Multiple missteps led to drone killing U.S. troops in Afghanistan

[n2doc]

By David S. Cloud and David Zucchino, Los Angeles Times
November 5, 2011, 3:50 p.m.
Reporting from Washington— On the evening of April 5, a pilot settled into a leather captain's chair at Creech Air Force Base in southern Nevada and took the controls of a Predator drone flying over one of the most violent areas of southwestern Afghanistan. Minutes later, his radio crackled.

A firefight had broken out. Taliban insurgents had ambushed about two dozen Marines patrolling a bitterly contested road.

The Air Force captain angled his joystick and the drone veered toward the fighting taking place half a world away, where it was already morning. He powered up two Hellfire missiles under its wings and ordered a crew member responsible for operating the drone's cameras to search for enemy fighters.

It didn't take long to find something. Three figures, fuzzy blobs on the pilot's small black-and-white screen, lay in a poppy field a couple of hundred yards from the road.


more

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-drone-attack-20111106,0,549676.story

[Aerows]

1. I feel so much "safer"

Knowing that these drones will soon be deployed around the United States.

[phasma ex machina]

4. This photo and caption appear on the left sidebar of the story:

Homeland Security adding 3 drone aircraft despite lack of pilots.


Autopilots? Keep a sharp eye 99 percenters.

[provis99]

2. friendly fire is an American specialty.

Like the joke says, "When the French shoot, the Germans duck. When the Germans shoot, the French duck. When the Americans shoot, everybody ducks."

[sad sally]

3. The last sentence says there was a chaplin waiting for the pilot.

What about all the innocent people killed by unmanned predator drones - piloted by Americans. Do those pilots have any remorse or need a chaplin after they kill innocent people? The US' use of these unmanned weapons has opened a moral issue that isn't going away.
#####

The expansion of the CIA’s undeclared drone war in the tribal areas of Pakistan required a big expansion of who can be marked for death. Once the standard for targeted killing was top-level leadership in al-Qaeda or one of its allies. That’s long gone, especially as the number of people targeted at once has grown.

This is the new standard, according to a blockbuster piece in the Wall Street Journal: “men believed to be militants associated with terrorist groups, but whose identities aren’t always known.” The CIA is now killing people without knowing who they are, on suspicion of association with terrorist groups. The article does not define the standards are for “suspicion” and “association.”

Strikes targeting those people — usually “groups” of such people — are called “signature” strikes. “The bulk of CIA’s drone strikes are signature strikes,” the Journal’s Adam Entous, Siobhan Gorman and Julian E. Barnes report.

And bulk really means bulk. The Journal reports that the growth in clusters of people targeted by the CIA has required the agency to tell its Pakistani counterparts about mass attacks. When the agency expects to kill 20 or more people at once, then it’s got to give the Pakistanis notice.
---
Fundamentally, though, it’s a question of policy: whether it’s acceptable for the CIA to kill someone without truly knowing if he’s the bombsmith or the laundry guy.

The Journal reports that the CIA’s willingness to strike without such knowledge — sanctioned, in full, by President Barack Obama — is causing problems for the State Department and the military.

http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/11/cia-drones-marked-for-death/?du

[Poll_Blind]

5. A little lengthy but still worth the read for the detailed account. nt

PB

[msongs]

6. maybe the white house needs a trophy room of some sort nt

[Angry Dragon]

7. people do die in video games

[azul]

8. Where did the LAT get this story?

I thought that there were military censors widely embedded in the media keeping us safe from knowing about this kind of stuff. We are pretending to be at war, state of emergency declared yearly, after all.