Drone attacks killing hundreds of innocents

Link

From Amnesty International, who will no doubt be dismissed, because human rights are an evil liberal/terrorist/fascist concept.

Excerpts:

So, evidence?

I wonder what these targeted noncombatants have in common. I very much doubt that there are no common factors among them.

If the allegation were that these people were innocent and killed accidentally and the U.S. didn't want to admit it, I could buy that. But the idea of strikes deliberately targeting people who were known to be innocent? That strains credibility. What exactly would you imagine the motive to be?

The point is that a drone can very specifically target a person even if that is not the intention of its programming/controller. Look at the first report (and there have been many like it): The drone flies up to a group of people, kills a 68-year-old, flies off without hurting anyone else. Clearly looks targeted; but no explanation as to how the target was picked.

It is difficult to examine motive through such secrecy. It is more likely a combination of indiscimanacy, indifference, and lack of accountability.

Apparently it was Allah's will.

Hope and change, baby!

'It became necessary to destroy the town to save it'

It is regrettable. But I have trouble believing some drone operator in Arizona though he is detached from the violence considerably would deliberately kill known civilian noncombatants.

colour me shocked that you would write off murdering civilians as "justified and classified".

So, evidence?

Have you read the report? Since you first asked this question less than 5 minutes after I posted the thread, I doubt you had time.

Most rational people agree with you. No doubt accidents happen (you're in the vicinity of the bad guys, like kids playing basketball in Chicago) but I'm guessing that the numbers are greeeeeeeaaaaatly inflated for maximum emotional response. Just sayin'

Terrorists' buddies getting killed!

You can write anything you want in a report. And Rick, you have a long history of loudly trumpeting anything you think you can use to attack the US military without really caring about accuracy.

When the terrorists try to camoflauge themselves by intermingling with civilians and using them as human shields, then often those they deliberately put at risk end up paying the ultimate price. The blood is on the hands of the terrorists.

Another for whom reading is inconvenient or impossible.

No Rick, its your anti-American agenda that I find impossible to take seriously.

You have failed to read either the report or my excerpts from it, since your response addresses something other than the allegations that are made. The incidents described are not occasions where civilians were hit while intermingling with terrorists, but where they were a) all alone and b) providing assistance to those wounded in an attack.

My "agenda", however you percieve it, proceeds from atrocities, it is not antecedent to them.

Well Rick there you go.

If you have terrorists targeted in an earlier drone attack and people are seen rushing to assist those that were targeted, logic dictates that the nearest responders would be OTHER terrorists from the same terror cell.

While obviously not an infallible line of reasoning it still makes a lot of sense.

I'm not following your intention here... none of the drones that the US currently has are able to make "independent decisions". All weapons discharges are done by an operator.

It is not a permissable line of reasoning under the Geneva Conventions, and those who engage in it elsewhere are routinely condemned as being terrorists by the civilised world specifically because of it. Terrorism is not okay when your guys do it.

Dayton has no credibility in anything, including this.

SECRECY! That's the bugaboo here. We need to post a schedule of our drone strikes, our target list (pending U.N./Rick approval of course) and standard operating procedures so the world knows our intentions are kosher, and yeah or nay our activities. Would 72 hours advance notice be enough? Should we wait for a potential target's R.S.V.P. also?

Would it be better that the US government kills people without records or scrutiny?

Your excerpts only state that civilians have been killed. They do not demonstrate culpability. They also use somewhat incendiary language and poetic license. Drones cannot hover, for example, as they are fixed wing aircraft. This leads me to question both the context and credibility of the claim. There is a war, people die in wars. Do you think nobody realizes this?

This. /thread.

This is the kind of banality worthy of a knuckle-dragging reactionary. You know full well that "people dying" is not in itself the issue.

We're back to the same old stuff about there being laws that govern conduct in how military conflicts are initiated and how they are pursued. Those are being broken here in a plethora of ways. What appears to be occurring - indiscriminate killing of civilians, murder of rescue workers and so on - is called state terrorism when undertaken by any other agent. It is amazing how readily these standards are thrown off by erstwhile "liberals" because a Democrat is in the White House.

When the kneejerk reaction to such serious charges is to rubbish the credentials and partiality of one of the leading human rights groups in the world rather than insist that they should be investigated, then you know you're on the wrong side, for the wrong reasons.

Soo we need more drones then?