Drones Provoke Growing Controversy in US

[unhappycamper]

http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/01/23-0



$26+ million dollar Predator drone firing $160 grand Hellfire missile

Drones Provoke Growing Controversy in US
by Jim Lobe
Published on Wednesday, January 23, 2013 by Inter Press Service

WASHINGTON - As Barack Obama renews his lease on the White House for another four years, his administration is debating how best to respond to a growing internal and public controversy over his first term’s non-battlefield counter-terrorist weapon of choice: armed drones.

For months, senior administration officials have reportedly been haggling over the terms of a so-called “playbook” for the use of drones against suspected terrorists that will provide detailed rules for who will be included on so-called “kill lists”, under what circumstances drones can be used to kill them, and what agency can do the killing.

How the debate turns out could be critical to Obama’s hopes of reducing the size of Washington’s military “footprint” in the Middle East, notably by withdrawing ground forces while still pursuing a counter-terrorist strategy to disrupt and destroy Al-Qaeda and its affiliates. Over the past four years, drone strikes have played the pre-eminent role in that strategy.

The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), which operates the drone programme in Pakistan and shares responsibility for drone operations with Pentagon forces in Yemen, has reportedly argued for greater leeway in carrying out strikes.

~snip~

“…(I)f the United States decides not to apply the, quote, playbook to Pakistan, it’s essentially meaningless, because 85 percent of all the targeted killings that the U.S. has conducted in non-battlefield settings since 9/11 have occurred in Pakistan,” said Micah Zenko, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) whose recently published report, “Reforming U.S. Drone Strike Policies”, is shaping much of the current debate.

[xchrom]

1. Du rec. Nt

[Thinkingabout]

2. One victim of drone strikes was Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, son of Anwar al-Awlaki who was also killed

Apparently some are troubled with drone strikes and are pointing out about the death of this Amercian teenager. Terrorist are not a nation we can attack and therefore with intelligence the targeted terrorist are located and action is taken. Drone strikes is probably the new way to strike these targets. I don't think they will go away unless replaced by something better.

[Victor_c3]

3. I love the caption under the picture

Every time we see a picture of a piece of military equipment they should include the price of the item. I'd imagine that more people would start to question our military spending if they had any idea how much the equipment costs.