Rolling Drone Thread

Because this shit is fucked

Not Starving Weirdoes, but unmanned aerial agents of death

i heard iran tried to shoot down a drone last week but failed.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in-war-on-al-qaeda.html?pagewanted=all

5/29 is my birthday

The more I think about drones - which is more often than I'd like - I wonder if ultimately humanity will look back on them like nukes, albeit at a less immediately destructive level. If enough of these things exist and are put to ill use at once....

they're kinda like giant flying remote controlled rifles, ya know?

http://www.splicetoday.com/politics-and-media/four-more-years-of-drone-strikes

Considered purely as a functional weapon, drones are both cheap and efficient. Unlike cruise missiles, drones don't disappear after one use. They can be launched, fly to an area, change course according to conditions, have a look around and strike to kill or not, depending on the operator's actions. They're reusable. They're expendable at need.

Cheap, functional efficient weapons that come with low risks to their operators are like nirvana to war planners and staff officers and drones fit perfectly into the "low-intensity warfare" the USA is frequently engaged in these days.

What really sucks is war, whether it's "low-intensity" or not. The problem here isn't the weapon so much as the decision-makers who deploy it. Wars without much reason, for aims not worth killing for are the real crime. Transferring one's hatred of unjustified killing into blaming the weapons used is pointless.

Then maybe we need to reframe how we talk about drones, by emphasizing "the morality of drones."

War obviously sucks, but the USE of drones has the effect of depersonalizing it.

The scene near the end of Syriana where George Clooney (along with several other people) is incinerated by remote control is one of the most harrowing in recent memory, though I don't think that was a drone strike.

i p much agree w aimless here inasmuch as i don't think there is any way a military/thirdworld imperial police force capable of using flying death robots would use anything but flying death robots and i can't really blame any commander of the machine at this point for trying brutally to minimize the regretful letters he has to send to his own citizens unless i object to the whole project to start with. which i do, although some, i dunno, smallminded sentimentality re: the republic did mean this got a lot worse for me when it turned out we were gonna be doing it to american citizens + their teenage sons as well; and also yeah i have abstract moral complaints about the weapon itself, just for its level of abstraction -- a complaint you could have about anything from rifles to bombs to airplanes, except that the drones also have their freaky and terrifying convergence w video games, and the insertion of (insanely fun; this was always the best part of MW2 for me, which was the last one i really played) interactive predator drone sequences into franchises that are shilled for on tv by oliver north and played by what seems like an awful lot of 12-year-olds. but no i think it's right that drones are just a partic unpleasant playa and it's the game that should be getting the hate.

altho i have been really affected by people talking about drones prowling past all night "like lawnmowers", like, that just seems hugely dark and terrifying to me in what feels like a new way; i guess people have been lying awake hearing soldiers clomp down the street forever, but the soldiers didn't used to be able to incinerate them in their beds w a thought.

this idea that drones are a way to 'minimize american casualties' is genuinely bizarre to me, considering that the drone campaigns are largely carried out in countries we're not at war with.

xp

Morality is the province of humans. Morality is connected to choices, actions and consequences. Drones make no choices. Drones appear to be amoral.

Certainly, having a tool that makes it easy to be evil is generally a Bad Thing, but I am not sure that any particular evil that is facilitated by the availability of drones could not have been accomplished in any other way.

As for depersonalizing violence, this has been true for army generals and other high level leaders for centuries. Whenever they wanted some killing done, they gave an order and it happened. Impersonally.

and yeah, re: the 'lawnmower' effect. fucking up the lives and minds of countless ordinary ppl in this plodding, consistent, day-after-day way seems every bit as horrible as killing them.

this idea that drones are a way to 'minimize american casualties' is genuinely bizarre to me, considering that the drone campaigns are largely carried out in countries we're not at war with.

that you would otherwise be sending coverts into, is the thing?

the problem isn't the drones, it's the targets

the drone does not have buddha-nature and i don't expect any reduction in humanity's evil would come of removing them, i just think this particular tool, which arguably like any weapon corrupts the user, is worse for the soul of more people and allows the country to make that much more war without producing a body of citizens w much connection to or understanding of the effects of the war. also i feel like this weapon is capable of inducing a new kind or at least a new level of helplessness+terror in its victims/those in the general vicinity of its vitcims, although maybe i am overestimating that. certainly it's not unprecedented; The Bomb had about as gross a connection-to-suffering ratio as you could get. but we weren't dropping multiple bombs a day. it's just an unpleasant new wrinkle i feel is all.

allows the country to make that much more war without producing a body of citizens w much connection to or understanding of the effects of the war.

one of the main attractions

We've been bombing the shit out of people around the world for 70 years, I don't see why it matters if there's a human in the aircraft.

i agree it's a small step, altho humans in aircraft can at least die

this idea that drones are a way to 'minimize american casualties' is genuinely bizarre to me, considering that the drone campaigns are largely carried out in countries we're not at war with.

― (The Other) J.D. (J.D.), Thursday, November 8, 2012 9:58 PM (2 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

right, it's pretty much a red herring in this respect. it's a false choice; when we're talking about yemen/pakistan/somalia, what drone warfare isn't saving us from all-out war as much as it's giving out military/intelligence agencies a way to circumvent congress. this is where the meat of the issue lies. of course there are plenty of legitimate moral and legal issues with it as well

great post dlh. sums up my feelings pretty well too

strike that "what"

clicked thinking this was an ILM thread /:

what drone warfare isn't saving us from all-out war as much as it's giving out military/intelligence agencies a way to circumvent congress.

yeah def true; also in the case of the intelligence agencies a way to circumvent what was left of accountability/transparency (not that this is anything they haven't done since the 50s.)

the drone does not have buddha-nature and i don't expect any reduction in humanity's evil would come of removing them, i just think this particular tool, which arguably like any weapon corrupts the user, is worse for the soul of more people and allows the country to make that much more war without producing a body of citizens w much connection to or understanding of the effects of the war. also i feel like this weapon is capable of inducing a new kind or at least a new level of helplessness+terror in its victims/those in the general vicinity of its vitcims, although maybe i am overestimating that. certainly it's not unprecedented; The Bomb had about as gross a connection-to-suffering ratio as you could get. but we weren't dropping multiple bombs a day. it's just an unpleasant new wrinkle i feel is all.

― difficult listening hour, Thursday, November 8, 2012 9:07 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

^^^^
THIS

i hadn't thought so much about the skirting congress angle but that's effed, too

wow typos galore in my post

The amount of collateral damage they do makes them extremely difficult to justify from a moral or a legal perspective even in otherwise 'legitimate' wars.

One of the things that has always held back the ability of the US to send covert operatives into countries it's not at war with is the risk of capture, not the risk of casualties. It would be create a massive legal headache trying to get them back and explaining what they were doing there. Drones circumvent this.

Even if they weren't taking out wedding parties and school children at the same time, the principle that the President shouldn't be able to effectively run extra-judicial death squads, irrespective of their methods, is one worth preserving. I can't really disagree with Dr Morbius in his assessment of Obama as a borderline war criminal, unfortunately.

ran in to an old family friend recently who's kids I used to babysit. her youngest always had learning disabilities

oops posted that early.

...and they worried what he'd do after high school (he's prob 10 years younger than me).

Turns out he's a happy husband, father, and making a great career for himself as a drone pilot.

Really unsettling for me :-/

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KQ-X

tanker drone

The first flight demonstrations occurred from January 11, 2012 to May 30. Milestones achieved included the lead receiver aircraft extending and retracting its aerial refueling hose several times, the trail tanker aircraft successfully demonstrating precision control in formation with manual and automated “breakaway” maneuvers for safety, the two Global Hawks successfully flying in close formation, at times as close as 30 feet away, and one aircraft flying more than 2.5 hours under autonomous formation control with the other flying within 100 ft.[3]

http://www.ien.com/uploadedImages/ien/IENblog/TerminatorHand.jpg

http://m.citypaper.com/news/the-kill-chain-1.1436761

Seriously, we should be debating this with something closer to the intensity of the US gun control debate. And by "everyone" I don't mean ILE, but rather "the whole fucking planet."

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2135132,00.html?fb_source=feed_opengraph&ref=feed_open_graph&_ft_=src.19%3Asty.347%3Aactrs.100002472507865%3Apub_time.1359853852%3Afbid.402238109868602%3As_obj.5%3As_edge.24%3As_prnt.28%3Aft_story_name.StreamStoryOpenGraphAction_og.likes_one2one%3Amf_objid.402238109868602%3Aobject_id.402238109868602%3Aobject_timeline_token_map.Array%3Aapp_id.53177223193%3Aaction_type_id.305566156165682%3Amedia_type.1%3Aobject_type_name.article

I'm with you there. Every time something comes up about new drone capabilities it's fucking terrifying.

http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2013/02/06/the-drone-memo-s-origins.html

Into the frying pan we go

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/comment/2013/02/the-release-of-a-doj-white-paper-about-targeted-killings.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/07/us/politics/obama-orders-release-of-drone-memos-to-lawmakers.html?ref=politics&_r=0

worth noting

Yesterday, as a task force of 125 officers, some riding Snowcats in the rugged terrain, continued their search, it was revealed that Dorner has become the first human target for remotely-controlled airborne drones on US soil.

unarmed spy drones, i guess, but yknow

What became of literature’s vaunted power to inspire empathy? Why was the candidate Obama, in word and in deed, so radically different from the President he became? In Andrei Tarkovsky’s eerie 1979 masterpiece, “Stalker,” the landscape called the Zona has the power to grant people’s deepest wishes, but it can also derange those who traverse it. I wonder if the Presidency is like that: a psychoactive landscape that can madden whomever walks into it, be he inarticulate and incurious, or literary and cosmopolitan.

According to a report in the New York Times, the targets of drone strikes are selected for death at weekly meetings in the White House; no name is added to the list without the President’s approval. Where land mines are indiscrimate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt. The sixteen near misses of the preceding year killed between two hunderd and eighty and four hundred and ten other people. Literature fails us here. What makes certain Somali, Pakistani, Yemeni, and American people of so little account that even after killing them, the United States disavows all knowledge of their deaths? How much furious despair is generated from so much collateral damage?

Of late, riding the subway in Brooklyn, I have been having a waking dream, or rather a daytime nightmare, in which the subway car ahead of mine explodes. My fellow riders and I look at one another, then look again at the burning car ahead, certain of our deaths. The fire comes closer, and what I feel is bitterness and sorrow that it’s all ending so soon: no more books, no more love, no more jokes, no more Schubert, no more Black Star. All this spins through my mind on tranquil mornings as the D train trundles between 36th Street and Atlantic Avenue and bored commuters check their phones. They just want to get to work. I sit rigid in my seat, thinking, I don’t want to die, not here, not yet. I imagine those in northwest Pakistan or just outside Sana’a who go about their day thinking the same. The difference for some of them is that the plane is already hovering in the air, ready to strike.

I know language is unreliable, that it is not a vending machine of the desires, but the law seems to be getting us nowhere. And so I take helpless refuge in literature again, rewriting the opening lines of seven well-known books:

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. Pity. A signature strike leveled the florist’s.

Call me Ishmael. I was a young man of military age. I was immolated at my wedding. My parents are inconsolable.

Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead bearing a bowl of lather. A bomb whistled in. Blood on the walls. Fire from heaven.

I am an invisible man. My name is unknown. My loves are a mystery. But an unmanned aerial vehicle from a secret location has come for me.

Someone must have slandered Josef K., for one morning, without having done anything truly wrong, he was killed by a Predator drone.

Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His torso was found, not his head.

Mother died today. The program saves American lives.

I was in New York City on 9/11. Grief remains from that awful day, but not only grief. There is fear, too, a fear informed by the knowledge that whatever my worst nightmare is, there is someone out there embittered enough to carry it out. I know that something has to be done to secure the airports, waterways, infrastructure, and embassies of our country. I don’t like war; no one does. But I also know that the world is exceedingly complex, and that our enemies are not all imaginary. I am not naïve about the incessant and unseen (by most of us) military activity that undergirds our ability to read, go to concerts, earn a living, and criticize the government in relative safety. I am grateful to those whose bravery keeps us safe.

This ominous, discomfiting, illegal, and immoral use of weaponized drones against defenseless strangers is done for our sakes. But more and more we are seeing a gap between the intention behind the President’s clandestine brand of justice and the real-world effect of those killings. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s words against the Vietnam War in 1967 remain resonant today: “What do they think as we test our latest weapons on them?” We do know what they think: many of them have the normal human reaction to grief and injustice, and some of them take that reaction to a vengeful and murderous extreme. In the Arabian peninsula, East Africa, and Pakistan, thanks to the policies of Obama and Biden, we are acquiring more of the angriest young enemies money can buy. As a New York Times report put it last year, “Drones have replaced Guantánamo as the recruiting tool of choice for militants.”

Assassinations should never have happened in our name. But now we see that they endanger us physically, endanger our democracy, and endanger our Constitution. I believe that when President Obama personally selects the next name to add to his “kill list,” he does it in the belief that he is protecting the country. I trust that he makes the selections with great seriousness, bringing his rich sense of history, literature, and the lives of others to bear on his decisions. And yet we have been drawn into a war without end, and into cruelties that persist in the psychic atmosphere like ritual pollution.

http://newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2013/02/a-readers-war.html

salon asks the one nagging question that was troubling us all:

http://www.salon.com/2013/02/11/would_lincoln_use_drones/

you know, i'm not sure i'm against (unarmed) drones searching for a particular bad guy. seems materially different from "surveillance"

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/02/drones_war_and_civilian_casualties_how_unmanned_aircraft_reduce_collateral.html

Rather laughable to talk about reducing collateral damage through the use of drones in countries the US is not at war with and would have no other practical option for attacking if it were not for unmanned aircraft.

Damn, schlump - that's a powerful piece you linked to.

that slate piece is incredibly awful

that’s the orwellian dream - a drone in every pot

this must be happening everywhere though xxp
just that unlike in nyc it offends french principles of dirigism to see unapproved technologies being used by unknown persons....god forbid someone might see what the seldom photographed exteriors of the louvre or the eiffel tower look like

It's the new Special Relationship!

"A top-secret U.S. intelligence document obtained by The Intercept confirms that the sprawling U.S. military base in Ramstein, Germany serves as the high-tech heart of America’s drone program. Ramstein is the site of a satellite relay station that enables drone operators in the American Southwest to communicate with their remote aircraft in Yemen, Somalia, Afghanistan and other targeted countries. The top-secret slide deck, dated July 2012, provides the most detailed blueprint seen to date of the technical architecture used to conduct strikes with Predator and Reaper drones.

Amid fierce European criticism of America’s targeted killing program, U.S. and German government officials have long downplayed Ramstein’s role in lethal U.S. drone operations and have issued carefully phrased evasions when confronted with direct questions about the base. But the slides show that the facilities at Ramstein perform an essential function in lethal drone strikes conducted by the CIA and the U.S. military in the Middle East, Afghanistan and Africa.

The slides were provided by a source with knowledge of the U.S. government’s drone program who declined to be identified because of fears of retribution. According to the source, Ramstein’s importance to the U.S. drone war is difficult to overstate. 'Ramstein carries the signal to tell the drone what to do and it returns the display of what the drone sees. Without Ramstein, drones could not function, at least not as they do now,' the source said."

https://firstlook.org/theintercept/2015/04/17/ramstein/

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday offered an emotional apology for the accidental killing of two hostages held by Al Qaeda, one of them American, in a United States government counterterrorism operation in January, saying he takes “full responsibility” for their deaths.

“As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” including the one that inadvertently took the lives of the two captives, a grim-faced Mr. Obama said in a statement to reporters in the White House briefing room.

“I profoundly regret what happened,” he added. “On behalf of the U.S. government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks came shortly after the White House released an extraordinary statement revealing that intelligence officials had confirmed that Warren Weinstein, an American held by Al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, died during a drone strike.

What are we fighting for?

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/23/us-drone-strike-killed-american-italian-al-qaida

Earnest said the compound was targeted based on “near-certain” intelligence that indicated it was being frequented by at least one al-Qaida leader, and that no civilians were in the area. Earnest said the review may raise “legitimate questions” that would force the administration to change its protocols for such operations.

Conceding that the operation was not ordered against any individual targets, Earnest said the administration only discovered later that the compound was occupied by Weinstein, La Porto and another American named Ahmed Farouq, who the White House says was a “leader” of the terrorist group.

Farouq was not, however, the target of the operation. The drone strike was not targeted at known al-Qaida members; instead, it was directed against anyone in the vicinity of what the US believed was a compound being used by the terrorist group.

A recent analysis by human-rights group Reprieve estimated that US drone strikes intending to target 41 men had killed 1,147 people as of November.

From that Guardian article

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2015/04/23/swiss_post_and_matternet_will_partner_on_drone_mail_delivery_service.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/26/us/politics/deep-support-in-washington-for-cias-drone-missions.html

i feel like a lot of the opposition to drones is some kind of unreasonable fear of the unknown since they're more morally neutral than most army tech - they have obvious civilian applications - even putting aside the question of whether they create fewer fatalities than more conventional warfare (which saletan @ slate is /droning/ on about again).

Although lawmakers insist that there is great accountability to the program, interviews with administration and congressional officials show that Congress holds the program to less careful scrutiny than many members assert. Top C.I.A. officials, who learned the importance of cultivating Congress after the resistance they ran into on the detention program, have dug in to protect the agency’s drone operations, frustrating a pledge by Mr. Obama two years ago to overhaul the program and pull it from the shadows.

Perhaps no single C.I.A. officer has been more central to the effort than Michael D’Andrea, a gaunt, chain-smoking convert to Islam who was chief of operations during the birth of the agency’s detention and interrogation program and then, as head of the C.I.A. Counterterrorism Center, became an architect of the targeted killing program. Until last month, when Mr. D’Andrea was quietly shifted to another job, he presided over the growth of C.I.A. drone operations and hundreds of strikes in Pakistan and Yemen during nine years in the position.

x-post to Mordy --even putting aside the question of whether they create fewer fatalities than more conventional warfare

We are seeing some moving of the goalposts now. Supporters of drone warfare used to carry on about how precise it was, now that the President is admitting two accidental deaths, and the CIA's program of using drones to hit what they believe are terrorist only camps is proving not so accurate, the new argument is simply well its better than conventional warfare. Referring only to conventional warfare also leaves out capturing specific terrorists, which yes entails some risk too, but has been done, including recently. The other issue with this is the near total secrecy involved in all aspects of the program.

I don't think that's true. I've been seeing the 'fewer fatalities than conventional warfare' argument for years now. Such as this article two articles ago:
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/human_nature/2013/02/drones_war_and_civilian_casualties_how_unmanned_aircraft_reduce_collateral.html

two years ago*

or http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/08/drones-actually-the-most-humane-form-of-warfare-ever/278746/ or http://www.cnn.com/2012/07/13/opinion/bergen-civilian-casualties/ or http://www.nytimes.com/2012/07/15/sunday-review/the-moral-case-for-drones.html?_r=0 which says:

But most critics of the Obama administration’s aggressive use of drones for targeted killing have focused on evidence that they are unintentionally killing innocent civilians. From the desolate tribal regions of Pakistan have come heartbreaking tales of families wiped out by mistake and of children as collateral damage in the campaign against Al Qaeda. And there are serious questions about whether American officials have understated civilian deaths.

Continue reading the main story
RELATED COVERAGE

Times Topic: Predator Drones and Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs)
So it may be a surprise to find that some moral philosophers, political scientists and weapons specialists believe armed, unmanned aircraft offer marked moral advantages over almost any other tool of warfare.

“I had ethical doubts and concerns when I started looking into this,” said Bradley J. Strawser, a former Air Force officer and an assistant professor of philosophy at the Naval Postgraduate School. But after a concentrated study of remotely piloted vehicles, he said, he concluded that using them to go after terrorists not only was ethically permissible but also might be ethically obligatory, because of their advantages in identifying targets and striking with precision.

“You have to start by asking, as for any military action, is the cause just?” Mr. Strawser said. But for extremists who are indeed plotting violence against innocents, he said, “all the evidence we have so far suggests that drones do better at both identifying the terrorist and avoiding collateral damage than anything else we have.”

Ok, some have made that argument for awhile, but the problem is that with so little information available, we don't know how many civilians have been killed, and when capture operations could have been utilized instead. Also, there's Obama's speech versus the CIA's methods

Obama's 2013 pledge:

To stop terrorists from gaining a foothold, drones will be deployed, Obama said, but only when there is an imminent threat; no hope of capturing the targeted terrorist; "near certainty" that civilians won't be harmed; and "there are no other governments capable of effectively addressing the threat."

vs CIA in 2015: Conceding that the operation was not ordered against any individual targets

tbf more conventional warfare is not any more accountable or targeted

It's a bit more accountable in the sense that you can't arbitrarily decide to send troops into Yemen at the drop of a hat.

or cambodia?

cambodia was wrong too

(the bombing of it, that is)

the no-accountability is the problem here

Mordy gung ho for the clean clinical Star Trek approach to being a badass superpower

tbf more conventional warfare is not any more accountable or targeted

― Mordy, Monday, April 27, 2015 4:18 PM

Hearing a Prez announce we are at war is different than a president who will not even use the word "drone" or say where and when his CIA determined that there was a probability of a terrorist camp being located

The Nixon secret bombing of Cambodia was wrong too

Geez no one here is arguing about whether it was wrong to bomb Cambodia. I was pointing out that conventional military can be used for unaccountable secret war actions just as easily as drones. Maybe drones make it easier but they also have X advantages

yeah I don't think "just as easily" is correct

I don't think people have an issue with the actual drone technology as much as with how it's being used/deployed with zero oversight or accountability

Vietnam provided cover for plane movements and any potential losses in Cambodia. Would be much tougher today even on the fringes of actual war zones, let alone in areas the U.S. has no overt business. One element is the accountability to the international community, which tbf can be usually brushed aside, the other element is potential domestic accountability for American casualties. Drones that have zero risk of American deaths (other than the Americans they are targeting) remove that.

The good ol' days of 2012

The Obama Administration uses the word "surgical" to describe its drone strikes.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/09/calling-us-drone-strikes-surgical-is-orwellian-propaganda/262920/

It's a hell of a pin point operation

"paging Dr Benway"

Mordy check yr webmail plz

A drone or another intelligence device is sorta like being at a football game sitting on the 50-yard line and looking through a soda straw. I mean you see what you see.

A quote from retired Brigadier General Craig Nixon from that Atlantic article

Morbs otm

Never read Burroughs novels I confess, so I had to look up "Dr. Benway."

where the satisfied customer gets killed!

The drone infrastructure uses Big Data to “build target packages” about its high-value individuals, while corporations can “build profiles of the most profitable current customers.” Drones attempt “to maintain 24/7 persistent stare,” just as corporations need “to get a 360 view of the customer.”

https://theintercept.com/2015/10/23/drones-ibm-and-the-big-data-of-death/

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/birth-control-drones-africa_us_56a8a3b4e4b0947efb65fc11

The idea grew into a successful pilot program called Project Last Mile, which has for months been successfully flying birth control, condoms and other medical supplies to rural areas of Ghana on 5-foot-wide drones. The program, which is jointly funded by Coca-Cola, UNFPA, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the United States Agency for International Development, is now expanding into six other African countries in hopes of revolutionizing women's health and family planning across the continent. The drone operator simply packs the vehicle with contraception and medical supplies from a warehouse in an urban area and pilots it over to places that are difficult to access by car. There, a local health worker meets the drone and picks up the supplies.

"Delivery to the rural areas used to take two days," Sunkutu said at the International Conference on Family Planning in Bali, Indonesia. "It will now take 30 minutes."

Access to birth control is a massive problem in Africa, especially Sub-Saharan Africa, where fewer than 20 percent of women are using modern contraceptives. The World Health Organization estimates that 225 million women in developing countries around the world would like to delay or stop childbearing, but lack reliable birth control methods. The lack of access leads to exceedingly high rates of unintended pregnancy in these areas, which prevents women and girls from finishing school or becoming employed. And roughly 47,000 women a year die of complications from unsafe abortions.

WASHINGTON — President Obama on Thursday offered an emotional apology for the accidental killing of two hostages held by Al Qaeda, one of them American, in a United States government counterterrorism operation in January, saying he takes “full responsibility” for their deaths.

“As president and as commander in chief, I take full responsibility for all our counterterrorism operations,” including the one that inadvertently took the lives of the two captives, a grim-faced Mr. Obama said in a statement to reporters in the White House briefing room.

“I profoundly regret what happened,” he added. “On behalf of the U.S. government, I offer our deepest apologies to the families.”

Mr. Obama’s remarks came shortly after the White House released an extraordinary statement revealing that intelligence officials had confirmed that Warren Weinstein, an American held by Al Qaeda since 2011, and Giovanni Lo Porto, an Italian held since 2012, died during a drone strike.

― Mordy, Thursday, April 23, 2015 2:54 PM (10 months ago)

The White House promised a “full review” of the strike, possible changes to policies around drone strikes, and compensation for the Weinstein and Lo Porto families.

Nearly a year later, little has emerged about the investigation. And while Weinstein’s family is reportedly still negotiating a settlement with the CIA, Lo Porto’s relations have had no contact with the U.S. government, directly or through the Italian authorities....

https://theintercept.com/2016/03/15/one-year-on-no-justice-for-giovanni-lo-porto-italian-hostage-killed-in-us-drone-strike/

http://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/s--qjkBhxSJ--/rskc0gjiohvn4cqvqhuu.gif

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2014/nov/24/-sp-us-drone-strikes-kill-1147?CMP=share_btn_tw

The drones came for Ayman Zawahiri on 13 January 2006, hovering over a village in Pakistan called Damadola. Ten months later, they came again for the man who would become al-Qaida’s leader, this time in Bajaur.

Eight years later, Zawahiri is still alive. Seventy-six children and 29 adults, according to reports after the two strikes, are not.

However many Americans know who Zawahiri is, far fewer are familiar with Qari Hussain. Hussain was a deputy commander of the Pakistani Taliban, a militant group aligned with al-Qaida that trained the would-be Times Square bomber, Faisal Shahzad, before his unsuccessful 2010 attack. The drones first came for Hussain years before, on 29 January 2008. Then they came on 23 June 2009, 15 January 2010, 2 October 2010 and 7 October 2010.

Finally, on 15 October 2010, Hellfire missiles fired from a Predator or Reaper drone killed Hussain, the Pakistani Taliban later confirmed. For the death of a man whom practically no American can name, the US killed 128 people, 13 of them children, none of whom it meant to harm.

Wait, that's from 2014 - i just saw it come up again on Twitter.

regular drone, not killer drone, but hey this is the thread we have

Hit-and-Run Drone Collision Causes Power Outage for 1,600 in Google’s Hometown

Home-made drones now threaten conventional armed forces

^ yup

F-35 fighter aircraft cost roughly $100 million per unit, not counting maintenance. You can buy one helluva lot of drone aircraft for that kind of money.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/dec/20/tens-of-thousands-of-passengers-stranded-by-gatwick-airport-drones

drones

i can't remember this and it's impossible to google and it's driving me crazy: who composed the early drone/experimental piece "was?" (german for "what?")

fuck wrong thread

You think?

"“Like in many other areas of drone regulation, the statutory and regulatory framework is lagging the technology,” said Reggie Govan, a former chief counsel to the F.A.A. who now teaches at the University of Pennsylvania Law School. “It’s just that simple.”"

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/01/01/us/drones-FAA-colorado-nebraska.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage