patrick.net

We are not trying hard enough to turn the whole Muslim world against us.I'm still wondering about sleeper cells.

You also need to look at the alternative. Say your flying a drone around all day, until the order is given to attack. Chances are a lot better that no innocent civilians are around when you fire your missiles, cause you been watching you target all day, you don't guarantee bystanders aren't going to get hurt, but you can minimize it much as possible.

Now look at a jet fighter that's been given orders to strike a target. They fly in, strike and leave. There no way to know who is in the building or who decided to wonder over to visit friends in the time in takes for the jet fighter to fly to the target. In short I firmly believe drones claim fewer innocent lives then traditional air strikes do.

Drones aren't inherently unethical, but America's use of them has been. Our military not given a damn about civilian casualties as demonstrated by the video of an attack helicopter destroying a building as an innocent walked by instead of waiting a few seconds so as to not kill the innocent.

Still worse, our military has deliberately targeted innocent children. A drone strike killed an innocent 16-year-old and his under-aged innocent friends as they were having dinner at home. They were the intended targets. Why? Because some bureaucrat thought that the boy's father might, just might, be sympathetic to our political rivals. This was a tragedy as bad as the recent Connecticut school killings, but it causes no outrage in our society because it's other people's kids instead of our own.

Our military has become the largest and most despicable terrorist organization in the world. And that is something we should be ashamed of. These drone strikes are acts of terrorism with the very intent of terrorizing civilian populations. If the situation were reversed, everyone in America would be calling the operators of drones terrorists.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/17/us-killings-tragedies-pakistan-bug-splats

George Monbiot
The Guardian, Monday 17 December 2012 15.30 EST
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A memorial to the victims of the Sandy Hook school shootings in Connecticut. The children killed by US drones in north-west Pakistan 'have no names, no pictures, no memorials of candles and teddy bears'. Photograph: Spencer Platt/Getty
"Mere words cannot match the depths of your sorrow, nor can they heal your wounded hearts … These tragedies must end. And to end them, we must change." Every parent can connect with what President Barack Obama said about the murder of 20 children in Newtown, Connecticut. There can scarcely be a person on earth with access to the media who is untouched by the grief of the people of that t