Elmarnieh wrote:
Aizle: Drone strikes have a ratio of 49 innocent to 1 tied to terrorism. We also have a policy of firing, waiting for rescue people to give aid and then firing again to increase body count.
None of this is remotely accurate. In fact, you're purposefully cherry-picking the most wildly exaggerated estimate of civilian casualties because it fits what you want to think. The real fact is you don't care one iota about civilian casualties; you've just glommed onto this as yet another excuse to ***** about military involvement just because you don't like the format Congress used to authorize it.
Quote:
How you could "not have a lot of heartburn" over this barbaric and murderous practice is beyond the pale.
It probably has to do with the fact that what you're stating is total nonsense.
Wikipedia, with direct citations found at the bottom:Quote:
The United States government has made hundreds of attacks on targets in northwest Pakistan since 2004 using drones (unmanned aerial vehicles) controlled by the Central Intelligence Agency's Special Activities Division.[4] These attacks are part of the United States' War on Terrorism campaign, seeking to defeat Taliban and Al-Qaeda militants in Pakistan.[4] Most of these attacks are on targets in the Federally Administered Tribal Areas along the Afghan border in Northwest Pakistan. These strikes have increased substantially under the Presidency of Barack Obama.[5] Some media refer to the series of attacks as a "drone war".[6][7]
Pakistan's government publicly condemns these attacks, but has secretly shared intelligence with the United States[8] and also allegedly allowed the drones to operate from Shamsi Airfield in Pakistan until 21 April 2011, when 150 Americans left the base.[9] According to secret diplomatic cables leaked by Wikileaks, Pakistan's Army Chief Ashfaq Parvez Kayani not only tacitly agreed to the drone flights, but in 2008 requested Americans to increase them.[10] However, Pakistan's Interior Minister Rehman Malik said, "drone missiles cause collateral damage. A few militants are killed, but the majority of victims are innocent citizens."[11] The strikes are often linked to anti-American sentiment in Pakistan and the growing questionability of the scope and extent of CIA activities in Pakistan.
Reports of the number of militants versus civilian casualties differ.[12] According to the Pakistani authorities, 60 cross-border predator strikes in the period from January 2006 to April 2009 killed 14 wanted al-Qaeda leaders and 687 Pakistani civilians.[13] [14] In a 2009 opinion article, Daniel L. Byman of the Brookings Institution wrote that drone strikes may have killed "10 or so civilians" for every "mid- and high-ranking [al Qaeda and Taliban] leader."[15] In contrast, the New America Foundation has estimated that 80 percent of those killed in the attacks were militants.[16] The Pakistani military has stated that most of those killed were hardcore Al-Qaeda and Taliban militants.[17] The CIA believes that the strikes conducted since May 2010 have killed over 600 militants and have not caused any civilian fatalities, a claim that some experts disputed.[12] The Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that between 391 – 780 civilians were killed out of a total of between 1,658 and 2,597 and that 160 children are reported among the deaths. The Bureau also revealed that since President Obama took office at least 50 civilians were killed in follow-up strikes when they had gone to help victims and more than 20 civilians have also been attacked in deliberate strikes on funerals and mourners, tactics that have been condemned by legal experts.[18][19][20] Barbara Elias-Sanborn has also cautioned that, "as much of the literature on drones suggests, such killings usually harden militants' determination to fight, stalling any potential negotiations and settlement."[21] However, analysis by the RAND Corporation suggests that "drone strikes are associated with decreases in both the frequency and the lethality of militant attacks overall and in IED and suicide attacks specifically."[22]
Drone strikes were halted in November 2011 after NATO forces killed 24 Pakistani soldiers in the Salala incident.[23] Shamsi Airfield was evacuated of Americans and taken over by the Pakistanis December 2011.[24] The incident prompted an approximately two-month stop to the drone strikes, which resumed on 10 January 2012.
The 49-to-1 ratio is only an estimate by certain "Pakistani Authorities" and only from 2006 to 2009. Furthermore, just because there have been follow-up strikes does not somehow mean that there is a "policy" of them, nor is there any concern whatsoever with "increasing body count". The objective is not simply killing people willy-nilly.
In fact, as it states, the Pakistanis can't even make up their mind since the Pakistani
military thinks that most of those killed have been militants. Even the "Bureau of Investigative Journalism" listed above estimates only about 1 civilian death for every 3 to 4 militants killed, depending on which end of their considerable number spread you buy into. (It's a little suspicious that they can only narrow down overall civilian and militant deaths to within a few hundred, but somehow know that
exactly 160 children have been killed.)
As for the term innocents, there aren't any. Innocents is a term that people like to use to pretend that there's some dichotomy between peaceful civilians who want only to be left alone and militants, when in fact the sort of war the Taliban is fighting relies upon the support of a large portion of the population.
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