Ban Drone-Porn War Crimes

[Arkansas Granny]

http://www.slate.com/id/2265655/

Death by joystick is immoral and illegal.
By Ron Rosenbaum
Posted Tuesday, Aug. 31, 2010, at 1:33 PM ET

Are the masters of "drone porn" committing war crimes by remote control? It's a bit shocking that more people aren't asking this question. I have a feeling that many of us, particularly liberal Obama supporters (like myself, for instance), haven't wanted to look too closely at what is being done in his name, in our name, when these remote-controlled and often tragically inaccurate weapons of small-group slaughter incinerate innocents from the sky, in what are essentially video-game massacres in which real people die.

Drones, or unmanned aerial vehicles, such as the Predator and the Reaper, are small, lightweight, pilotless aircraft equipped to hover over hostile territory and survey it for controllers half the world away who watch the relayed raw video footage—the "drone porn." Cruising the skies over Afghanistan (and Pakistan, and Yemen, and Somalia, and who knows where else), looking for Bad Guys and firing missiles to vaporize them, drones have become the pre-eminent weapon in what was once the war on terror. They have been hailed for their cost effectiveness in killing terrorists or militants or whatever the preferred euphemism is now. (And, in fact, as I hope to demonstrate, the relevance of the euphemism choice has been overlooked.)

[RC]

1. These thing are so high tech they only kill terrorists.

Or so we are told.

[Arkansas Granny]

2. Yes, that's what they tell us. Others have a different take.

More from the article:

Of course, there's a lot of controversy over the percentage of noncombatants killed in the drone strikes. One study, not very convincingly, puts civilian casualties at slightly above 3 percent. Another says 10 percent, another a full one-third, Brookings far more. Do these different numbers yield different moral conclusions? Are the drone strikes defensible at 4 percent murdered innocents but indefensible at 33 percent? There's no algorithm that synchs up the degree of target importance, the certainty of intelligence that's based on, and potential civilian casualties from the attack. It's a question that's impossible to answer with precision. Which suggests that when murdering civilians is involved, you don't do it at all.