@VoodooV
worst...analogy...ever.

@bcglorf
how does your analysis of the situation in pakistan defend or excuse the execution of american citizens abroad?

@Yogi made the clear example of Anwar al-Awlaki,an innocent 16 yr old american citizen living with his respectable grand-parents,who was executed by a drone strike.

are you suggesting we should just trust the executive branches decisions to murder citizens because the political/religious situation in a certain country?

i am trying to understand your correlation between a political climate and abusive executive powers.

For balance, most of the towns where drone strikes have been made already were completely controlled by people who hated America and harbored or cooperated with those actively working on killing Americans. Take a tour of the hundreds of drone strike targets in tribal Pakistan and you are surveying a region accepting the rule of militants so extreme that the Pakistani government is a secular heresy worthy of death to them. Pakistani law including the death sentence for blasphemy. Those regions being under such strong control of the militants that the Pakistani military can't go there for the casualties they would take trying to do so. The welcome for Americans(long before drone strikes were made) would have been even more vicious.

It is important to state that for as much legitimate reason to 'hate' American foreign policy as there is, there exist huge numbers of people who hate America for their own petty, vile and psychotic reasons. The Islamic fundamentalists that see Pakistan as too secular are plainly one such example, and saying they only hate America because they are justified is making excuses for monsters.

Around the 30 second mark, I would have agreed to a drone strike on the audience.

I found this discussion very interesting and I agree with many points made.

The first thing I thought of about these drone strikes is:

drone strike vs Dresden, Germany end of the WW2.

Drones are technology that is keeping "some" people alive that would be obliterated by indisciminant bombing.

Other than that one little idea of avoiding an entire city/village being flattened, I do not see how anyone can win in these tough situations.

It's a messy world. I wish we had some real solid positive choices but I'm not sure we do.

@bcglorf
how come it always take you 4-5 posts to get an idea across that i can relate to?
its frustrating.

dont know how you got i feel america is some kind of 'special" place.
again i seem to have failed in conveying how wretched i think my government has been for the past few decades.

irregardless...
not american eh?
interesting.....
so you think america should play the global police?
and what exactly gives us that right?
because we have the bigger guns? bigger military?

since it cant be on moral grounds it HAS to be military might.

and america only likes to play with those countries it wants/covets/desires in order to perpetuate this global hegemony thing is has going on.

god you are confusing.
on the one hand you wish to see injustice brought to its knees and are willing to make a deal with the devil to do it.

yet on the other hand you reference history as if you have a semblance of understanding and if THAT is the case then you KNOW nothing is a delineated black vs white dynamic.
nothing is ever as simple or easy as it appears.

so you choose to use american military might to crush the religious zealots and in doing so create more...
but your argument appears to be:if we use drones LESS jihadists will be created and this is a good thing.

no.
it..is ..not.

you cant have it both ways.
you cant have your justice with zero (or less) consequences.
there will ALWAYS be consequences.

do you allow a country to work their problems out (as horrific as it can become).
OR do you go in and possibly extend the suffering of normal folk?

how long?
how long do you think it morally right to intrude on another country and most likely extend conflict,while feeding the rage and resentment creating even more fanatics and zealots who only desire is to bring the suffering to your your door?

and here is what really blows me away.
you are utterly oblivious to just how arrogant your statements are.
yes they are coming from a moral outrage.
yes they are coming from a reaction to horror.
but it is still arrogant all the same.

who are you?
who are you to dictate to anyone how or what they should do?

are there homeless in your country?
are there people starving?
is there injustice?
horrors?

or is it only the countries populated by brown people where the injustices warrant violence?
should america come to your country and clean house there as well?

hell,you wanted us in syria and now pakistan.
any other country you want us to drone?
specific people?

or is it a specific religion?
you seem awfully unsure of those muslim folk.
isreal has been doing all kinds of nasty things to the palestinians for the past 80 yrs.
how come no mention of america droning them?

are you starting to see why your argument makes no sense to me?
it is illogical.

because at the end of the day the poor and less fortunate will always pay the price.
how high a price are you willing to pay for seeing a wrong righted?
does it matter that those people you wept for and were outraged for paid an even higher price?

violence begets violence.
if history taught you anything it had to be that equation.

and a drone strike is violence.
it is intimidation.
it is assasination.
and it is wrong.
without a declaration of war passed by congress and no accountability it is wrong.

i will not make a deal with the devil to get justice today.
because when payment comes due the injustices wrought will tower over everything.
i know you disagree with me.
know that i am ok with that.

So you know, I'm not American. I think your problem is the same a great many people share, and that's the belief that America is far more special than it actually is. America has a history littered with all kinds of horrific awful things, as you've spent a great deal of time pointing out. The trick is, if you take a look at any country and you find the same thing. The colonization by the British you already touched on. I'll include the mention of the colonization that most other european nations also partook in as well. I'll also ask you take a look at Russian and Chinese histories as well. There's an awful lot of dead people in that history, and never for very good reasons. Actually, look at the whole of human history and it's always been that way.

I insist on pointing this out because it MATTERS to how we view our world and actions today. America is no more special than any other nation. I instead ask on looking at the details and asking oneself if the actions taken by any state in a particular instance is leading to more or less death and suffering. I look at the drone strikes in tribal Pakistan and see enthusiastic murderers being killed off more efficiently than any ground offensive the Pakistani army could muster, if it actually saw any profit in it. Truth is though, the Pakistani army WANTS the suffering, it makes them look good, or at least makes the civilian governments look bad, which to them is the same thing.

I believe that the end of current American involvement in tribal Pakistan will lead to more deaths and suffering than it's continued involvement, both long and short term.

There will never be an easy solution, but in discussing drones there are points that deserve deliberation;
The Pakistani government cannot be seen, publicly, to condone drone strikes. However, given the carnage being done by the taliban, which they are finding difficult to contain, behind the scenes they actually do.
Terrorists existed long before drones and to believe that ceasing their use would reduce terrorism is naive and dangerous.
Manned or unmanned - and no matter what care is taken - weapons cause collateral damage. But these weapons can be highly effective, as was demonstrated in the "taking out" of the pakistani taliban leader last week.
If the terrorists had the same technology they would, certainly, use it. At the moment they are restricted to suicide bombers and maniacs with AK's who massacre innocents in schools or shopping malls etc. If/when they acquire chemical, biological, or atomic weapons you will see just how "restrained" in there use they truly are.
All weapons can be used for evil. The difference is, who controls them and how they are used. You just have to ask yourself, who would you prefer to hold the military advantage?

For all the horrible things you can say about drone strikes, there has never before been such an efficient method of specifically killing enemy leaders in a war zone. Look at WW2 and Vietnam, and how many innocent civilians were killed for every high level enemy leader. The drone strikes in tribal Pakistan, even by the measure of Pakistan's own critics of them, manage better than 50% of their victims as bonafide militants. This includes a long list of high level Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders. Loss of civilian life is always tragic, but to kill 1 thousand militants and a thousand bystanders each year, while those same militants kill 10s of thousands of civilians on purpose is on the whole a good trade. Truth be told, if the Pak army was at the helm of the drones, the praises of the program would be unending. It's a combined pride and distrust of America thing.

I also think guys over here complaining need to better appreciate the ground situation over in places like tribal Pakistan. Tribal Pakistan is exactly that, a series of tribal communities. Outsiders are either welcomed in as guest and friend, or ushered out as mortal enemy, with a number of social and ethical codes dictating which will apply. If you are living in a community, that whole community has embraced you as one of your own and on a large scale sharing common cause and values. Any tribal community that's accepted high level Taliban militants into their community is guaranteed to share an extreme form of Sharia law. The community will not tolerate the education of their young girls. Blasphemy and apostasy will be immediate death sentences, without trial. Rape victims will be stoned and/or killed for adultery, as is only right. Our high standards of morality over here absolutely demand we still declare those people civilians, and mark their deaths as such, but the notion of them being potential allies turned enemies because of drone strikes is absurd.

I agree, I can't condone being treated like a suspect all the time for the hope that it may stop eventually a potential terrorist somewhere.
The most effective way to fight terrorism is to make sure there are less reasons for others to become one. Drone striking the shit out of their countries surely doesn't help with that. Neither does playing naked-man-jenga in prisons.
If everybody who steps out of his house would get a cavity search, you'd be even better protected against any criminal threats. Why not go that route? Would've caught any underwearbombers in a second.

No, no, no... that was the last administration; this is the drone strike administration.

Um, so where did he say "because a drone strike . . . " ? I didn't see or hear him say it. So without that, there's nothing special here.

"hack·er [hak-er] Show IPA
noun
1.
a person or thing that hacks.
2.
Slang. a person who engages in an activity without talent or skill: weekend hackers on the golf course.
3.
Computer Slang.
a.
a computer enthusiast.
b.
a microcomputer user who attempts to gain unauthorized access to proprietary computer systems."

Well, I'd be damned. It seems according to the dictionary he is a hacker. Hmmmm.

Drone strikes in northern Pakistan are not indiscriminate. Count how many of the Taliban and Al Qaida's top leadership has been killed off by them. That's some pretty impossibly lucky indiscriminate fire to so frequently end up taking out major jihadist leaders.

Do you have an alternative proposal for dealing with militant jihadists in Pakistan? They are killing civilians, and in particular women, children and students daily. During Pakistan's elections, the Taliban killed multiple candidates, including candidates lobbying extremely hard for an end to drone strikes, an end to military action in the tribal regions, and for talks with the Taliban. Even those candidates were declared enemies by the Taliban for taking part in elections and were killed by them. This isn't about protecting white christians from muslims, it's about jihadists killing off muslims and trying to stop them.

America can't take more precise policed action to arrest or capture militant leaders in Pakistan either. Killing Bin Laden led to even greater outrage than the drone strikes, but boots on the ground are the only method left with less risk of collateral damage. Even if Pakistan's military is finally persuaded to do so instead, it is guaranteed that it will again increase civilian deaths over the short term as any campaign to retake control of the tribal areas is put into action.

It's a mess and simply saying leave them alone is naive and stupid. The Taliban are actively working to topple a nuclear powered state that is particularly vulnerable to them. More over, we are not even sure just how removed from each other key leaders in Pakistan's ISI and military leaders are from jihadist leaders. This instability doesn't play out with a nuke thrown our way in the opening, it comes as jihadists getting enough influence to instigate sending one into India.

If all you pay attention is the idiotically simplistic, war is bad lets not fight pseudo commentators you miss the entire picture.

So, signature strikes are those that identify 'targets' by watching for things like people who leave militant camps with guns to go cross over into Afghanistan and then come back again...

Read up on the situation in Pakistan's tribal regions before setting your position on drone strikes in stone. America is at war with the powers controlling the tribal regions of Pakistan. It's not declaring it a war because that would enrage Pakistan even further, but it is the reality. Pakistan doesn't want to admit that the tribal regions have been essentially seized from them by the Taliban and have been in all but name an independent state that is actively waging war on Pakistan by launching endless attacks on it's civilians.

The deeper truth not spoken about is that the Afghan war was never about Afghanistan, though it was about the 9/11 organizers. After 9/11, America deemed it no longer acceptable for nuclear armed Pakistan to be allied with the groups that just attacked it. The war in Afghanistan was double edged. It gave a launching ground for a land war against Pakistan if needed, and it was a direct warning to Pakistan's leadership that America fully intended to wage war and remove power any government allying itself with the jihadists behind international terrorist attacks. It's just not politically expedient to say that, so president's say more veiled things like: "Your either with us or against us".

@lantern53

i think the only thing manning did that could be considered "wrong" is the pure data dump he performed.

unlike snowden,who sifted and vetted the information and then forwarded the information to a journalist (glenn greenwald at the gaurdian),manning just dumped massive amounts of information to wikileaks.

but manning is also paying a high price and he is willing to pay that price.
so while i may disagree with his methodology i admire his courage to face the full force of the united states federal government.

its interesting that you find people who criticize the federal governments practices as being confused.
let us look at the definition of terrorism shall we?

from the FBI:“the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” (28 C.F.R. Section 0.85).

now the key word here is "unlawful".
which can be translated as being "when THEY perform acts of violence against a population it is "terrorism" but when WE perform acts of violence against a population it is "counter-terrorism" because WE made it lawful".

the arguments is about distinctions and it is flimsy when you question the validity coming from a government which performs drone strikes on a daily basis on brown people.

when a person straps a bomb to their chest and walks into a cafe and detonates themselves in a crowd they are a terrorist.
when the US government sends drone strikes and bombing runs to a village in yemen they are terrorists.

there is no distinction.
just because the government proclaims otherwise or your desire for the US to be standing on moral ground are irrelevant.

they are,by definition,both terrorists.

and when you consider the guidelines put forth by the nuremberg trials after WW2,in which it was the UNITED STATES government which implemented the majority of those guidelines both bush and obama and consequent participatory members of those administrations should be (and ARE in the international court of law) war criminals.

but the united states government conveniently ignores just about everything outside their own interest.even if that interest after the second world war was to diminish the practices our very own government engages in on a global scale every day.

it is the height of hypocrisy and reveals a moral bankruptcy that is staggering.
when they do it =terrorism
when we do it=counter-terrorism

i call bullshit.