John Oliver On Drones

[Kevin_Kennedy]

It's sad that an in-depth report on drones has to come from a comedian.

 

[Luddly Neddite]

It was the usual brilliance we have come to expect from him and no accident that Jon Stewart is his mentor.

Its a shame that so most RWs are scared to watch them or Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert. None are as knee-jerk liberal as they want to believe and can be just as critical of Dems as they are of Repubs.

 

[chikenwing]

It was the usual brilliance we have come to expect from him and no accident that Jon Stewart is his mentor.

Its a shame that so most RWs are scared to watch them or Bill Maher, Stephen Colbert. None are as knee-jerk liberal as they want to believe and can be just as critical of Dems as they are of Repubs.

Scared to watch??!!! bwhwhahahahahaha
You just make things up as you go don't you?

 

[waltky]

Obama makes liberal use of drones...

Drones may predate Obama, but his resolute use of them is unmatched
Wednesday 18 November 2015 - Civilians have been killed and officials warn it will ‘weaken the rule of law’, yet the president’s actions indicate drone warfare won’t be going away anytime soon

The first drone strike took place within weeks of the September 11 attacks, but the unmanned aerial weapons system came of age under Barack Obama. It was Obama who stepped up the most controversial use of drones, using them beyond internationally recognised war zones to conduct hundreds of strikes in the lawless regions of Yemen, Pakistan and Somalia. Unlike conventional aircraft, drones can linger for hours above their targets, watching and hoovering up data such as cellphone signals. This makes them uniquely well-suited for pursuing suspected senior terrorists – “high-value targets”, in military jargon – or providing surveillance on suspect sites or groups.

Obama and his team seized on these capabilities: in 2009, his first year in the White House, Obama carried out more such strikes in Pakistan than Bush had during his entire presidency. The following year, strikes hit Pakistan’s tribal regions at a rate of more than two a week. Concrete details on all aspects of these secretive campaigns, waged by the CIA and Joint Special Operaitons Command (JSOC), are elusive – Obama himself did not even mention drone strikes publicly until 2012. But independent monitoring groups such as the Bureau of Investigative Journalism and the New America Foundation estimate that the US has conducted almost 400 such strikes since Obama entered the White House.

This is not an arm’s-length project for the president. Senior officials have described on condition of anonymity how Obama, who holds the 2009 Nobel peace prize, personally signs off on the “kill list” and is often briefed on individual strikes. These strikes have claimed high-profile scalps; figures such as Nassir al-Wuhayshi, leader of al-Qaida’s Yemeni affiliate, who died in a drone strike in June. Meanwhile, letters from Osama bin Laden reveal the considerable disruption caused by the persistent presence of drones to al-Qaida’s senior leadership in Pakistan.

But the strikes have provoked sustained criticism from international lawyers and civil rights groups, who question the administration’s claim that after 9/11 the US is legally justified in targeting al-Qaida and its “affiliates”, wherever they may be. Christof Heyns, the UN’s special rapporteur on extrajudicial killing, said in 2012 that the practice threatened to “weaken the rule of law”. The strikes have also been dogged by claims of civilian casualties. The administration has sought to play these down: John Brennan, at the time Obama’s counter-terrorism adviser and now the head of the CIA, portrayed drones as an “exceptionally precise and surgical” weapon causing next to no collateral damage.

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