

Post by jsn117 »

DominikR wrote: post #111
rhino369 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

Why is it obvious that the attack on the hospital wasn't purposeful? This article by associated press indicates that they attacked the hospital on purpose. http://bigstory.ap.org/urn:publicid:ap.org:5e20fcd92aee49e69... > 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.

> I have no words for this. How a person can even entertain such thoughts is beyond me.

Being condescendingly naive doesn't make you a better person

Re: The Drone Papers

#125

Post by DasIch »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #32
DasIch wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

Re: The Drone Papers

#126

Post by pdeuchler »

jsn117 wrote: post #123
cryoshon wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 matt…

So comparing a terrible mistake in an active war zone to a purposeful killing of civilians is..what exactly?

The US is not at war with anyone so it's impossible for Afghanistan to be a war zone

Re: The Drone Papers

#127

Post by [deleted] »

AUmrysh wrote: post #110
dombili wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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): 1- http://i.imgur.com/Xk3tefg.jpg 2- http://i.imgur.com/3C7sdIA.jpg 3- http://i.imgur.com/8FNhVfE.jpg

"There are 1.2 m people on various stages of their watch list" :-O That's absolutely terrifying. I wonder how many of those are American citizens.

[deleted]

Re: The Drone Papers

#128

Post by dragonwriter »

pdeuchler wrote: post #126
jsn117 wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So comparing a terrible mistake in an active war zone to a purposeful killing of civilians is..what exactly?

The US is not at war with anyone so it's impossible for Afghanistan to be a war zone

> The US is not at war with anyone

Yes, it is. A Congressionally declared war, even.

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.)

Re: The Drone Papers

#129

Post by jsn117 »

dombili wrote: post #7
yuvadam wrote: post #2

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…

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): 1- http://i.imgur.com/Xk3tefg.jpg 2- http://i.imgur.com/3C7sdIA.jpg 3- http://i.imgur.com/8FNhVfE.jpg

Those are some amazing revelations, ones that have nothing to do with spying and everything to do with defeating a war effort.

Re: The Drone Papers

#130

Post by anigbrowl »

bambax wrote: post #102
rhino369 wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 r…

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.…

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.

Post reply on HN