Don’t put words in another person’s mouth. You know what they meant. Don’t play dumb to enrage the comment section.
Comment on Lemmy users logging on to level set the Blue Wave enjoyers
brave_lemmywinks@lemmy.world 2 days agoYou saw it? Did he pilot the drone? Did he purposefully aim at the wedding? Did he target children?
InputZero@lemmy.world 2 days ago
bountygiver@lemmy.ml 2 days ago
If he is blameless that way and we cannot blame soldiers who just follow orders, then who should take responsibility ever? (The answer is both are at fault if you need to spell it out btw)
uriel238@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 days ago
Obama personally reviewed every name on the Disposition Matrix, after they were tried by FISC, a secret court using secret interpretations of US and international law. The DM is still active and in Trump’s hands now.
There were (are?) multiple CIA drone strike programs. I only know about the ones in Afghanistan and Pakistan (I think Southern Spear in the Caribbean is wholly DoD, not CIA.)
In Afghanistan, (off the top of my head) the CIA drone strike program averaged 500 sorties a year, fifty civilian casualties for every person-of-interest executed. The operators called them bugsplats. They called dead children fun sized terrorists. That is to say dead kids were so common they had jargon for the phenomenon. Whether the casualties were infants or grandmothers or somewhere in between, news agencies reported them as militants. Villages were encampments.
PTSD was epidemic among drone operators. Turnover was so high the drone programs were consistently running short and requiring crews to run long shifts. They were also treated like shit by their superiors, which was especially harsh when they were previously pilots.
It turns out killing other humans can be traumatic even if done from extreme distance, and the experience is filtered through digital obscurity. It demonstrated the opposite side of the canard that gamers can’t tell the violence is fake. Drone operators sure can tell the violence is real.
Kill orders passed through at least three layers of command. Often the order to hit a site with Hellfires came after it was evident the POI was nowhere to be found.
Disclaimer: I only researched the program in Afghanistan, now ended, so my information might not apply to the other theaters. The data sets are different so the statistics may also be different.
Obama may not have personally targeted the kids or fired the Hellfires, but he knew what was going on. He knew the heinous casualty rate and could have adjusted policy. He didn’t.
I still think he was the best US President of the 21st century (so far), but he was still an evil fuck regarding the international war on terror. He also fucked up with the surveillance state, and look! It all fell into the exactly wrong hands.
And, eventually we invented the AGM-114R-9X Ginsu Hellfire which pops out blades instead of an incendiary burst, and maybe fewer folks died thanks to the development. That didn’t affect Afghanistan, though.