Maybe he got raped by joggers.
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Maybe he got raped by joggers.
who liked to cook using pressure cookers.Quote:
Originally Posted by YellerDog
Advocate's a cook with a history of raping people.
Not so. (Anyone not interested in semantics, please skip to the next post.) I will not defend the drone program. I am against what the president is doing with it and have said so before. (My main problem is with the death of non-targets and the incursion into sovereign nations, though I also have a huge problem with a small group of people holding secret meetings to decide who dies with no trial. It is a horrific precedent.) What I was replying to, however, was the claim that terrorism is some hazy, relative term that is used by each side to characterize what the other side is doing.Quote:
Originally Posted by sleeve
Anyone that watches even the occasional crime drama knows there are different types of killing: manslaughter, first-degree murder, gross negligence resulting in death, etc. Terrorism is a specific type of action. If a man lurks outside his neighbor's window and shoots him over a property dispute, he isn't rightfully considered a terrorist. If he, like John Allen Muhammad, shoots a number of people at random with the intent of causing mass panic and causing the government to capitulate to his demands, he is a terrorist. It's a useful distinction; there is no need to lose it, as I'm sure you agree.
As far as I know, the goal of the United States' drone program is to kill individuals deemed - whether justly or unjustly, legally or illegally, morally or immorally - to be enemies of the state or threats to national security. That this is done extrajudicially is terrible, but it is not terrorism. As I said earlier, the drones are terrorizing villages as they fly overhead, and they certainly terrorize whomever thinks his name is next on the list, but they are designed to kill in order to directly eliminate specific enemies.
If neither the intent nor the modus operandi are the same, that is an indication that drone killings may be different from what is considered terrorism. I can see this being called genocide before it is seriously called terrorism in a world court.Quote:
Originally Posted by sleeve
Amen, brother. So do I. Answer this: since President Obama has, by his own admission, the final word on who is targeted. do you consider him a mass murderer? Do you consider our president to be a terrorist?Quote:
Originally Posted by sleeve
The drone program and anyone involved with it is pretty terroristy. It'll be seen as a terrible mistake one day, and we'll all suffer for it as much as we would for the Ciscas and Sopis.
Ugh. You know that point where you don't believe that the one major thing in the news is completely true and that maybe the crazies occasionally stumble onto something real, and you wonder if you're turning crazy and if you were pushed down that slippery slope by the very people you were rooting for.
#thanksobama?
Dan Carlin has made a great point about the drone war on his podcasts: with our actions now, we are setting the protocols for the appropriate use of these weapons, but we're acting like we think we'll be the only country to ever have them, which OF COURSE WE WON'T. One day another country will use them against us or our allies, exactly the way we've used them, we'll cry foul... and we won't have a leg to stand on because of what we're doing now.
That's one of the most common-sense arguments against drone warfare. You don't even need to look at statistics.
Look, assassinations are nothing new, nor do I have irreconcilable problems with us killing national security threats without a trial if there is no way feasible way to bring them in. But the fact that diplomacy, restraint, and the court system have gone out the window to the extent they have - the number of times they have - is insane. Just look at the number of strikes and realize that there are also bystanders being killed on a regular basis.
Each of those strikes is an admission that, We know where these criminals are but we can't get them any other way. We can't get together sixty votes to beat a filibuster and we can't work with our admittedly questionable allies to haul in accused terrorists.
It's an era of failure.
The government knows, of course, that these actions feed the "Great Satan" perception, but I guess Bush and Obama were convinced that leaving these targets alive was the more dangerous option.
I'm not even sure if Bush and Obama believe that. I think that once this gets put into motion, it can't be stopped. People are employed building these drones and have a Congressperson represent them. The people using them are "our boys in uniform."
Dipshit authoritarians like Lindsay Graham and John McCain would fear monger at the sight of any rolling back (see: Obama's attempt to close Gitmo).
This is why it is so dangerous even to get started with this.
For TNL, it's #poorobama.Quote:
Originally Posted by Finch
You'll have to forgive - my response was not based on the categorization of terrorism. On that, we agree: A US drone, even if kills unintended civilians, is not terrorism. Radicals who strap bombs onto themselves and indiscriminately kill innocents for whatever reason is terrorism. Leaving morality out of the equation entirely.Quote:
Originally Posted by Nick
I skimmed back but I didn't see the part about terrorism being a relative term so my bad.
This is true. We tolerated it. We should never have tolerated it initially. :(Quote:
Originally Posted by Diff-chan