On December 28, the Lexington Herald-Leader published an article from The Washington Post on President Obama’s expansion of the U.S. drone war--targeted killings and surveillance of adversaries by unmanned aircraft systems.
The only adviser to President Obama who questioned the expansion of the drone war was Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, who was later fired. Pres. Obama himself seems to have been noncommittal.
The advantage of targeted drone killings is that not as many U.S. personnel are killed as would be in a conventional war. This manner of war-making treats war as a video game. The pilots are located outside the theater, often inside the United States, and operate the drones by a joystick . The remote pilots, however, can suffer psychological repercussions from their actions.
The drone attacks often end up killing civilians, even children. Neither the intelligence nor the targeting is always accurate.
On the same day that the Herald-Leader published The Washington Post article, the Los Angeles Times published an article telling of Pakistani death squads that were going after informants to the U.S. drone program. The drone program has increased hatred of the United States.
The legality of the drone attacks according to international law has been questioned. The group Human Rights Watch sent a letter to President Obama on December 16, 2011 declaring that the US government should clarify fully and publicly its legal rationale for conducting targeted drone killings and the legal limits on such strikes. The group especially questioned the drone killings by the Central Intelligence Agency and stated the strikes should be confined to the U.S. armed forces.
The targeted killings and surveillance by drones are especially heinous. They are a dehumanizing and distancing way of war-making that, thus, make war-making all that much easier. War is getting completely out of hand. Instead of expanding our war-making with drones, we should be ending our War of Terror on Terror.
The only adviser to President Obama who questioned the expansion of the drone war was Obama’s former Director of National Intelligence, Dennis Blair, who was later fired. Pres. Obama himself seems to have been noncommittal.
The advantage of targeted drone killings is that not as many U.S. personnel are killed as would be in a conventional war. This manner of war-making treats war as a video game. The pilots are located outside the theater, often inside the United States, and operate the drones by a joystick . The remote pilots, however, can suffer psychological repercussions from their actions.
The drone attacks often end up killing civilians, even children. Neither the intelligence nor the targeting is always accurate.
On the same day that the Herald-Leader published The Washington Post article, the Los Angeles Times published an article telling of Pakistani death squads that were going after informants to the U.S. drone program. The drone program has increased hatred of the United States.
The legality of the drone attacks according to international law has been questioned. The group Human Rights Watch sent a letter to President Obama on December 16, 2011 declaring that the US government should clarify fully and publicly its legal rationale for conducting targeted drone killings and the legal limits on such strikes. The group especially questioned the drone killings by the Central Intelligence Agency and stated the strikes should be confined to the U.S. armed forces.
The targeted killings and surveillance by drones are especially heinous. They are a dehumanizing and distancing way of war-making that, thus, make war-making all that much easier. War is getting completely out of hand. Instead of expanding our war-making with drones, we should be ending our War of Terror on Terror.
The Obama administration announced a 30 percent increase in funding for Drones :( Quite sad.
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