Unaccountable Killing Machines: The True Cost of U.S. Drones

[Luminous Animal]

http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2011/12/unaccountable-killing-machines-the-true-cost-of-us-drones/250661/

It's all good though! Obama made a joke about killing people with them!

"In other words, Jaffe is describing a system in which a decentralized apparatus carries out summary executions of people we're assured are bad and who are sometimes U.S. citizens, and the president knows about this but chooses not to exercise oversight or control of the process."

[Devil_Fish]

1. Fasinating article. may I suggest to the author a small edit to the 2nd to last paragraph:

Origional last sentance:
Rather than asking the difficult questions of whether the success of the drone program has been worth it, though, President Obama has chosen instead to amplify its operations and thus claim victory in killing bad guys, even while he distances himself from the knowledge and personal responsibility for who these dead people are and what crimes they may have committed.

Revised:
Rather than asking the difficult questions of whether the success of the drone program has been worth it, though, President Obama has chosen instead to amplify its operations and thus claim victory in killing bad guys, even while he distances himself from the knowledge and personal responsibility for who these dead people are and what crimes, if any, they may have committed.

(did you catch it?)

[Luminous Animal]

5. Ah yes. That is a good suggestion.

[SixthSense]

2. Really good article

It brings to mind the question, if we can't get a reasonable "correct" rate on the domestic death penalty where we do have extensive due process (even if often corrupted), what are the chances that this program won't kill scores of innocents, or more?

[nashville_brook]

3. k and r

[quaker bill]

4. An opinion piece

"The enormous expansion of drone operations has been a success in the narrowest sense of killing some bad guys. But it has come at an enormous cost: to our reputation, to our morals, to our relationship and status with countries we need to work with to contain and defuse terrorism, and in the lives of the many innocent people we've killed through either sloppiness or ignorance."

I do not support the use of drones, nor do I support direct military invasion. I do however have a hard time wrapping my head around the distinction which makes one more apparently grevious than the other.

Invasions kill many innocent people through ignorance or sloppiness. Drones seem to kill fewer people, but I am sure some deaths are unintended. Both are done without the permission of the country being visited. Both come at great cost to "our reputation, to our morals, to our relationship and status with countries we need to work with to contain and defuse terrorism."

What I don't get is why "boots on the ground" would be better than drones in the air.... I do not find any one weapons system more "moral" than another. I think we should just stop killing people, regardless of the weapon used.

[Luminous Animal]

6. Are we at war with Pakistan and Yemen?

[quaker bill]

7. Aren't we using weapons to kill people there?

I am pretty sure the subtle distinction you may be posing is totally lost upon those in the crosshairs. Do you find that being technically "at war" makes the act of killing people somewhat better? I find that killing people is killing people regardless of the political background or mechanism used.

A cruise missle is not a drone, is it therefore more moral to use one? I don't think so.

[Luminous Animal]

10. Sorry I read your original post too quickly and overlooked your point..

Last edited Tue Jan 3, 2012, 05:15 AM - Edit history (1)

"I think we should just stop killing people, regardless of the weapon used."

Yes. I agree.

[joshcryer]

14. I agree with you, if you have cause to go after someone, they should get a jury trial.

It doesn't matter if they're a US citizen. It's just not "politically expedient," to go that route, and our politicians are cowards. Yes, I think drone strikes are immoral cowardly behavior. I would even be against "boots on the ground" unless the first and foremost behavior was to capture, not kill or capture, capture, defend, and if totally necessary, kill. We're talking about besieging various militant groups for as long as it takes until they surrender.

I think also, part of the problem is that the evidence against these militants is iffy at best, they might be able to be charged by the parent state with some arms issues, but other than that, we probably don't have a case in most situations, so we wouldn't even go that route if we wanted to.

[joshcryer]

13. Boots on the ground "got Bin Laden," with no lives lost.

Politicians don't like "boots on the ground" because they're damn risky (Somolia). If we did surgical, boots on the ground style strikes, we probably wouldn't make as many enemies as the current policy does, because fewer if any innocents would be killed in the process.

I personally think one reason they're not doing it is that the MIC is trying to improve the technology to the point where drones as as big as small birds and can do assassinations of people without anyone nearby being at risk of dying, and they pressure politicians not to go the "boots on the ground" route because it puts at risk their new MIC tech development programs.

Another thing is that boots on the ground requires political pressure to the sovereign states that we want to 'invade' (I do not consider a small special forces unit an invasion force, but that could just be me). It's just easier, and sloppier, to just do it from the sky with spies and others gathering information.

[quaker bill]

15. Using that one operation as a model

probably doesn't work. I am convinced that a great deal of effort went into planning it and a fair amount of risk for failure was involved. In this particular case they wanted the whole body as intact as possible for confirmation. Apparently that was worth the additional risk.

[joshcryer]

16. Yeah, you're right, but I don't think it's not workable completely. Just not viable, imho.

The kind of planning you're talking about isn't really viable for all the high profile targets, especially if they're on the move a lot. And the less planning / training you have (they actually built a mock compound to train in) the more higher the risk is. So it would never happen. But I think at least then, especially if you held to justice and trials, we'd have moral standing.

Just my humble opinion.

[quaker bill]

17. I am not taken with death penalty trials for anyone

foriegn or domestic. I do not find our system for delivering death by jury to have any greater moral standing.

We have been delivering wholesale death in a sloppy and imprecise manner over there for nearly 10 years now. I am really not clear how a drone strike someplace takes it up a notch from "shock and awe", where we delivered 800 one ton bombs on a city of 4 million people in a day, most shot from 100s of miles away. None of those people got a trial, and it is very clear that the thumb was heavily on the scales of justice to rationalize that one.

After that event, I am not clear, short of using nukes, what more we could do to damage our moral standing. Bringing all of this to an end is the only way to begin to recover some moral standing. It was never going to end without killing Bin Laden and his close associates. No President was going to bring the troops home before that was accomplished. In that context, a few targeted drone strikes to bring this to an end seems relatively non-violent, when you compare it to "shock and awe" or Falluja. (Do you remember the point where the entire US Marines had to place an emergency order because they were actually running out of bullets? I do.)

Don't get me wrong, I think the entire thing top to bottom was as close to morally bankrupt as anything the US has ever undertaken (and it has undertaken some very morally suspect things). I just have difficulty singling out specific events for particular outrage anymore. This started for me most of 10 years ago. I call it "outrage fatigue".

Let's just bring the troops home, (most or all of them, from everywhere).

[bluestate10]

8. Obama has it right. Give firm instructions then put mission execution in the

hands of the military senior leaders. This poster has no issue with the policy.

[gratuitous]

9. How do these "incidents" not qualifyas summary extra-legal executions?

As long as we're giving various governors of Texas grief for the execution mill their state is - and we should, no doubt - where is the "liberal" outrage over these murders? Instead, we get no-text posts about how Gallup says that 83% of liberals approve of President Obama. Whatever in hell that is supposed to mean.

And do we have any standing to object when other people use our own methods?

[T S Justly]

11. K&R (nt)

[joshcryer]

12. Google "targeted killing," the US has determined that it's perfectly legal.

I find the act immoral, deplorable, really. It's assassination by drone.