Anger Over US Drone Program In Pakistan Prompts Activists To Reveal Secret Identity Of Spy

[Purveyor]

Source: ASSOCIATED PRESS

ISLAMABAD — Rising anger over deadly drone attacks spurred a Pakistani political party Wednesday to reveal the secret identity of what it said was the top U.S. spy in the country. It demanded he be tried for murder, another blow to already jagged relations between the two nations.

A pair of U.S. missile strikes in recent weeks — including one that killed the Pakistani Taliban's leader as the government prepared to invite him to hold peace talks — has increased simmering tensions between Washington and Islamabad after years of public fury over the covert attacks. The apparent disclosure of the top CIA officer's name will almost certainly strain the fragile diplomacy that the U.S. is relying upon to help negotiate an end to the war in neighboring Afghanistan.

It was the second time in recent years that Pakistanis opposed to drone strikes targeting Islamic militants have claimed to have revealed the identity of the top CIA spy in the country.

In a letter to Pakistani police, Shireen Mazari, the information secretary of political party Tehreek-e-Insaf, called for the CIA station chief in Islamabad and CIA Director John Brennan to be tried for murder and "waging war against Pakistan" in connection with a Nov. 21 drone strike on an Islamic seminary in the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province.

Read more: http://www.therepublic.com/view/story/1a8d0c2b485e4ca28dbb90247e381bcb/US-Pakistan-US

[NYtoBush-Drop Dead]

1. Mr President,

Bring ALL our troops home, NOW.

[cosmicone]

2. A marginal nutcase party wants its terrorists unfettered activity

Drone all of them (extremist elements) to let the good people of Pakistan build a civilized nation.

[Comrade Grumpy]

3. "A marginal nutcase party." Here's what Wikipedia says:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakistan_Tehreek-e-Insaf

The Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf (PTI) (Urdu: پاکستان تحريک انصاف‎; Pakistan Movement for Justice) is a centrist, nationalist and communitarian political party in Pakistan, which was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party is an anti-status quo movement advocating for an egalitarian and modern model of Islamic democratic welfare state.[3][4][10] It is the fastest growing political party in Pakistan.[11] The PTI claims to be the only non-family party of mainstream Pakistani politics.[12] With over 10 million members in Pakistan and abroad it is claimed to be Pakistan's largest party by membership.[13][14][15] According to 2013 elections results PTI is Pakistan's close third largest party, second largest in Punjab and Karachi while largest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It received the second largest popular vote in the country, with a little over 7.5 million people voting for it on the election day.[16] It also leads a coalition government in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa.

--------

Okay, let's see:

Marginal?

"According to 2013 elections results PTI is Pakistan's close third largest party, second largest in Punjab and Karachi while largest in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa. It received the second largest popular vote in the country, with a little over 7.5 million people voting for it on the election day.[16] It also leads a coalition government in the northwestern province of Khyber Pakhtunkhwa."

and

"It is the fastest growing political party in Pakistan."

Nutcase?

"A centrist, nationalist and communitarian political party in Pakistan, which was founded by former Pakistani cricket captain and philanthropist Imran Khan. The party is an anti-status quo movement advocating for an egalitarian and modern model of Islamic democratic welfare state."

Party?

Well, at least you got that right.

Would you like to drone Mr. Khan?

[cosmicone]

6. hahahahahaha

Marginal = not one of the two main parties which are People's Party and Muslim League.
Nutcase = Anyone who supports terrorists and extremists is off kilter to begin with.

Fastest Growing is a statistical term. Let's assume Democrats are 40% and Republicans are 38% and they grow by 2% a year. Then tea party which was 0% in 2009 and 13% of the population in 2010 would be the "fastest growing party" -- still marginal and still nutty.

Imran Khan has gone off the deep end and is not a centrist anymore. He has supported terrorism and terrorist acts in India and other countries. He also believes that Pakistan could win a nuclear war against India because a lot of the population could hide in caves.

I wouldn't advocate droning Imran Khan but I wouldn't shed a tear if he ends up droned.

[Comrade Grumpy]

9. Ha ha yourself. Just because you don't like them doesn't make them marginal or nutcases.

Please elaborate on how they support terrorists and extremists, other than by opposing drone strikes.

I see that they have the conservative Islamist Jamaat-e-Islami Party as junior partners in Kyber Pahktunkwa, but other than that...

[cosmicone]

11. Pakistani military supported Imran Khan

in the last elections and the military creates, funds, trains and supports the terrorist groups. That is the only thing the Pakistani military has ever been successful in -- otherwise it has lost every war it has ever fought, the worst being the Bangladesh war in which their ass was handed to them and 91,000 troops surrendered including a five star general.

Any candidate Pakistani military supports is a pro-terrorist candidate. Pakistani electorate wisely voted against the military candidates because they are sick of military rule. They shrewdly supported Nawaz Sharif, an anti-military candidate and a pragmatic businessman who will bring peace and prosperity to Pakistan. What is Imran Khan going to do? Endless terror and mosques and madrassahs will take Pakistan backwards and not forward to modern civilization.

[JackRiddler]

64. Sounds like...

The U.S. should stop supporting this Pakistani military, doesn't it now?

Hmmmmmmmmm paradox. How to solve? Impossible! Does not compute!

[cosmicone]

65. The US should not support any part of Pakistan

except food and medicines.

It is a failed, terrorist state that exports terrorism all over the world.

[MyNameGoesHere]

5. I bet you play

RPG games really well. Why with that bravado, I am sure you have killed thousands of bad guys. Now with all that killing experience we could use your type in the real thing. How about it? Care to use that killing bravado for real?

[cosmicone]

7. I don't have to operate a drone or fight myself

in order to support President Obama's drone policy which has been vastly successful and brought Al Q'aeda/Taliban to their knees.

I laugh like hell thinking of Al Quaeda/Taliban management hiding 24/7, not able to make a phone call, not able to trust many people, having to move around daily and always looking at the sky. Serves them right.

[Comrade Grumpy]

8. Oh, you're funny. Brought the Taliban to their knees, have we?

Which is why the US so desperately wants to hang around for another 10 years?

[cosmicone]

12. A few dozen more drone strikes and Taliban will be crawling ... n/t

[Comrade Grumpy]

20. ...into Kabul. As the Americans leave.

[cosmicone]

22. I seriously doubt it.

However, your sympathy and well wishes for the violent, extreme and fundamentalist terrorists is noted.

[JackRiddler]

63. Is this the Wolfowitz parody?

You know, they'll be throwing flowers at our troops?

[closeupready]

67. Or Sarah Palin - same word salad nonsense.

[Ace Acme]

10. The Esquire article about the murder of Abdulrahman al Awlaki by drone

... (16 years old and an American citizen) ended with the observation that if Mr. Obama claims the right
to drone people he regards as terrorists, then other heads of state have the same right to drone Mr.
Obama on grounds that he is a terrorist.

http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/abdulrahman-al-awlaki-death-10470891

[polly7]

14. Do you give any thought to all of the innocents killed in these drone strikes? nt

[Ace Acme]

15. Ideologues don't care about real people--only about their idealized imaginary friends. nt

[cosmicone]

18. What innocents?

You make President Obama sound like George Zimmerman.

He is not shooting at unarmed kids wearing hoodies and carrying skittles from a convenience store. He is killing extremely dangerous people and their supporters/sympathizers who aid and abet the violent terrorists bent upon killing far more innocents in US, India and elsewhere.

[polly7]

25. You need to broaden the scope of your reading material a bit, when it comes to these drones, imho.

Last edited Fri Nov 29, 2013, 03:18 PM - Edit history (1)

By Medea Benjamin

Tuesday, November 05, 2013

Excerpts:

On October 29, the Rehman family—a father with his two children—came all the way from the Pakistani tribal territory of North Waziristan to the US Capitol to tell the heart-wrenching story of the death of the children’s beloved 67-year-old grandmother. And while the briefing, organized by Congressman Alan Grayson, was only attended by four other congresspeople, it was packed with media.

Watching the beautiful 9-year-old Nabila relate how her grandmother was blown to bits while outside picking okra softened the hearts of even the most hardened DC politicos. From the Congressmen to the translator to the media, tears flowed. Even the satirical journalist Dana Milbank, who normally pokes fun at everything and everyone in his Washington Post column, Example: covered the family’s tragedy with genuine sympathy.

The visit by the Rehman family was timed for the release of the groundbreaking new documentary Example Unmanned: America’s Drone Wars by Robert Greenwald of Brave New Foundation. The emotion-packed film is filled with victims’ stories, including that of 16-year-old Tariq Aziz, a peace-loving, soccer-playing teenager obliterated three days after attending an anti-drone conference in Islamabad. Lawyers in the firm pose the critical question: If Tariq was a threat, why didn’t they capture him at the meeting and give him the right to a fair trial? Another just released documentary is Wounds of Waziristan, a well-crafted, 20-minute piece by Pakistani filmmaker Madiha Tahir that explains how drone attacks rip apart communities and terrorize entire populations.

Just as the visit and the films have put real faces on drone victims, a plethora of new reports by prestigious institutions—five in total—have exposed new dimensions of the drone wars.

Full article and more on the Global Drone Summit November 16-17 in Washington DC: http://www.zcommunications.org/drones-have-come-out-of-the-shadows-by-medea-benjamin.html

Human Rights Watch

Amnesty International

License to Kill, released by the Geneva-based group Al Karama

Adding to these well-researched reports by non-governmental organizations are two documents commissioned by the United Nations. One is by Christof Heyns, the UN's special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. The other is by Ben Emmerson, the special rapporteur on human rights and counter-terrorism.

Video.

http://www.democracynow.org/2013/2/8/codepink_repeatedly_disrupts_brennan_hearing_calling

Thursday’s confirmation hearing for CIA nominee John Brennan was briefly postponed to clear the room of activists from CODEPINK after they repeatedly disrupted Brennan’s testimony. One woman held a list of Pakistani children killed in U.S. drone strikes. Former U.S. diplomat Col. Ann Wright interrupted Brennan while wearing a sign around her neck with the name of Tariq Aziz, a 16-year-old Pakistani boy who was killed in a U.S. drone strike in 2011. Wright and seven others were arrested. We speak to CODEPINK founder Medea Benjamin, who also disrupted the meeting and recently visited Pakistan to speak with victims of drone strikes. "It’s not only the killing, it’s the terrorizing of entire populations, where they hear the drones buzzing overhead 24 hours a day, where they’re afraid to go to school, afraid to go to the markets, to funerals, to weddings, where it disrupts entire communities," Benjamin says. "And we are trying to get this information to our elected officials, to say, 'You are making us unsafe here at home,' to say nothing of how illegal, immoral and inhumane these policies are." [includes rush transcript]

JOANNE LINGLE: 178 children killed by drones in Pakistan. And Mr. Brennan, if you don’t know who they are, I have a list. I have a list with all the names and the ages.

SEN. DIANNE FEINSTEIN: All right, I’m going to—we’re going to halt the hearing. I’m going to ask that the room be cleared and that the CODEPINK associates not be permitted to come back in. Done this five times now, and five times are enough.

"Go to Sleep or I Will Call the Planes"

—By Adam Serwer| Wed Apr. 24, 2013 6:01 AM PDT

A week ago, activist Farea al-Muslimi was live-tweeting the aftermath of a drone attack on his childhood village of Wessab in Yemen. Monday, he was testifying before a Senate subcommittee on the legality and impact of the Obama administration's targeted killing program. It was the first time Congress has heard from a witness with anything close to first-hand experience with being on the receiving end of a drone strike.

"Women used to say [to kids] go to sleep or I will call your father," Muslimi said. "Now they say go to sleep, or I will call the planes."

Last week's strike killed Hameed al-Radmi, described by the US government as an Al Qaeda leader, and four suspected militants. But Muslimi told the Senate that Radmi had recently met with Yemeni government officials, and could easily have been captured, rather than killed in a strike that alienated everyone in the village.

"[A]ll they have is the psychological fear and terror that now occupies their souls," Muslimi said of the residents of Wessab. "They fear that their home or a neighbor's home could be bombed at any time by a U.S. drone." President Obama received some backup from an unlikely source—Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), who has spent the last week criticizing the Obama administration for handling the suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings in civilian court. Graham said although he would prefer to capture terror suspects, Yemeni officials couldn't be trusted to apprehend them. "The world we live in is where if you share this closely held information you're going to end up tipping off somebody," Graham told Muslimi.

Full Article: http://www.motherjones.com/mojo/2013/04/yemen-drone-strikes-senate-hearing

http://childvictimsofwar.org.uk/get-informed/drone-warfare/

“Even one child death from drone missiles or suicide bombings is one child death too many. Children have no place in war and all parties should do their utmost to protect children from violent attacks at all times.” Sarah Crowe UNICEF

US: Strikes Kill Civilians in Yemen Youtube video by Human Rights Watch

Remote Killing of Civilians

The US has used armed drones in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Yemen, Libya, Somalia and recently in the Phillipines. Over 200 children have already been killed in these strikes since 2004. See The Bureau of Investigative Journalism

Change.org

Cease deadly drone strikes that kill civilians in Pakistan.

http://www.change.org/petitions/cease-deadly-drone-strikes-that-kill-civilians-in-pakistan



"Real people are suffering real harm" but these civilian deaths by drones are being mostly ignored by governmental oversight agencies and also by the news media according to James Cavallaro of Stanford University, one of the authors of a study by Stanford and NYU in the report, "Living Under Drones". The results of this recent study reported on Sept. 25, 2012 concludes that only about 2% of drone casualties are top militant leaders. Up to 884 civilians, including 176 children have been killed in Pakistan since 2004 due to drone strikes.

Voices From the Drone Summit:
On one occasion, Hale located an individual who had been involved with Improvised Explosive Devices (IEDs). The man was riding a motorcycle in the mountains early in the morning. He met up with four other people around a campfire drinking tea. Hale relayed the information that led to a drone strike, which killed all five men. Hale had no idea whether the other four men had done anything. Hale had thought he was part of an operation protecting Afghanistan. But when the other four men died – a result of “guilt by association” – Hale realized he “was no longer part of something moral or sane or rational.” He had heard someone say that “terrorists are cowards” because they used IEDs. “What was different,” Hale asked, “between that and the little red joy stick that pushes a button thousands of miles away”?
http://www.zcommunications.org/voices-from-the-drone-summit-by-marjorie-cohn.html

I learned all kinds of things. We were told that a lot of people killed by drones were people who would have been very easy to capture. We got examples of young men who were travelling and had just passed a checkpoint, and a mile after they were killed by a drone. Or people who were living right outside the capital city, Sana’a, and maybe would have turned themselves in to figure out why the US wanted to kill them, but they had no way of knowing.
http://www.zcommunications.org/drone-wars-by-medea-benjamin.html

The two drone strikes in November show that these attacks don’t just kill and maim individuals. They also blow up peace talks. They weaken democratically elected governments. They sabotage bilateral relations. They sow hatred and resentment.
http://www.zcommunications.org/drone-strikes-in-pakistan-reapers-of-their-own-destruction-by-medea-benjamin.html

http://www.livingunderdrones.org/

http://unmanned.warcosts.com/stream

[cosmicone]

26. Would it be any better

if we used B1 bombers or fighter jets instead?

Or would there be fewer casualties if we sent in 100,000 troops?

Amnesty, HRW etc. don't provide solutions. They can raise more money by giving exposure to some tragic deaths. The fundamental fact is that President Obama believes that he is doing the right thing with the least possible civilian casualties and I support him.

These are very dangerous people who are funded and armed by the Pakistani military to destabilize Afghanistan with an aim to take it over and create a brutal regime that will adversely affect millions of people. The pakistani government is unwilling or powerless to stop these terrorists.

Have you read up on the concept of "greater good" instead of simply cut and pasting cherry-picked tragic stories?

[polly7]

29. Have you read up on the concept of

'collateral damage' - 'we don't do body counts', rather than parroting the exact justifications used to excuse all those killed and mutilated in Iraq?

Nothing much changes, does it?

[Celefin]

33. Give it up...

...there's seriously no point whatsoever in 'debating' this topic with this DU-member who always shows up to celebrate another victory against common human decency when it comes to the drone program. Sadly.

Don't waste your time and have your evening ruined.

[Ash_F]

35. Your previous post was "What innocents?"

What happened to that? Now you are all about making excuses.

[Ace Acme]

44. False dichotomies get you nowhere, except in the courtroom of your own mind

where you are judge, prosecutor, jury, and executioner.

Stop celebrating Obama's terrorism as a necessary evil.

[Ace Acme]

43. He's killing grandmothers and children. Get a clue. nt

[hughee99]

54. Exactly, they're ALL "suspected militants",

and it's okay to kill someone you SUSPECT might be a militant. They could be bad people!

[JoeyT]

19. They're brown, Muslim, and foreign.

To some people that's plenty enough to automatically preclude them from being an innocent. Usually they inhabit Fox News and Free Republic, but we've got a handful here as well.

It's why they don't feel bad running around screeching for the death of any Muslim that annoys them in any fashion.

[polly7]

38. That's true.

We sobbed.

For the first time ever, there was a public hearing on the human, yes, “human” cost of drone warfare. For the very first time, the drone debate included on its panel of white male faces a young, brown Yemeni man who spoke clearly but emotionally about how hard it was to reconcile his love for America and Americans with the devastation upon his dear Yemen, and his struggle with informing his community about the goodness of America-- that these drone strikes which are killing innocent people were not representative of the American people. For the first time, Senators were hearing from someone whose job was not to sift through news sources to calibrate numbers of dead people, or somebody who wrote lengthy legal opinions “reasoning” with murder, or an obvious ex-military apologist for war, cowering behind podiums and office desks. For the first time, Senators saw that the human cost was far beyond dollars and triple digits. It was a man’s identity and morals in question, his home and his family’s life in jeopardy, his difficulty in both loving a country that has given him so much, but taken away equal amounts.
We can relate to his dilemma.

Farea wasn’t there to try to win the hearts and minds of Senate by giving them policy or reform suggestions. He was there to tell his story. But white privilege and its associated subjectivities were clearly in action.

“I have been to Yemen,” Lindsey Graham said to Farea al-Muslimi. Our blood pressures rose. “Isn’t your country in turmoil?” Graham continued. “We have some problems.” replied Al-Muslimi. Graham ended his questioning, self-indulgent smirk on his face, as if to say, “I rest my case.” Although we doubt he is even aware of the terminology, Graham’s neo-colonial presumptions about Farea’s understanding of his own country were disgusting.

Drone Wars: How White Privilege Obscures Real Dialogue
By Noor Mir and Rooj Alwazir

Saturday, April 27, 2013

http://www.zcommunications.org/drone-wars-how-white-privilege-obscures-real-dialogue-by-noor-mir.html

[JackRiddler]

57. This is it, basically.

Horrible.

[LanternWaste]

58. One may wonder if that same sentiment applies to the thousands of civilians who are too

"I laugh like hell thinking of Al Quaeda/Taliban management hiding 24/7, not able to make a phone call, not able to trust many people, having to move around daily and always looking at the sky. Serves them right...

One may wonder if that same sentiment applies to the thousands of civilians who are too forced into hiding... "serves them right" and any other bumper stickers needed to rationalize the irrational.

[Nihil]

37. "marginal nutcase" + "Drone all of them" = unbelievable irony ...

Some people are so hypocritical that they fall foul of Poe's Law.

It would be comical were it not so sad to mock the afflicted.

[JackRiddler]

52. Yours is the marginal nutcase view.

Only in the United States itself does any significant number of people imagine there could be legitimacy to the U.S. government murdering people by drone in distant countries without any semblance of due process entirely on the judgement of the "prosecution." Shame on you for defending this murder.

[cosmicone]

55. It is war. It is not criminal prosecution.

Would you have protested our bombing Germany in WWII in a similar manner?

[JackRiddler]

56. "It is war" is a nonsense statement.

Whose war is it, on whom, for what reason? Who started it, what is its justification? There have been criminal prosecutions for acts of war, so "war" and "crime" are not separate categories - in fact, war is the worst form of crime.

What you're saying is that it's okay to murder little children because it's "war," not "criminal prosecution."

And your historical hypothetical is incredibly stupid. I wasn't aware that the U.S. drones were attacking Hitler! One can insert any historical example one likes, outrageously use the first-person plural, and pretend one has said something significant. Here:

Would you have approved "our" bombing Jesus Christ in a similar manner?

Aha! I totally win!

[Comrade Grumpy]

4. This would be the second time our top spook there got outed.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/nov/27/cia-officer-pakistan-imran-khan-party

<snip>

If his identity is confirmed it will be the second time anti-drone campaigners have unmasked a top US spy in Pakistan. In 2010 another CIA station chief, Jonathan Banks, was named in criminal proceedings initiated after a drone strike. Banks was forced to leave the country.

As with the Banks case, questions will be raised about how the PTI came to know the identity of the top US intelligence official in the country. Although nearly all foreign spies in Pakistan use diplomatic cover stories to hide their occupation, many, including station chiefs, are declared to the country's domestic spy agency.

The letter signed by the PTI spokeswoman Shireen Mazari demanded the named agent be prevented from leaving the country so that he could be arrested. The PTI said it hoped he would reveal "through interrogation" the names of the remote pilots who operated the drone.

"CIA station chief is not a diplomatic post, therefore he does not enjoy any diplomatic immunity and is within the bounds of domestic laws of Pakistan," the letter said.

<snip>

[L0oniX]

13. Pakistan should be flying drones here to take out tea party members.

O yea how would we like it if some other country was killing people here with drones? Oh but we're killing Taliban. Huh? I thought we were trying to kill Al Quaida. Wow how things change when yer having fun with guns and drones. Fuck this excessive military action and expense. Shut down the over seas US military operations and save our country. We either take care of our own or we go over to other countries and fuck with them. IMO military enlistment should stopped. Want a war? Draft people or STFU.

[Ace Acme]

16. It's not Tea Partiers droning civilians. It's the Commander in Chief.

It's a shame that no Democrat had the guts and the integrity to run a primary challenge in 2012.

[L0oniX]

17. Drones don't care who is running this country.

This is where both parties are the same.

[Ace Acme]

21. Drones love Obama. He's their man in Washington.

Bush used the drones very sparingly, killed very few. Quite conspicuously, after Clinton's surveillance drone program had spotted bin Laden a dozen times, Bush kept the drones on the ground in the months before 9/11.

Obama's first drone strike was on his third day in office, an illegal strike on Pakistan that killed a dozen civilians. He has greatly expanded the drone program. Drones love Obama.

[cosmicone]

23. Drones love terrorists

they give the terrorists a passionate kiss (of death.)

[Ace Acme]

24. But since the USA defines as a "militant" any military-aged man who happens to find himself killed

... by a drone, your claims about terrorists are pretty thin.

It reminds me of the practice in Vietnam--If They're Dead, They Must Have Been VietCong.

[cosmicone]

27. I have more faith in the intellect and wisdom

of President Barack Obama. He is not alien to brown muslim foreigners -- his dad was one -- and he is certainly no Vietnam style cowboy.

Your point is well taken but every drone strike target is carefully vetted, debated and analyzed. It is not like we are flying a bunch of drones that are randomly shooting at anything that moves.

[Ace Acme]

28. You didn't say honesty, morality, integrity

"Wisdom" means anything you want it to mean. It can mean "awareness of the fact that it's futile to oppose the monsters who run the world".

Obama is indeed a cowboy, flying drone strikes in 5 countries (Pakistan, Afghanistan, Somalia, Yemen, Darfur).

Targeting is very careless--hence the murder of a 16-year-old American, Abdulrahman al Awlak--and the murder of hundreds of civilians and dozens of children. It's terrorism.

[Bonobo]

36. Good christ

You sound like a major league douchebag.

[cosmicone]

39. Ad hominem attacks

reveal the bankruptcy of logic and cognition.

[Ace Acme]

40. A succinct and accurate criticism of someone's style and ideas is not an ad hominem fallacy.

An ad hominem fallacy would be "you are wrong because you are a douchebag".

"You're a douchebag because you're wrong" is not an ad hominem fallacy.

[cosmicone]

41. "Wrong" is highly subjective

Just because one's viewpoint is different doesn't make it right or wrong.

Calling someone a douchebag because someone else has a different view makes it a manifestly ad hominem attack.

I respect the passion and view of anti-drone people and I never have to resort to calling them names even though I don't agree with their perspective.

[Ace Acme]

42. It's not a fallacious attack. It's an aggressive criticism.

To call someone a bigot who says bigoted things is also I suppose an ad hominem attack, but that doesn't make it fallacious.

To call someone an advocate of violence who makes remarks advocating violence is also I suppose an ad hominem attack, but that doesn't make it fallacious.

To call someone a liar who says things that are not true is also I suppose an ad hominem attack, but that doesn't make it fallacious.

Your apparent belief that the lives of civilians in Yemen, Pakistan, and Afghanistan are not as valuable as the lives of Americans is deeply offensive.

[cosmicone]

45. :::::::::: yawn ::::::::::::::: n/t

[Ace Acme]

46. Right, you really can't defend yourself. Thanks for making that clear. nt

[cosmicone]

48. Sometimes it is useless to teach logic

to persons such as radical terrorist sympathizers, faux news audience, teabaggers or dittoheads,.

Yawning is the perfect dismissive response in that situation.

[Ace Acme]

49. Your credentials as an expert in logic are . . .

what exactly?

Try citing a specific case instead of making a vague and non-specific argument form authority.

Many posts challenging your nonsense in this thread have no responses.

If you lived in Tennessee or Alabama I might cut you some slack.

[cosmicone]

51. Want some cheese with that? n/t

[Ace Acme]

53. That's very stale cheese, left over from Bushbots circa 2005. nt

[closeupready]

66. And you know what, sometimes things are what they sound like.

[JackRiddler]

59. You love "terrorists," apparently.

A magic word to justify any atrocity by "our" side as a happy, wonderful thing. (The same thing done against those you imagine are on "our" side, of course, would be bad.)

Oh, and ha ha. I'm sure every massacre of civilians had its joker. You're hilarious.

[L0oniX]

31. You can believe that if Bush were to have had a 3rd term drone use would have expanded.

[Ace Acme]

32. Bush didn't need a third term. Obama expanded all his neofascistic programs

... just fine.

[Celefin]

34. He probably wouldn't have needed to.

He'd likely kept the boots on the ground instead as he loved the cowboy style. Different strategy, same outcome:
A massive waste of lives, money and goodwill.

Drones are stealthy and unsuitable for TV-coverage and they also reduce American casualties.
Better PR on the home front, especially for a Dem administration that wants to show it's disengaging from the wars.

They are also hugely effective at terrorizing the populace of the target countries and fueling the hate for the US.
Sadly, while drawing down troops the Obama administration massively expanded the drone program.

Of course, should another Republican presidency befall the nation, the drone program would be expanded further and there would be an increase of boots on the ground and new wars. Seems to be no way out of all this.

[JackRiddler]

60. Oh hooray! Bush would have done it too!

That justifies everything! Anything!

We can go murder a million people, long as we can say, Bush would have killed a million and one!

[L0oniX]

61. Did you even read what I was responding too? Context is everything.

If you have a problem with both presidents using drones then you need to work on making the Dem party stand out apart from those that would use drones! I thought I didn't vote for drones ...or for someone who would use them.

[JackRiddler]

62. Ah yes, I see. So sad...

To be arguing over this atrocity as if the party lines make a difference here. Yes.

[MannyGoldstein]

30. If Pakistan flew Sudden Death Robots around the US, we'd be OK with it.

Right?

High-strung people, I guess.

[Sunlei]

47. they droned a man on a motorcycle, he's on a public street w/ civies all over!

very wrong to even allow missile strike attempt near any innocents.

I think I'd be happiest for our troops if the Pacs do say, everyone out and we just totally pull out American military.

Mr. President pull everyone out by end of 2014! everyone.

Let any 'training' be done online. Let the war contractors/war profiteers deal with their own business without any American federal funds or American military.

[Ace Acme]

50. I once asked a neocon why we needed 700 military bases overseas.

He said it was to defend the interests of our corporations.

I asked him why should the taxpayers fund the corporate interests. Why shouldn't the corporations pay for their own security as a cost of doing business? He said he'd get back to me on that.

[knic]

68. Feinstein and Rogers wonder why terrorism threat to US is Increasing (n/t)