This might be an urban thing.

So what in heck is "the Fire" and why do we want to fight it?

A new report published by the international law clinics at New York University and Stanford grapples with dead innocents. But it also highlights interviews with people living through the drone strikes in Pakistan's tribal areas. They are human reminders that America's drone campaign affects not only those hit by missiles, whether rightly or wrongly, but also innocents all around them.

Our drones are attacking the community where they live.

The American public is told by the Obama Administration that drone strikes are surgical. Precise. That they "limit collateral damage." And that civilian casualties are rare. Is that the truth?

Does it adequately capture reality?

Ponder a few interviews from the report -- decide for yourself.

All these stories take place in Northwest Pakistan's tribal areas, a remote part of the country filled with poor people. Most are guilty of nothing at all. A minority are militants. Even among them, almost none poses an imminent threat to the American homeland. Just traveling to the nearest major city requires a journey of hours or even days spent traversing multiple military checkpoints. There are Taliban, some of whom pose a threat to U.S. forces in Afghanistan, and other bad guys fighting the dodgy Pakistani government. Some locals sympathize with the bad guys. Many others want no more to do with them than you want to do with the nearest street gang to your house. Why haven't you eradicated it? That's why they haven't gotten rid of the militants.

An interview with a typical mother is as good a place to begin as any. She described what happens when her family hears an American drone hovering somewhere overhead. "Because of the terror, we shut our eyes, hide under our scarves, put our hands over our ears," she told her interviewer. Asked why, she said, "Why would we not be scared?" Said a father of three from a different family unit, "drones are always on my mind. It makes it difficult to sleep. They are like a mosquito. Even when you don't see them, you can hear them, you know they are there."

Said a day laborer, "I can't sleep at night because when the drones are there ... I hear them making that sound, that noise. The drones are all over my brain, I can't sleep. When I hear the drones making that drone sound, I just turn on the light and sit there looking at the light. Whenever the drones are hovering over us, it just makes me so scared." Added a politician, people "often complain that they wake up in the middle of the night screaming because they are hallucinating about drones."

Would you have nightmares if they flew over your house?

"When children hear the drones, they get really scared, and they can hear them all the time so they're always fearful that the drone is going to attack them," an unidentified man reported. "Because of the noise, we're psychologically disturbed, women, men, and children. ... Twenty-four hours, a person is in stress and there is pain in his head." A journalists who photographs drone strike craters agreed that children are perpetually terrorized. "If you bang a door," Noor Behram said, "they'll scream and drop like something bad is going to happen." Do your kids?

The terrified parents react there as they would here. Many pull their kids out of school, fearing they'll be killed by drones if they congregate in big groups. Kids make the same decision for themselves: "The children are crying and they don't go to school," says Ismail Hussain. "They fear that their schools will be targeted by the drones."

Faheem Qureshi is still just a teenager.

Back in 2009, he was the sole survivor of the first drone strike that President Obama ordered. He was "one of the top four students in his class before the drone strike fractured his skull and nearly blinded him," the report states. He's struggled ever since. "Our minds have been diverted from studying. We cannot learn things because we are always in fear of the drones hovering over us, and it really scares the small kids who go to school," he told his interviewer. "At the time the drone struck, I had to take exams, but I couldn't take exams after that because it weakened my brain. I couldn't learn things, and it affected me emotionally. My mind was so badly affected."

Of course, it isn't just parents and children who are affected.

Safdar Dawar, who leads an organization of tribal journalists, gave a superb description of what life is like for every innocent person in North Waziristan: "If I am walking in the market, I have this fear that maybe the person walking next to me is going to be a target of the drone. If I'm shopping, I'm really careful and scared. If I'm standing on the road and there is a car parked next to me, I never know if that is going to be the target. Maybe they will target the car in front of me or behind me. Even in mosques, if we're praying, we're worried that maybe one person who is standing with us praying is wanted. So, wherever we are, we have this fear of drones."

Said Fahad Mirza, "We can't go to the markets. We can't drive cars. When they're hovering over us, we're all scared. One thinks they'll drop it on our house, and another thinks it'll be on our house, so we run out of our houses." Some refuse to leave their houses. Funerals are sparsely attended. Friends no longer visit one another's homes. Yet no one ever feels safe anyway.

When I want aged, dead plants soaked in water, beer is the way to go.

Sign O' the Times. Title track. Within the top 10 albums of the past 50 years, easy.

Sign O' the Times. Title track. Within the top 10 albums of the past 50 years, easy.

It's great, but I hate that the production is so dated.

Oh good lord that's 25 years ago. I need to sit down.

There is no way to wage war without harming innocents. You have to decide going in if killing innocents is worth achieving your goal.

If sounding dated is going to be a judgement for music, then 90% of the White Album is going to be dated.

EDIT: CostCo is awesome. Beer is nasty (but I don't drink any alcohol, so what do I know).

NOW THIS ####### SONG IS IN MY ####### HEAD YOU ####### ASSHAT #############! GODDAMNIT!

True, but this is an argument to end the war, not to justify the death of innocents. With that said, I think for me, personally, the most horrific aspect of our current drone war - and I'm on record publicly as being against the thing entirely at this point - is the constancy of it in these people's lives. It seems counterintuitive, but the worst part of it isn't the random bombs dropping from the sky, but the otherwise "normal" and "peaceful" days where these people have to go about their lives with the buzz of our drones hovering in the skies above them constantly. Step back an imagine that if you can. You can't sleep because of the buzz of the killer robots hovering in the night sky. You can't go to the market without thinking "is the guy next to me on a kill list" again while the buzz of the killer robots hover in the sky above you. It's constantly there, a literal buzz of this hovering killing machine, like an angry mechanical wasp-god, constantly reminding you that every aspect of your life is at its whim. It can kill you at any time, for any reason, and you can't even see it. All you can do is listen to it's constant droning sound from miles above you. Waiting. With your death in it's wings.

This is as immoral and evil as torture.

I had a CostCo haggis a month or so ago. I can honestly say it was the finest haggis I ever ate.

True, but this is an argument to end the war, not to justify the death of innocents.

Not trying to be flippant or snarky here, since this is an issue I wrestle with, but what would you propose? I can see several alternatives:

* Sustained military intervention with boots on the ground into Waziristan from bases in Afghanistan: A totally horrific idea that I would hope nobody would seriously consider.

* Current war of drones/special forces/CIA intel with minimizing risk to American forces being top priority

* Stopping the drone program and attempting to rebuild ties with Pakistani security forces and in general aiming for a very 'soft', police-style campaign, necessarily dependent heavily on Pakistani cooperation

* Deciding we've hit them as hard as we can hit them without doing more damage than it's worth, Bin Laden is dead, so we will withdraw forces and focus on defense, keeping the military in readiness in case we have reason to believe another 9/11-type strike is coming, and accepting the danger that we might not find out in advance.

None of these seem particularly attractive, even ignoring domestic political considerations.

YOU LIE!!!

Seriously, that is hard to believe. Have you never eaten at a good pie shop in Edinburgh or Glasgow? It's hard to get a decent frozen pot-pie, so I don't know how you could get a good haggis one. I don't mean to ruin the mood here and turn this into a Joe/Sam debate but you need to retract that statement NOW!!

* Deciding we've hit them as hard as we can hit them without doing more damage than it's worth, Bin Laden is dead, so we will withdraw forces and focus on defense, keeping the military in readiness in case we have reason to believe another 9/11-type strike is coming, and accepting the danger that we might not find out in advance.

When faced with four options all roughly equally unlikely to solve your problem (Islamic terrorists),

BrewDog, which owns seven pubs including a venue in Camden, north London, had been ordained "Bar Operator of the Year" by a panel of independent judges. But minutes before the award was due to be handed over, the winner was suddenly swapped to another company on the shortlist.

A representative from Diageo, who has not been identified, was allegedly overheard threatening to withdraw the drinks giants' sponsorship from future BII awards if BrewDog was declared the winner.

* Deciding we've hit them as hard as we can hit them without doing more damage than it's worth, Bin Laden is dead, so we will withdraw forces and focus on defense, keeping the military in readiness in case we have reason to believe another 9/11-type strike is coming, and accepting the danger that we might not find out in advance.


This. I am perfectly fine living with the absurdly low possibility that someone from Warzistan might come kill some of us one day. I'm tired of Americans behaving like a bunch of cowering pussies.

Get out. Now. If actionable intelligence comes up later, act on it. (Drones aren't that hard to deploy; they don't need to be in the sky every day.) If someone kills Americans sometime in the future, find out who did it and go get them.

When faced with four options all roughly equally unlikely to solve your problem (Islamic terrorists), you pick the one that kills the fewest people.

If your military advisor says that the chances of a 9/11-level attack over the next 10 years is 10% with drone attacks, and 20% without, do you give any weight to that? Do we multiply 10% by 3,000 and say it's worth it as long as we kill fewer than 300 people doing so?

If your military advisor says that the chances of a 9/11-level attack over the next 10 years is 10% with drone attacks, and 20% without, do you give any weight to that?

Or to get rid of people who don't like beer.

you pick the one that kills the fewest people.

But honestly - you cannot even predict the DIRECTION of the effect of each of those choices, let alone the magnitude. They cannot be rationally evaluated based on probable outcome.

How is this making us any safer? If anything, we're harming our ability to gather useful intelligence on any potential future attacks by spreading fear and hatred among the people best able to provide us such intelligence.

Well if we're discussing small/local stuff and beer... anyone in the Bay Area should keep an eye out for Dying Vines, a supersmall brewer specialising in english/west coast mashups. They just started doing retail kegs (Ledgers, Berkeley) but don't bottle.

For a while now, pictures purporting to show Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham, modeling in 1950s bondage and fetish porn have been floating around the darker corners of the Internet. Now, though, they’ve made their way into a pseudo-documentary, Joel Gilbert’s Dreams From My Real Father, which is being mailed to voters in swing states, promoted by several Tea Party groups and by at least one high-level Republican. At the same time, Dinesh D’Souza’s latest book, Obama’s America—the first of all his works to hit the top spot on The New York Times bestseller list—has a chapter essentially calling Dunham a fat slut. If Obama is reelected, it’s hard to imagine where the right goes from here.

It’s tempting to ignore Dreams From My Real Father because it’s so preposterous. The movie claims that Obama’s actual father was the poet and left-wing activist Frank Marshall Davis, who Dunham met through her father, who was a CIA agent merely posing as a furniture salesman. “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon,” says the narrator, speaking as if he were Obama reading his autobiography. “It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.”

Davis enjoyed taking nude photos of women, and the images said to be of Dunham, to which the director pays lascivious attention, are presented as evidence of their intimate relationship. “These photos were taken a few weeks before 1960, when mom was about five weeks pregnant with me,” the narrator says. “Frank then sold the photos to men’s mail-order catalogues.”

What matters here is not that a lone crank made a vulgar conspiracy video, one that outdoes even birther propaganda in its lunacy and bad taste. It’s that the video is finding an audience on the right. Gilbert claims that more than a million copies of Dreams From My Real Father have been mailed to voters in Ohio, as well between 80,000 and 100,000 to voters in Nevada and 100,000 to voters in New Hampshire. “We’re putting plans in place, as of next week, to send out another two or three million, just state by state,” he told me.

Gilbert won’t say who is funding this distribution, and there’s no way to verify his numbers. Had he not made other right-wing documentaries in the past, I might suspect that the whole thing is a brilliant conceptual art project about the limits of anti-Obama credulity. But the fact is, people are reporting receiving the disk in the mail. Tea Party groups and conservative churches are screening it. It was shown at a right-wing film festival in Tampa during the Republican National Convention, and by Phyllis Schlafly’s Eagle Forum Council in Missouri. Alabama GOP Chairman Bill Armistead recently recommended it during a speech, saying, “I’ve seen it. I verified that it is factual, all of it. People can determine.”

My initial reaction is to say that our priority ought to be to save American lives, and if we can be reasonably sure that a policy will save American lives on average, we ought to follow that policy unless there are significant countervailing reasons.

Yes you can. History has taught us that (see above) killing does breed killing.

My views on violence are more nuanced (or more confused, take your pick).

Even using the estimates of drone opponents (and not the official statistics), the civilian casualties seem remarkably low compared to other forms of military intervention.

So I think it's absolutely wrong that it's 'just as destructive' as regular war. It appears to be between 10 and 1000 times less destructive (wide range, I know, but I am being conservative).

I can't speak for anyone but myself, but until I turned 65 health insurance was one disaster after another. Premiums kept going up and up, as did deductibles, and worst of all, the paperwork was totally incomprehensible to anyone not familiar with the jargon.

Hey I did mention (later in the post) violence has a place. It is a much more limited place though than what we see here in America.

Long standing disputes (like South Africa, India/Pakistan, the Mideast) can not be solved by violence.

This is not accurate from what I have read. I am not an expert and I bet there are a million ways this can be thought about. I am sure from the American perspective it is perhaps 1000 times less destructive. If we are only considering our perspective and the alternative is full on war with boots on the ground.

Cajun Ponce Bouree

Preserved Fish nailed it.

I did have some amazing fish in Glasgow once.

"What will I replace the ACA with? Nothing. Nothing at all. Rather, I will strive to reduce the... waste, fraud, and abuse... that is currently in the system. Most of you are happy with your health care and are worried the system will change for the worse. It won't."

"What will I replace the ACA with? Nothing. Nothing at all. Rather, I will strive to reduce the... waste, fraud, and abuse... that is currently in the system. Most of you are happy with your health care and are worried the system will change for the worse. It won't."

Coming from the guy who championed RomneyCare and called for a national health care mandate, this is pretty rich.

Oh! In that case, Ray doesn't know who Mitt Romney is.

It seems counterintuitive, but the worst part of it isn't the random bombs dropping from the sky, but the otherwise "normal" and "peaceful" days where these people have to go about their lives with the buzz of our drones hovering in the skies above them constantly. Step back an imagine that if you can. You can't sleep because of the buzz of the killer robots hovering in the night sky. You can't go to the market without thinking "is the guy next to me on a kill list" again while the buzz of the killer robots hover in the sky above you. It's constantly there, a literal buzz of this hovering killing machine, like an angry mechanical wasp-god, constantly reminding you that every aspect of your life is at its whim. It can kill you at any time, for any reason, and you can't even see it. All you can do is listen to it's constant droning sound from miles above you. Waiting. With your death in it's wings.

This. I am perfectly fine living with the absurdly low possibility that someone from Warzistan might come kill some of us one day. I'm tired of Americans behaving like a bunch of cowering pussies.

Stop. Being. Such. Pansies. Freedom isn't free. Live with insecurity you gits.

Yes. A thousand time yes. Violence breeds violence (don't make me quote MLK again).

Step back an imagine that if you can. You can't sleep because of the buzz of the killer robots hovering in the night sky. You can't go to the market without thinking "is the guy next to me on a kill list" again while the buzz of the killer robots hover in the sky above you. It's constantly there, a literal buzz of this hovering killing machine, like an angry mechanical wasp-god, constantly reminding you that every aspect of your life is at its whim. It can kill you at any time, for any reason, and you can't even see it. All you can do is listen to it's constant droning sound from miles above you. Waiting. With your death in it's wings.

But it's not like Romney is leading in the polls anyway, so what does he have to lose?

I think his best bet at this point is just to say that he was wrong, all wrong for thinking that Romneycare was a good solution, and with time he has seen from the Obamacare debate that both systems are not good for the country. Distance himself from it. Say he was for it before he was against it.

Also, these claims about drones constantly "buzzing" overhead seem new. I thought drones operated at an altitude of roughly double that of a commercial airliner (i.e., 60,000 feet)? These articles make it sound like they're buzzing overhead 24/7 like a bunch of model airplanes, which seems like a counterproductive strategy. I thought one of the main attributes of the drones was that people didn't know they were present?

But it's not like Romney is leading in the polls anyway, so what does he have to lose?

Is this accurate, at all? Do we know what the experience of living in this part of the world is like? For all I know, for the people in the population centers these drones are a very rare and very mild annoyance.

There is now significant evidence that the US has repeatedly engaged in a practice sometimes referred to as “double tap,”[429] in which a targeted strike site is hit multiple times in relatively quick succession. Evidence also indicates that such secondary strikes have killed and maimed first responders coming to the rescue of those injured in the first strike. In a February 2012 joint investigative report, Chris Woods of The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ) documented that:

[o]f the 18 attacks on attacks on rescuers and mourners reported at the time by credible media, twelve cases have been independently confirmed by our researchers. In each case civilians are reported killed, and where possible we have named them.[430]

Since those findings were released, several more strikes have repeated this pattern, including a strike on July 6, 2012 in which three “local people” and “tribesmen . . . carrying out rescue work” were reportedly killed and two more injured in follow-up strikes.[431]

Those interviewed for this report were acutely aware of reports of the practice of follow-up strikes, and explained that the secondary strikes have discouraged average civilians from coming to one another’s rescue, and even inhibited the provision of emergency medical assistance from humanitarian workers.

Is this accurate, at all? Do we know what the experience of living in this part of the world is like? For all I know, for the people in the population centers these drones are a very rare and very mild annoyance.

“If I’m elected president I will repeal Obamacare,” he says. “And also, on my first day in office … I will grant a waiver to all 50 states from Obamacare.”

The Supreme Court upholds the Affordable Care Act, and by now Romney has locked up the presidential nomination. “Our mission is clear,” he says. “If we want to get rid of Obamacare, we’re going to have to replace President Obama.”

I think his best bet at this point is just to say that he was wrong, all wrong for thinking that Romneycare was a good solution, and with time he has seen from the Obamacare debate that both systems are not good for the country. Distance himself from it. Say he was for it before he was against it.

#7984 Never thought about it the way you presented it in 7926. Have to say I find the argument compelling. It's easy for me to imagine it creating a water torture atmosphere.

What it amounts too, in no uncertain terms, is *terrorism.* Think of living in Manhattan on 9/12/2001, except every so often a jet buzzes a skyscraper. Doesn't actually hit it every time. Just once in a while. But it's always there, this sound of jets that you know could slam into the building next to you at any moment, day or night. That's what we are doing to Warzistan with our drone war. We are terrorizing them. We have become the monster.

By this definition, any member of a street gang is a terrorist. I wouldn't mind going down that road, but I bet the lefties would.

I think his best bet at this point is just to say that he was wrong, all wrong for thinking that Romneycare was a good solution, and with time he has seen from the Obamacare debate that both systems are not good for the country. Distance himself from it. Say he was for it before he was against it.

So he will be deemed a hypocrite. Yay. How is that worse than trying to dance and walk between raindrops by making fine distinctions? Just sell out.

But it's not like Romney is leading in the polls anyway, so what does he have to lose?

So disowning Romneycare would indeed by a new tact.