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twaddle. Lawyers are trained to defend their clients, even if the clients are indefensible.
The drones SEEM OK to a lot of people because we're bombing faceless brown people who hate the U.S. and live in a faraway country.
But look at it this way. Suppose the government sent drone strikes against American neighborhoods where Mafia figures or seditious right-wing militia leaders lived.
Would we accept the same excuses?
That they were too dangerous to get at by legal means? That the deaths of their children were just "collateral damage"? That if the targeting wasn't accurate and a neighbor's house was blown up instead, that was just too bad, but perhaps the neighbors shouldn't have agreed to let the Mafia boss or militia leader live in their neighborhood?
Come to think of it, our government has actually used the first two excuses in its attack on David Koresh's followers in Waco, Texas, a few years back. The members of the cult, including Koresh, frequently went into town to buy supplies, and the authorities could have arrested them then and there with a minimum of fuss. Noooo, they had to play cowboy and mount a siege and then an attack, and we were told that the children who were killed were just "collateral damage" and that their parents shouldn't have joined the cult.
We see this again and again on the world stage. There's a certain percentage of the population that has never grown out of childish video game revenge fantasies and loves the idea of watching perceived enemies get blown up at a distance, even if they would not be willing to go in themselves and kill a perceived enemy and his wife and children and neighbors with an axe or even a handgun.
And let's get practical here. Killing (not "taking out"--let's be realistic about what we're saying) ONE or even a DOZEN alleged insurgents will make only a negative difference in the bogus War on Terror, because individuals aren't the problem.
First of all, the people killed have friends and extended families, and their cultural norms will require them to seek revenge. Each drone strike creates more terrorists. (If you want to facilitate further corporate dominance and eroded civil liberties by putting the nation on an endless war footing, make sure that you fight an unwinnable war against a vaguely defined enemy whose numbers will only multiply. Such a deal for the military-industrial complex and so easy to have the mass media persuade the uninformed that anything and everything the MIC dreams up is essential for "national security."
Second, I'm sorry to break the news to all you "America's the greatest country in the world and we're always on the side of truth and justice" grade school patriots, but the REAL problem is and has always been the behavior of successive Republican and Democratic governments in the Middle East. Oil companies call the shots in our system, and in the interests of ensuring a continued, low-priced flow of "our" (our?) oil from the Middle East, U.S. governments have supported anyone who will play nice with the oil companies, no matter how badly they treat their own people. (Our government loved Saddam Hussein for decades before it hated him.)
I'm afraid that in the realm of international relations, America's morality has deteriorated in the past seventy years.
In 1945, the Allies put the surviving members of the German government on trial at Nuremberg. The conclusion was foregone, but the world heard a full account of their crimes before they were executed or imprisoned. We didn't just send soldiers out to kill the top Nazis and their families. (That's what the Nazis did in the countries they conquered.)
So in 1945, we could formally arrest, imprison, and hold trials for the top Nazis, the men who planned to conquer Europe and wipe out all "non-Aryans," and in 2013, we have to send drones to get ONE GUY who may be aiding Al Qaeda (or may not be--we never see the evidence. What if someone being held for the CIA in a foreign prison gave his name under torture just to make the torture stop?) and risk killing his whole family and several of his neighbors?
The system is rotten, infiltrated with blood lust and money lust, and I do blame Obama for going along with it. He has a history of appeasing his opponents, so if the Experts and Very Serious People and Legal Equivocators say that we need to go after individuals with drones, his natural tendency will be to do what they say.
But he IS Commander-in-Chief. He could say NO. He could say, "You know, about Iran, I bet if we didn't have them surrounded on all sides by U.S. military installations, they wouldn't be so belligerent. You know, there are a lot of people in the Middle East who hate us for very good reasons, and why are we always intervening when we only screw up every time we go in there?"
So once again, I am ashamed to be an American.
This should be an OP
Please inform American lawyers who it is that is "indefensible." We are too unethical to figure that out. 
So there are people who have no right to a lawyer? Interesting. But there are people who have a right to a trial from our country, based on their actions against us abroad. Because you just stated that there are Americans who have no right to a lawyer, in America, before a judicial tribunal in America itself.
Hilarious to be slamming at lawyers when you are demanding that people in Afghanistan or somewhere have rights to use them. I suppose those lawyers would not be scum like the ones in the US defending the indefensible. Funny how being part of terror plots against the U.S. is defensible yet some cases in the U.S. itself are not.
Last edited Thu Feb 7, 2013, 07:34 AM - Edit history (4)
--The same result as when Germany sent V1 "Buzz Bombs" into England...except the V1 wasn't as accurate and didn't return from its mission. Our drones are teleoperated/actively guided (human-in-the-loop "radio controlled" while the V1 was autonomous, with a simple autopilot. That's the only control difference that I have noticed about them thus far. If one now realizes that the modern armed drone aircraft is actively human-controlled, then it is virtually human piloted, and achieves results similar or slightly worse than what a human-borne attack aircraft achieves.
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V-1 Buzz Bomb (ancestor of the Cruise Missile)
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Tomahawk Cruise Missile
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Predator Drone
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F-20 Tigershark
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So, this is not much different than what organized crime engages in when it seeks to eliminate its enemies....except of course that the Mafia does it while on the ground. Under international Law, this is very likely illegal. The UN should and I hope it does conclude as much. So, what recourse do they have after that? Do UN member countries sign off on arrest warrants for those who ordered up these assassinations? What about the collateral damage these assassination missions cause? What an effective anti-American sentiment recruiting tool these drone attacks continue to be. Is this the new face of U.S. Hegemony in the World? Is this the "Big Stick" that the late President Teddy Roosevelt said we should carry while walking softly?
Some background info on The V-1 Buzz Bomb
The V-1 was developed at Peenemünde Airfield by the German Luftwaffe during the Second World War. During initial development it was known by the codename "Cherry Stone". The first of the so-called Vergeltungswaffen series designed for terror bombing of London, the V-1 was fired from "ski" launch sites along the French (Pas-de-Calais) and Dutch coasts. The first V-1 was launched at London on 13 June 1944, one week after (and prompted by) the successful Allied landing in Europe. At its peak, more than one hundred V-1s a day were fired at southeast England, 9,521 in total, decreasing in number as sites were overrun until October 1944, when the last V-1 site in range of Britain was overrun by Allied forces. This caused the remaining V-1s to be directed at the port of Antwerp and other targets in Belgium, with 2,448 V-1s being launched. The attacks stopped when the last site was overrun on 29 March 1945. In total, the V-1 attacks caused 22,892 casualties (almost entirely civilians).
V-1 missile or flying bomb or buzz bomb
German missile of World War II. The forerunner of modern cruise missiles, it was about 25 ft (8 m) long and had a wingspan of about 18 ft (5.5 m). It was launched from catapult ramps or sometimes from aircraft; it carried an explosive warhead of almost 1,900 lbs (850 kg) and had an average range of 150 mi (240 km). More than 8,000 V-1s were launched against London in 1944–45, and a smaller number against Belgium. The V-1 guidance system used a simple autopilot to regulate height and speed. A weighted pendulum system provided fore-and-aft attitude measurement to control pitch (damped by a gyrocompass, which it also stabilized). There was a more sophisticated interaction between yaw, roll, and other sensors: a gyrocompass (set by swinging in a hangar before launch) gave feedback to control each of pitch and roll, but it was angled away from the horizontal so that controlling these degrees of freedom interacted: the gyroscope stayed trued up by feedback from the magnetic field, and from the fore and aft pendulum. This interaction meant that rudder control was enough without a separate banking mechanism. A countdown timer driven by a vane anemometer on the nose determined when target range had been reached, accurately enough for area bombing. Before launch the counter was set to a value that would reach zero upon arrival at the target in the prevailing wind conditions. As the missile flew, the airflow turned the propeller and every 30 rotations of the propeller counted down one number on the counter. This counter triggered the arming of the warhead after about 60 km (38 miles). When the count reached zero, two detonating bolts were fired. Two spoilers on the elevator were released, the linkage between the elevator and servo was jammed and a guillotine device cut off the control hoses to the rudder servo, setting the rudder in neutral. These actions led the V-1 into a steep dive. While this was originally intended to be a power dive, in practice the dive caused the fuel flow to cease, which stopped the engine. The sudden silence after the buzzing alerted listeners that the V-1 would impact soon. The fuel problem was quickly fixed and by the time the last V-1 fell, the majority had impacted under full power. Almost 30,000 V-1s were made. Approximately 10,000 were fired at England; 2,419 reached London, killing about 6,184 people and injuring 17,981. The greatest density of hits were received by Croydon, on the SE fringe of London.
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Reference Links:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-1_flying_bomb
http://www.reference.com/browse/buzz-bomb
