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The Drone Papers

theintercept.com

31–40 of 226 posts

Re: The Drone Papers

#31
post #12

Hm. So what stops US from targeted killings in China? Russia? Europe? Only the probable retaliation?

Motive is the big reason. It's not like America is killing people for fun or some petty economic gain. America is killing people that American believes they are at war with. Hell, America is killing people who believe themselves to be at war with America.

But drones only work when you have total air supremacy. Any halfway decent airforce can protect against the huge drones America fires missiles from.

Re: The Drone Papers

#32
post #23

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power. Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate jugg…

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.

Re: The Drone Papers

#34
post #24

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power. Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate jugg…

Voting, by design, won't change something the majority of people want to keep happening: http://www.politico.com/story/2015/05/poll-support-drone-str... ("Fifty-eight percent of respondents expressed approval of U.S. drone strikes, while only 35 percent disapproved. This included nearly three-fourths of Republicans, slightly more than half of Democrats and 56 percent of independents."). "Insiders" and "corporate jugg…

We can't exactly expect the populace to make the right decision when it is fed misinformation.

Re: The Drone Papers

#35
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nuclear weapons, most likely.

Doesn't explain Pakistan though.

True. The bombings happen near the border though, they're probably easy for the government of Pakistan to ignore, or maybe even convenient.

Moreover, from what I can find on-line, Pakistan seems to have just over a hundred warheads, most in the few dozen kiloton range, none exceeding half a megaton. They can't do any real damage with that. Maybe blow up a few cities in the US, at which point the rest of the world would turn them into a flat sheet of glass visible from orbit, and the only good thing that would come from that for anyone would be increased albedo of Earth helping combat the global warming. There is no MAD situation with Pakistan.

Re: The Drone Papers

#36
post #5

There are lots of important points in this set of articles, but a few stand point: - Congress has not defined what "assassination" means; and since they haven't defined it, the Executive Order 12333 is effectively meaningless. https://theintercept.com/drone-papers/the-assassination-comp... - IMEIs are used to track targets. Can IMEIs be spoofed? - Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that…

>Military Aged Males are considered enemy combatants. Effectively that means all males ages 18-49 are considered enemy combatants. Since you're guilty by association, your age makes you a target. You are conflating what the US considers enemies before targeting and after a strike. The US doesn't just bomb any random male 18-49. But when the US does target what it thinks is a legitimate target, it counts any unknown m…

> It makes you a tragic accident.

"We're not going to apologize for this, because you hung out with someone who was on our list, who we think was in this area, and so clearly you deserved being bombed by a drone. What? You borrowed your friend's phone? Oh well. Jackpot."

> And it's not like the Taliban aren't a real threat to Afghanistan. They just took over the 5th largest city in Afghanistan two weeks ago.

Why are we concerned with Afghanistan? There are literally dozens of other countries that are an actual threat to our National Interests (note: I did not say national security), so if we're going to go after countries, there are lots of other countries that should be ahead of a country half a world away.

One thing that sending in ground troops would do is hopefully reignite the debate as to whether we should be in that country at all.

A major problem with drones is that it allows us to make enemies without having to actually commit to a war. These Drone strikes are essentially a line-item on our defense department budget, and the CIA drone strikes are part of a black-budget we don't even know what it contains, let alone able to debate it.

If we're basing drone strikes on groups we're unfriendly with taking over countries, then we've got a lot of targets to go after.

The problem with not minding our own business and starting wars around the globe is that we continually get blowback, but we don't learn from it. It was "to keep the world safe for Democracy", then "safe from Nazis", then "Safe from communism", and now "safe from international terrorism", yet there is no debate in our congress about how our policies fuel any of these things.

When will there be a 'war' to keep the world safe from us?

Re: The Drone Papers

#37

Utterly disgusting, America conducts clear war crimes, tortures, bombs afghan hospitals, assisinates, all without consequence. I'm sure some idiot will tell me to vote, because that'll change the systemic corruption and nightmare that has taken hold of US power. Did voting in nazi Germany help? No because they were voted in, voting only legitimizes a political system completely captured by insiders and corporate jugg…

Some alternatives to voting that come to my mind: - Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist. - Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous tha…

> It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy.

lol really impressed you managed to pull stuff about feminists in here

Re: The Drone Papers

#38
post #12

Hm. So what stops US from targeted killings in China? Russia? Europe? Only the probable retaliation?

They just don't use drones; instead, there will be a traffic accident or a suicide. Or a single-car traffic accident, where it's unclear if the driver wanted to commit suicide or not.

The main thing that "stops" people from committing acts of war is that you cannot really keep it a secret for too long, and then you will have started a war. Pakistan is different, because while we wage war against their citizens, the central government (a) is only nominally in control of those areas, and (b) is given a metric ton of money each year by NATO, and they don't hate money. If they didn't have nukes, the war against Pakistan would be much more brazen (cf. Ukraine).

Re: The Drone Papers

#39
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some alternatives to voting that come to my mind: - Figure out the real reason why the US is at war with "terrorism", and do everything to help develop and popularize technology that will make that reason obsolete. Is it because of oil? Then become a Tesla evangelist. - Keep talking, writing, shouting about the issue, shaming and blaming everyone even tangentially related to drone strikes. It's utterly ridiculous tha…

> It's utterly ridiculous that you can lose your job and home and have life ruined over pissing off some random feminists on Twitter or Tumblr, and yet people responsible for drone attacks are all happy. lol really impressed you managed to pull stuff about feminists in here

I really try to be considerate to SJW movement, but let's be honest - it seems to have some incredible power of rallying up people towards a cause and scaring companies into doing its bidding. If we could redirect this power towards the drone strikes issue, we could maybe see some changes happening. And in the longer run, maybe the drone issue could have a chance of becoming something important to people, like racism or suffrage in the past.

Re: The Drone Papers

#40
I know it's a tangent, but I'm actually blown away by the quality of the website itself. They've managed to use modern techniques like header background video and fading in of navigation elements in a way that is classy and reserved. It doesn't lag up my browser; it doesn't make jarring movements that cause UI elements or content to jump out of line of the eye.

The best part? It actually helps add to the point they're trying to make. It's... chilling, serious, international-stakes stuff here. Kudos on perfect execution of the full package.

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