JTT
 
Mon 22 Apr, 2013 05:16 pm
What do you think the difference is between the Tsarnaev brothers and the men, and possibly, women, who fly the US drones?

Are the members from both groups terrorists?

Number dead from the drone flyers - 4700 people.
Injured - unknow

Tsarnaev brothers - three dead and about 100 injured


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izzythepush
 
  0  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 07:10 am
@JTT,
I'll give you a considered response when I have time.
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izzythepush
 
  1  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 08:02 am
@JTT,
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.)
izzythepush
 
  1  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 08:41 am
@JTT,
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.
JTT
 
  0  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 01:32 pm
@izzythepush,
Quote:
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.


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.

Quote:
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.


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.

Quote:
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 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.

izzythepush
 
  0  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 01:45 pm
@JTT,
You wanted my response, I've given it to you.
saab
 
  0  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 01:56 pm
@izzythepush,
.....and you gave a good one.
izzythepush
 
  0  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 02:30 pm
@saab,
Thanks.
0 Replies
 
JTT
 
  -1  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 03:06 pm
@izzythepush,
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.
0 Replies
 
JTT
 
  -1  
Tue 23 Apr, 2013 09:45 pm
Quote:

http://mwcnews.net/focus/analysis/26428-tsarnaevs-motive.html

What If the Tsarnaev's Motive Was Revenge for U.S. Foreign Policy?


Tuesday, 23 April 2013 09:12

By Sheldon Richman


On the day of the Boston Marathon bombings, President Obama stood in the White House briefing room and said, “We will find out who did this; we’ll find out why they did this.”

What motivated the murderous acts allegedly committed by Tamerlan and Dzhokhar Tsarvaev is the question on everyone’s mind. We would be surprised if it were not.

But will people remain interested in the motive if they don’t like what they hear?

Judging by the recent past, the answer might well be no. After 9/11, people wondered why anyone would kill indiscriminately by flying airplanes into buildings. The Bush administration and others leapt to an unlikely conclusion: the hijackers “hated our freedom.” That seemed to satisfy most people. But it made little sense, and based on previous incidents, we already had ample reason to believe the answer lay elsewhere. Earlier perpetrators of violence from the Middle East had made clear that what fueled their hatred of America was U.S. foreign policy in the region and the larger Muslim world. Osama bin Laden’s own fatwa against the United States named three offenses: support for Israel’s occupation of Palestine, the presence of American military forces near Muslim holy sites in Saudi Arabia, and the devastation of Iraq through 10 years of bombing and economic sanctions.

But most American officials did not want to hear — and did not want the American people to hear — that Muslim violence was in retaliation for U.S. foreign policy. When Ron Paul, a candidate for the Republican presidential nomination in 2008, criticized U.S. interventionist foreign policy during a primary debate, he was admonished by another candidate, Rudy Giuliani, among others, who claimed he had never heard such an outrageous thing. Giuliani was either lying or unaware that the official 9/11 commission and the Pentagon had previously acknowledged that U.S. foreign policy creates resentment among Muslims.

What about the Tsarnaevs? We await the facts, and Dzhokhar Tsarnaev reportedly told authorities his acts were motivated by “religious fervor.” But it’s a good bet this resentment was part of their motivation. The Tsarnaev family is Chechen, but Chechnya’s beef is with Russia, not the United States, so that seems an unlikely source of a desire to kill and injure runners and spectators in Boston.

It is more likely the young men were angered by U.S. drone warfare that has killed thousands of Muslims in Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia; brutal occupations in Iraq and Afghanistan; backing for dictators and corrupt monarchs throughout the Muslim world; and unwavering material and moral support for Israel’s oppression and humiliation of the Palestinians, with no end in sight. The Washington Post reports that a neighbor of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the older, deceased brother, told him, “In Afghanistan, most casualties are innocent bystanders killed by American soldiers.”

If revenge for U.S. foreign policy was the motive, what will happen next? Will such evidence prompt a national reconsideration of America’s decades-old imperial foreign policy? Or will it be quickly dismissed, while the bombings are exploited in an effort to double down on that foreign policy. U.S. Rep. Peter King, a Republican, has already begun that effort. (Interestingly, Alberto Gonzalez, who was attorney general under President George W. Bush, acknowledged on CNN over the weekend that U.S. foreign policy is indeed resented by Muslims abroad and prompts a desire for revenge.)

There is much we still don’t know about the Tsarnaev brothers and why they chose their deadly path. (What, if anything, did it have to do with Chechen organized crime?) Maybe it will turn out that they simply developed a hatred for what they saw as American licentiousness and felt they needed to strike out at it. (That Dzhokhar Tsarnaev partied at his college after the bombings, casts doubt on that prospect.)

It seems far more likely that the murder-by-drone of Muslim children, the no-knock night raids of Afghan homes, the daily humiliation of and violence against Palestinians, and the support for violent and corrupt rulers are what made these men want to exact vengeance against Americans.

Of course, none of this would justify killing innocents. But if we wish to prevent such wanton crimes in the future, we’d better understand what motivates the criminals who commit them.

JTT
 
  -1  
Thu 25 Apr, 2013 09:33 pm
@izzythepush,
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?
0 Replies
 
JTT
 
  0  
Thu 25 Apr, 2013 09:36 pm
@izzythepush,
Quote:
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.


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?
0 Replies
 
JTT
 
  -1  
Thu 25 Apr, 2013 10:09 pm
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#
0 Replies
 
Moment-in-Time
 
  1  
Fri 26 Apr, 2013 12:38 pm
@JTT,
Quote:

What If the Tsarnaev's Motive Was Revenge for U.S. Foreign Policy?
Tuesday, 23 April 2013 09:12
By Sheldon Richman


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!!!!???

JTT
 
  0  
Fri 26 Apr, 2013 02:19 pm
@Moment-in-Time,
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?
Moment-in-Time
 
  1  
Fri 26 Apr, 2013 06:27 pm
@JTT,
Quote:

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


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

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


"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?!?!
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