Bentway, re: "You seem pretty confused and misinformed. We aren't killing poor Arabs with the drones, we're killing AQ operatives. Like the 9/11 folks. The only poor Arabs killed are collateral damage, like that happens in a war."
Collateral damage, as in a war?
The difference is that we're not at war with the countries where we find the people we're targeting because we believe they're terrorists, we're making kill lists by secret military or civilian rules that none of us are privy to and we're assassinating those on the kill lists, we're executing the assassinations based on "best information" which is all too often erroneous and, by all reports, we have been sending in missiles to take out those we suspect of being on the kill lists even when we see others in the kill zone.
Can you find any problems with any one of these factors? Stepping all over international sovereignty? Secret assassination lists? Clumsy targeting? Launching missiles that we know are going to kill bystanders? Accepting that sometimes our info will be wrong and we'll have killed innocents?
No? Try reversing the scenario and think how you'd feel if that were being done here by some other nation/culture/religion. Then think how you'd feel if pictures of dead children, grieving widows and mothers and dead men and women were on your tv screen month after month.
I think the damage to international laws, our sense of the sanctity of life, our sense of the rules of engagement in terms of war, much less criminal pursuit and apprehension, and our efforts to do no harm in the middle east and let them settle their own future, is tremendously negative.
So, yes, kill or capture but the ends don't justify the means when the means pave the way down a slippery slope of government assassinations, destruction of the rule of law and a sharp increase in the number of people willing to die inflicting damage to the USA. Ed |
