It looks like you're using an Ad Blocker.
Please white-list or disable AboveTopSecret.com in your ad-blocking tool.
Thank you.
Some features of ATS will be disabled while you continue to use an ad-blocker.
originally posted by: DAVID64
a reply to: Shakawkaw
I can agree with that. But before the Trump haters come flocking in to cry about all the dead kids, they damn well better get the score straight.
Pushed to release information about civilian deaths in drone strikes, in July 2016 the US government made the absurd claim it had killed, at most, 116 civilians in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia and Libya between 2009 and 2015. Journalists and human rights advocates said the numbers were ridiculously low and unverifiable, given that no names, dates, locations or others details were released. The London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, which has tracked drone strikes for years, said the true figure was six times higher.
Given that drones account for only a small portion of the munitions dropped in the past eight years, the numbers of civilians killed by Obama’s bombs could be in the thousands. But we can’t know for sure as the administration, and the mainstream media, has been virtually silent about the civilian toll of the administration’s failed interventions.
originally posted by: UKTruth
Drone strikes should be banned. It is too much of an easy decision for a President / military leader to make as they have little to worry about in terms of their own people being killed. It restricts the consequences of war.
Trump is dead wrong to continue this practice.
Let's not make this a partisan issue. This is a USA issue and whether it is Obama or Trump or any other President, this stinks.
originally posted by: Ridhya
a reply to: yuppa
There was a group sterilizing people against their will in history where it was considered genocide, but history isn't your strong suit.
originally posted by: IgnoranceIsntBlisss
a reply to: wileel
Because its an easy copout to just blow snip up with marginalized sense of consequences.
How did they even figure 30,000 targets, for example?
This all sound more like they're just trying to meet quotas all of this.
originally posted by: jjkenobi
So is Trump directing the drones or is the CIA?
We know Obama was directing them, as he stated so many times on the record.
The Obama administration put in place a rule that no drone strike could take place outside a war zone unless there was a "near certainty" that no civilian would be harmed. Obama also put the White House in the decision loop on most strikes against high-value targets. And, outside a war zone, the military or the CIA had to show that the target posed an imminent threat to the United States.
A flurry of strikes in Yemen in recent weeks, against targets that had long been previously identified, was made possible by declaring parts of Yemen a war zone, the official said. The Pentagon no longer had to show that the targets posed an imminent threat to the U.S. or declare a near certainty that no civilian would be harmed.