I'm having a hard time following Paul's diatribe about drone attacks on American citizens.
I got a kick out of Holder's late evening letter to him while he was on the Senate floor.
In essence saying what part of NO don't you understand.
As for Americans overseas who choose to join groups like Al Qaeda then plan attacks against Americans; well that was their choice now wasn't it.
Does the U.S. screw up in these attacks with civilian casualties? Probably so.
But on the same token it is the same terrorists who use innocent people as shields to continue their terrorist ways.
The means in either case doesn't justify the end result I guess.
and for drawing attention to the social backlash against their use in Pakistan.
I'm sure there is a social backlash against drones. It's also high time the people of Pakistan say enough is enough to terroists that live within their borders.
July 22, 2012, 5:15 pm 390 Comments The Moral Hazard of Drones By JOHN KAAG and SARAH KREPS
The Stone
The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers on issues both timely and timeless.
As the debate on the morality of the United States’ use of unmanned aerial vehicles (“U.A.V.’s,” also known as drones) has intensified in recent weeks, several news and opinion articles have appeared in the media. Two, in particular, both published this month, reflect the current ethical divide on the issue. A feature article in Esquire by Tom Junod censured the “Lethal Presidency of Barack Obama .. http://www.esquire.com/features/obama-lethal-presidency-0812 ” for the administration’s policy of targeted killings of suspected militants; another, “The Moral Case for Drones .. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-moral-case-for-drones.html ,” a news analysis by The Times’ Scott Shane, gathered opinions from experts that implicitly commended the administration for replacing Dresden-style strategic bombing with highly precise attacks that minimize collateral damage.
Posted By Thomas E. Ricks Wednesday, November 7, 2012 - 5:57 AM
By Adam Ahmad
Best Defense department of dronery
The debate concerning the use of armed Predator drones to neutralize al Qaeda and a cauldron of other militant groups in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA) has accelerated in recent months. Supporters of the drone program cite its ability to rapidly trounce terrorist operatives with little difficulty, while those in the opposition highlight the controversial nodes of the program such as its legality and the public animosity it breeds from civilian casualties.
But a constant focus on the positives and negatives of the drone program in Pakistan does little to address the real issues surrounding its use. The more compelling issue is: what's the alternative? Yes, the drone program has sapped much of al Qaeda's energy in the tribal areas, but it has also sparked torrents of anti-Americanism. Is there any other way for the U.S. and Pakistan to dismantle terrorist organizations without provoking wider violence for Pakistan?
One approach is for Pakistani military forces to suit up and prepare for another invasion of the tribal areas. But past incursions have ended dreadfully. During Operation Zalzala in South Waziristan in 2008, homes were razed, villages were leveled and thousands of FATA residents were displaced. The operation was so devastating that it created new grievances for FATA's local population and led Baitullah Meshud's al Qaeda inspired Tehrik-i-Taliban (TTP) to double-down in violence and suicide bombings, wreaking havoc across the Pakistani landscape.
This is not to say that the Pakistani military should shy away from conducting operations in Pakistan proper to claw back militant gains. The military offensive in 2009 to vanquish Mullah Fazlula's Taliban faction-responsible for the assassination attempt on Malala Yousafzai-from the Swat Valley was much needed. But the Pakistani military should steer clear of orchestrating incursions into the tribal areas where the writ of Islamabad runs thin in order to avoid wider devastation.
A more hazardous alternative to drones is to have U.S. forces conduct cross-border raids into FATA. With the U.S. drawing down in Afghanistan, this option is not on the table in Washington and for good reason. If the Pakistani public is outraged at remote controlled bombers hovering over their country, hostility towards the U.S. would certainly hit a fever pitch at western boots on the ground. A U.S. military presence in FATA would also serve a propaganda bonanza for violent extremist groups. Indeed, there remains little appetite in Washington to turn that into a reality. Pakistan's leadership will also never give the green light for such a move.
In another approach, Pakistani authorities could also turn to forging political settlements with militant groups in hopes that they cease their assistance in planning and executing terror attacks with foreign and homegrown terrorist organizations. But if history is any lesson, peace deals with extremist groups have a very short lifespan. The 24-year-old Waziri militant leader Nek Mohammed back in June 2004 failed to up hold his end of the Shakai Peace Agreement with Islamabad, jolting the Pakistani military into South Waziristan again to clear out Pakistani and foreign militant groups from the area.
What's more, recent utterances from TTP vanguard Hakimullah Meshud suggests that the group is not interested at all in signing peace deals with the government. Meshud even sacked one of his deputies -- Maulvi Faqir Muhammad -- for entertaining the idea.
Pakistan has historically negotiated these peace deals when the Pakistani government was in a relatively weak position, forcing the state to make significant concessions to the militants. The deals failed to serve their purpose and only strengthened the resolve of the extremists.
None of these alternatives can wipe out terror groups in Pakistan without causing wider destruction in the tribal areas or in Pakistan proper. Drones not only allow for the swift incineration of terrorist operatives, but they also make it more difficult for terror groups to meet and plan attacks. The program may have its faults, but it has also kept Pakistan safer by neutralizing the groups that seek nothing more than to break the government in Islamabad and harm activists for speaking out for a woman's right to education. For better or for worse, blemishes and all, drones are here to stay.
Adam Ahmad is a researcher at the Center for a New American Security and a reporting assistant at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. His work focuses on South Asia and U.S. covert action.
[ President Barack Obama talks about national security, Thursday, May 23, 2013, at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington. hidden inside ]
JULIE PACE & LARA JAKES May 23, 2013, 3:10 PM 6291
WASHINGTON (AP) — President Barack Obama on Thursday defended America’s controversial drone attacks as legal, effective and a necessary linchpin in an evolving U.S. counterterrorism policy. But he acknowledged the targeted strikes are no “cure-all” and said he is haunted by the civilians unintentionally killed.
The president also announced a renewed push to close the Guantanamo Bay detention center in Cuba, including lifting a moratorium on prisoner transfers to Yemen. However, shutting the prison will still require help from Republicans reluctant to back Obama’s call to move some detainees to U.S. prisons and try them in civilian courts.
Obama framed his address as an attempt to redefine the nature and scope of terror threats facing the U.S., noting the weakening of al-Qaida and the impending end of the U.S. war in Afghanistan.
“Neither I, nor any president, can promise the total defeat of terror,” Obama said in remarks at the National Defense University. “What we can do — what we must do — is dismantle networks that pose a direct danger, and make it less likely for new groups to gain a foothold, all while maintaining the freedoms and ideals that we defend.”
Since taking office, Obama’s counterterrorism strategy has increasingly relied on the use of strikes by unmanned spy drones, particularly in Pakistan and Yemen. The highly secretive program has faced criticism from congressional lawmakers who have questioned its scope and legality.
The president, in his most expansive public discussion on drones, defended their targeted killings as both effective and legal. He acknowledged the civilian deaths that sometimes result — a consequence that has angered many of the countries where the U.S. seeks to combat extremism — and said he grapples with that trade-off.
“For me, and those in my chain of command, these deaths will haunt us as long as we live,” he said. Before any strike, he said, “there must be near-certainty that no civilians will be killed or injured — the highest standard we can set.”
Ahead of the address, Obama signed new “presidential policy guidelines” aimed at illustrating more clearly to Congress and the public the standards the U.S. applies before carrying out drone attacks. Officials said the guidelines include not using strikes when the targeted people can be captured, either by the U.S. or a foreign government, relying on drones only when the target poses an “imminent” threat and establishing a preference for giving the military control of the drone program.
However, the CIA is still expected to maintain control of the drone program in Yemen, as well as in Pakistan’s tribal areas, given the concern that al-Qaida may return in greater numbers as U.S. troops draw down in Afghanistan. The military and the CIA currently work side by side in Yemen, with the CIA flying its drones over the northern region out of a covert base in Saudi Arabia, and the military flying its unmanned aerial vehicles from Djibouti.
In Pakistan alone, up to 3,336 people have been killed by the unmanned aircraft since 2003, according to the New America Foundation which maintains a database of the strikes.
Obama’s advisers said the new guidelines will effectively limit the number of drone strikes in terror zones and pointed to a future decline of attacks against extremists in Afghanistan as the war there winds down next year. But strikes elsewhere will continue. The guidelines will also apply to strikes against both foreigners and U.S. citizens abroad.
On the eve of the president’s speech, the administration revealed for the first time that a fourth American citizen had been killed in secretive drone strikes abroad. The killings of three other Americans in counterterror operations since 2009 were widely known before a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder to Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy acknowledged the four deaths.
In that letter, Holder said only one of the U.S. citizens killed in counterterror operations beyond war zones — Anwar al-Awlaki, who had ties to at least three attacks planned or carried out on U.S. soil — was specifically targeted by American forces. He said the other three Americans were not targeted in the U.S. strikes.
Though Obama sought to give more transparency to the drone program, the strikes will largely remain highly secret for the public. Congress is already briefed on every strike that U.S. drones take outside Afghanistan and Iraq during the war there, Obama said, but those briefings are largely classified and held privately.
The president said he was open to additional measures to further regulate the drone program, including creating a special court system to regulate strikes, similar to one that signs off on government surveillance in espionage and terror cases. Congress is already considering whether to set up a court to decide when drones overseas can target U.S. citizens linked to al-Qaida.
White House officials said the president had originally planned to deliver Thursday’s speech earlier this month, but it was delayed as the administration grappled with a trio of other controversies, including the attack on Americans in Benghazi, Libya, the IRS’ targeting of conservative groups and government monitoring of reporters.
Also Thursday, Obama reaffirmed his stalled 2008 campaign promise to close the military prison at Guantanamo Bay, where some terror suspects are held. Lifting the ban on transfers of some Guantanamo prisoners to Yemen is a key step in jumpstarting that process, given that 30 of the 56 prisoners eligible for transfer are Yemeni.
Obama halted all transfers to Yemen after the failed Christmas Day 2009 bombing attempt of an airliner over Detroit. The convicted bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, trained in Yemen.
Congress and the White House have sparred since Obama took office in 2009 over the fate of the suspects and whether they can be brought to trial on U.S. soil. In the meantime, the detainees have been held for years with diminishing hope that they will charged with crimes or given trials.
Obama acknowledged that the politics of closing Guantanamo are difficult, but he made the case that “history will cast harsh judgment on this aspect of our fight against terrorism, and those who fail to end it.”
Rep. Howard P. “Buck” McKeon, the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said he was open to a proposal from Obama on the future of Guantanamo Bay. But that plan has to consist of more than political talking points, he said.
“This speech was only necessary due to a deeply inconsistent counterterrorism policy, one that maintains it is more humane to kill a terrorist with a drone than detain and interrogate him at Guantanamo Bay,” McKeon said
This week, the Pentagon asked Congress for more than $450 million for maintaining and upgrading the Guantanamo prison. More than 100 of the prisoners have launched a hunger strike to protest their indefinite detention, and the military earlier this month was force-feeding 32 of them to keep them from starving to death. ___
Associated Press writers Lita Baldor, Kimberly Dozier and Richard Lardner contributed to this report.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), a frequent critic of the Obama administration on foreign policy, took issue with President Barack Obama's speech Thursday in which he argued that global war on terror must come to an end.
"The theme of the speech was that this war is winding down," Graham said at a press conference in Washington. "The justification is that we destroyed [al Qaeda's] leadership and were relentless in our pursuit of terrorism -- that is not true. The enemy is morphing and spreading, there are more theaters of conflict today than in several years, and our policy toward Syria and Iraq, indecision about leaving troops in Afghanistan, is creating instability."
He added: "Our allies are more afraid than I have ever seen. I support the concepts that the president talked about in many ways, but if he does not change his policy, the Middle East is going to blow up and we are going to hit again here at home to matter how hard we try."
In a historic speech at National Defense University, Obama argued that it was time to bring to a close a post-9/11 era marked by expanded counterterrorism efforts in favor of a more narrow and "targeted" role abroad.
"Beyond Afghanistan, we must define our effort not as a boundless ‘global war on terror’ – but rather as a series of persistent, targeted efforts to dismantle specific networks of violent extremists that threaten America," Obama said.
sheesh .. wish Ron Paul was president .. he would put Tanner back in his box .. umm, actually Congress has put Paul in a box for how many years? .. ummumm, actually Ron did that to himself, didn't he .. yeah ..
Tanner looks like he's pleading .. 'c'mon you guys we gotta do this forever and ever and ever' .. c'mon Ron, speak out ..
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