Who are the terrorists?

I'll give you a considered response when I have time.

For a start we need to set parameters, those that fly the drones is too vague, it includes those who just engage in surveillance. As such we should limit our discussion just to those who use drones to strike targets.

As I've stated before the use of drones is not a good thing, it serves as a recruiting sergeant for Al Qaida and the effect of collateral damage is devastating.

As for the people involved, they're probably ordinary soldiers who signed up because they thought it was the right thing to do, or they needed employment. there might well have been a family tradition of joining the military.

Shooting a target by remote control allows one to disassociate oneself from what one is actually doing. They probably don't think of the targets as people, just as targets, although I don't know how successful that would be. The Milgram experiment proves people will do all sorts of things if told to do so by an authority figure. Bradley Manning shows what happens if you step out of line and disobey orders.

The Taliban are not very nice people at all, there's plenty of evidence about the terrible things they got up to when they were in power. The drone flyers may well have believed they were targetting really bad people, they were helping to make the world a better place.

Your figure of 4700 does not take into accout the legitimacy of the targets, undoubtedly some of them were pretty dispicable figures, and others were innocents caught up in the crossfire. Knowing the balance is important. if it was clear that 4699 taliban killers were killed and one innocent, people would probably think it was a price worth paying. If the reverse were the case they'd want the drone strikes stopped straight away.

(Got to go now, I will continue posting later.)

As for the Boston Bombers, they followed a different path. It's clear that the elder brother did not have much joy fitting in with American society, unlike his younger sibling who seemed to fit in quite well. At some point he was radicalised, either at home or abroad, and he then radicalised his brother.

Like the drone flyers they probably thought they were doing something good, that they would help persecuted Moslems around the world, and like the flyers they were wrong.

Courage and bravery are not really appropriate terms to describe either type of action, but it certainly takes more nerve to walk through a crowd and plant a bomb than it does to remotely fly a drone. At the same time it's a lot harder to disassociate yourself from what's going on. They saw the faces of the people they planned to blow up. And if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by the younger brother didn't seem that touched by his conscience after the bombing.

The main beneficiaries of the war in Iraq were the Mullahs in Iran, and the only person who benefits from all of this is Vladimir Putin.. His justification is putting down Chechen nationalism is that they are all terrorists and extremists, and Chechens fleeing persecution will now find it a lot harder to claim asylum in America.

You would seek to exclude those who rounded up Jews, put them on the trains, guarded the trains to ensure there were no escapes but the folks who started up the gas chambers are the only guilty ones.



Ordinary soldiers guarded the death camps, Izzy. These ordinary soldiers are taking part in an illegal invasion of a sovereign country. These ordinary soldiers
are performing extrajudicial murders, mostly of innocent civilians.



The Taliban were created by the US and the US didn't care one bit what the Taliban did until that point when the Taliban let it be known that the US wasn't going to get all its economic/business plans met. Only then did the Taliban come to be the bad guys.

You wanted my response, I've given it to you.

.....and you gave a good one.

Thanks.

That wasn't a response, Izzy. That was a litany of propaganda. You've done just what you accuse Advocate of doing. You are ignoring the facts in favor of feelings that make you feel good about your beliefs.

I think that can best be described as 'clinical', Izzy. Why is there such a remarkable difference between you on this issue and you discussing Israel/Palestine with Advocate and Oralloy?

Are the drone fliers and everyone down the line enabling them to kill innocents terrorists?

You never noticed the profits that Halliburton and the other preferred gangs made?

Was Blair/Cameron able to dole out prizes to UK industrial giants?

Inside America's Dirty Wars

Jeremy Scahill April 24, 2013 | This article appeared in the May 13, 2013 edition of The Nation.

...


After Abdulrahman [al-Awlaki] heard the news of Anwar’s death, he called home for the first time and spoke to his mother and grandmother. “That’s enough, Abdulrahman. You have to come back,” his grandmother Saleha told him. “That’s it.” The conversation was brief. Abdulrahman said he would return home soon, but that he wanted to wait for the roads to clear. There were police checkpoints and fighting along the route, and he did not want to be detained or caught up in any violence.

As Abdulrahman mourned, the boy’s family members in Shabwah tried to comfort him and encouraged him to get out with his cousins. That was what Abdulrahman was doing on the evening of October 14. He and his cousins had joined a group of friends outdoors to barbecue. There were a few other people doing the same nearby. It was about 9 pm when the drones pierced the night sky. Moments later, Abdulrahman was dead. So, too, were several other teenage members of his family, including Abdulrahman’s 17-year-old cousin Ahmed.

Early the next morning, Nasser al-Awlaki received a phone call from his family in Shabwah. “Some of our relatives went to the place where [Abdulrahman] was killed, and they saw the area…. And they told us he was buried with the others in one grave because they were blown up to pieces by the drone. So they could not put them in separate graves,” Nasser told me.

With the horror setting in that their eldest grandson had been killed just two weeks after their eldest child, Nasser and Saleha watched in disbelief as numerous news reports identified Abdulrahman as being 21 years old, with anonymous US officials referring to him as a “military-aged” male. Some reports intimated that he was an Al Qaeda supporter and that he had been killed while meeting with Ibrahim al-Banna, an Egyptian citizen described as the “media coordinator” for AQAP.

When I visited Nasser after Abdulrahman was killed, he showed me the boy’s Colorado birth certificate, which states that he was born in 1995 in Denver. “When he was killed by the US government, he was a teenager; he wasn’t 21. He wouldn’t have been able to enlist in the military in the US. He was 16,” Nasser told me. Days after the killing of Abdulrahman, the United States released a statement, as usual feigning ignorance about who was responsible for the strike, even though “unnamed officials” in the United States and Yemen had confirmed it. “We have seen press reports that AQAP senior official Ibrahim al-Banna was killed last Friday in Yemen and that several others, including the son of Anwar al-Awlaki, were with al-Banna at the time,” National Security Council spokesman Tommy Vietor told the press, in a statement that strangely cast Abdulrahman as something between an Al Qaeda associate and a hapless tourist. “For over the past year, the Department of State has publicly urged US citizens not to travel to Yemen and has encouraged those already in Yemen to leave because of the continuing threat of violence and the presence of terrorist organizations, including AQAP, throughout the country.”

While the Awlakis opposed Anwar’s killing and believed that the United States had exaggerated its claims about his involvement with Al Qaeda, Nasser told me that his family understood why the United States wanted Anwar dead. “My son believed in what he did,” Nasser said, “but I am really distressed and disappointed by the killing, the brutal killing, of his son. He did nothing against the US. He was an American citizen. Maybe one day he would have gone to America to study and live there, and they killed him in cold blood.”

The CIA later claimed that it did not carry out the strike, asserting that the supposed target, al-Banna, was not on the agency’s hit list. That led to speculation that the attack that killed Abdulrahman and his relatives had been a JSOC strike. According to The Washington Post, senior US officials acknowledged that “the two kill lists don’t match, but offered conflicting explanations as to why.” The officials added that Abdulrahman was an “unintended casualty.” A JSOC official told me that the intended target was not killed in the strike, though he would not say who that was. On October 20, 2011, military officials presented a closed briefing on the strike to the Senate Armed Services Committee. With the exception of the statements from anonymous officials, the United States offered no public explanation for the attack. The mystery deepened when AQAP released a statement claiming that al-Banna was still alive. The Awlakis began to wonder if perhaps Abdulrahman was, in fact, the target of the strike.

Senate majority leader Harry Reid, one of the handful of US lawmakers who would have access to intelligence on the strike, seemed to suggest that this was the case when asked about the killing of the two Awlakis and Samir Khan. “I do know this,” he said on CNN, “the American citizens who have been killed overseas…are terrorists, and, frankly, if anyone in the world deserved to be killed, those three did deserve to be killed.”

Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary and a senior official in President Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign, was also asked about the strike that killed Abdulrahman. “It’s an American citizen that is being targeted without due process of law, without trial. And he’s underage. He’s a minor,” reporter Sierra Adamson said. Gibbs shot back: “I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well-being of their children. I don’t think becoming an Al Qaeda jihadist terrorist is the best way to go about doing your business.”

...

http://www.thenation.com/article/173980/inside-americas-dirty-wars?page=full#

JTT, the article by Sheldon Richman is an excellent one. I, too, believe Tsarnaev's motive was retaliation for U.S. foreign policy. What we're seeing is blowback caused by US' many distructive actions in the middle east. The article stated a number of reasons for Bin Ladin's 9/11 attack on the US: 1) the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, 2)US "presence of American military bases near Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabi" (the US military basses were moved to Qatar and Kuwait) and 3) "devastation of Iraq through 10 years of bombing and economic sanctions." The US seems to have turned the Arab and Muslim world upside-down.

The US backed Saddam Hussein's war against Iran even during the time the Iraqi dictator used nerve gas on its own people, the Kurds, and some Iranians. The US earlier had backed the Shah of Iran until the Iranian revolution in 1979 and overthrew the Shah. The US allowed Israel free reign to invade Lebanon (cautioning the Zionist nation not to use White Phosphorus chemical weapon which they subsequently did when they saw they were losing badly) in 2006 to oust Hezbollah (Israel did not succeed in ousting Hezbollah). After 9/11 the US illegally invaded a sovereign nation, Iraq, killing many Iraqi citizens, creating many refugees, destabilizing the region. The Arab/Muslim world is angry! Is it any wonder their Mullahs preach/teach hatred and revenge against America?! If Americans would just stop and think about the actions of our government we would not be so shocked when attacks take place on American soil!

Being a native New Yorker, I remember 9/11 vividly...the powerful images of the imploding World Trade Center after the two planes had hit! Manhattan was in mourning for a very long time. I hated every Muslim that existed! Later, much later, I tried to understand the reasoning behind the actions of these extremist Muslims. I see the US drones that continue to kill so many innocents. Supposing we had drones flying over the US instilling much emotional and psychological fear?! Would we not want to seek revenge, badly!!!!???

I applaud your honesty, MiT. You are a rare soul among the hundreds of millions of Americans.

What percent of Americans do you think really don't know what their governments have done/are doing?

Thanks for the compliment, JTT. I find in you a kindred soul.



"What percentage of Americans...."? That's difficult to say, but not too many in my personal opinion. Students on American campuses are aware, but that's a place of learning and a special category. Not being well-informed is not limited to just Americans; just how many citizens of other countries truly understand what their government is doing in their name or even are au courant of foreign policy. One reason in the US might be that America has many households where both parents work just to pay bills, mortgage, school tuition, etc. The financial gap is getting wider between the middle class and the rich. (The GWB administration made America poorer and we were on our way to a depression at the end of his second administration. Obama saved us.) Many Americans get news on the run unless they are retired and have lots of free time....It is not so unusual that many Americans are outside the loop when it comes to the failings of our government in foreign countries.

I am interested in Political Science, Foreign and Domestic Policy....I am an intense follower of these events.

The memory of the illegal invasion of Iraq was a disaster and an insult to all peoples....GWB thought the rest of the world were too dumb and stupid to do anything about the US. They were *almost* right. France, Russia, Germany did not join the coalition to invade Iraq. The GWB admin's personal agenda was set to invade Iraq well before 9/11 and that gruesome tragedy most likely had the GWB administration salivating at their good fortune!.....Now the American people will be clambering for war in the middle east....but we wanted the US to stay in Afghanistan......

All one has to do, JTT, is try and understand/share the feelings of others....empathize. I imagine how I would feel is a super power invaded my country, killing many of those I cherish dearly, displacing me, turning me into a refugee, searching for food, water and a place to take shelter!

The Muslim/Arab community is seeking revenge for the way the US has treated them as if they were cockroaches....upsetting the balance, destroying their lives and livelihood. Certainly that is the way Iraqis felt. (It does not help that the US is one-sided in dealings with the Palestinians and the Israelis; often giving lip service but allowing Israel to take all the land it want without cutting funds to that tiny nation) The Israeli/Palestinian conflict is a cancer within the Middle east and the entire region is upset by Israel and the US who are considered as one, opposing the Muslim community. Look at Abu Ghraib torture and prisoner abuse photos where US soldiers were maltreating these prisoners! All of the Arab world has seen what the west has done to them....they are angry....can you blame them?!?!