Some searching led me to this report from an NGO called "AirWars" [1] which, in connection with The Guardian, reports that "at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes".
You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.
I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.
Israel actually has the capability of targeting a single apartment in an apartment building, and has done so dozens of times in the current war against Hezbollah.
Does Israel actually have the capacity to target the whole of Hamas with those small accurate bombs, as they get intelligence on them? If Hamas is in the basement can the small bomb get them? And if they forgo the opportunity will it be possible to target that person again soon without civilians nearby?
The real truth is that Israel is happy to flatten entire, crowded, apartment complexes. That "one guy" is just an excuse.
Most recent example (out of at least 100,000 examples in just these last 3 years alone) would be their "defence" (hah!) minister delightedly boasting how they have Gaza'fied South Lebanon and destroyed over 15,000 structures.
GWB got heat for extralegal extraordinary renditions. Obama solved it by just killing them. I guess we can’t ask the dead guys if they’d prefer to go to Guantanamo.
Let's see. They were part of the US military, right? In just this war alone, they started by triple tapping an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, murdering nearly 200 little children.
And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.
And that was just ... DAY ONE.
By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.
We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.
This american citizen minor certainly was. And the claim of collateral damage is already shown false by the fact that they went after the kid (16 years old) intentionally, twice. Even after they knew his father was already dead. Oh, and by the way, they never indicted the father or showed evidence against the father either. Neither were in a war zone of any sort.
The other examples on the second wikipedia link were literally non-US citizen journalists who later sued the US in a US federal court he brought where he showed up and wasn't arrested because he didn't do anything wrong.
I'm with you that being a US citizen doesn't mean someone is "good". But in this case I've literally given non-US citizen examples too that you passed over for this mistargeted aside.
That is true for all people. Not just Americans. It’s just disgusting to say that all Americans are innocent but we can assume others are guilty. As far as I know Bin Laden was killed without ever being tried in a criminal court.
Are school shooters in America innocent if they are killed before getting a trial?
I'd say anyone who chooses to kill a civilian, whether based on an order or not, is a war criminal. I really don't care if they thought they were there for a noble cause or not.
What if they choose to kill a person who was a civilian until they were drafted into the enemy army the day before?
What if the civilian they kill has a substantial effect on the enemy's military capabilities, for example by being someone famous who loudly endorses the honour of signing up to fight for one's country, thereby motivating thousands of young men to do just that?
What if killing a soldier’s children might make him lose his resolve or act erratically? What if destroying an entire city full of millions of civilians might make the enemy lose hope and surrender? What if poisoning the land and water for decades could prevent the enemy from reconstituting itself? What if killing all the women could prevent the production of future soldiers?
Once you open the door, where do you draw the line?
Civilians die in wars, and that's with the best intentions of all parties to the conflict. If one or both has got radicalised, then a lot of civilians die in war.
No, I'm explaining to you that accidental civilian casualties in a war is a normal part of the terrible activity that is war. Good soldiers with the best of intentions will kill civilians in a war, because war is chaotic and very dangerous.
Radicalised soldiers and armies will give less and less concern to civilians, and at a certain hated level civilians actually will get targeted by individual soldiers or squads. If it then moves up the command chain and there's not enough accountability or pushback from the top leadership then you get to proper genocidal actions like what happened at Srebrenica.
Targeting civilians for death is not acceptable or justifiable.
The author of that page appears to be a Holocaust denier[1]. Not exactly the example I would put forwards, especially if I want to make an unannealed appeal against Israeli war crimes.
[1]: A search for that name mostly brings up links to pages for SS apologia.
Yes: the content is very different from what I remembered it as from back when I first visited it after Aaron died, I don't know how the website went where it went, and I'm sorry I didn't check prior to posting.
"War crimes" is something of a shorthand for being involved in an aggressive war; they are a surprisingly minor influence on the discourse because they are small in comparison to the decision to go to war at all.
I think the more baby-steps approach to western cognitive dissonance is to at least get them to be consistent about when it is a good idea to go to war. I'm more than happy to get downvoted pointing out that killing 100s of thousands of Russians and welding them strategically to China was a terrible policy, uniting Asian manufacturing and resource giants is catastrophic for western power. But people were grumpy and didn't want to talk about realpolitik because the Russians are so evil.
Now we have the US attacking Persians in Persia for trying to govern Persia because the US sphere of influence covers the whole world and doing serious damage to the West's access to global oil markets and we have this muted and philosophical response from the powers that be. It isn't just immoral, it is also actively stupid - if we can tolerate this behaviour from the US, why can't we also tolerate Russia on a far smaller and easier to understand scale? How are all the sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine actually justified in the minds of the people making the decisions? It clearly isn't a moral calculation and it seems to be stupid strategy.
If we got some thoughtful and transparent thinkers in power there'd probably just be less wars, they seem to be the fast path to poverty and the upside is hard to spot. There are serious questions about why any of the major conflicts right now looked like a good idea to the people in Washington and wherever NATO is in Europe. Brussels I suppose. Can we try peace and prosperity as a strategy?
The South Korean government was a military dictatorship at the time. And the North was wealthier. Without the power of foresight, you couldn't justify the war as bringing democracy or economic prosperity, it was purely a geopolitical struggle. It took a lot of historical revisionism to erase that inconvenient little fact from western consciousness.
The majority opinion at the time, in the west, was that communism led to less economic prosperity, less democratic institutions, and less freedom. So maybe it wasn't a guarantee that the south would become a democracy or prosperous, but doing nothing would guarantee the opposite.
Also, the North wasn't democratic either so it was two nondemocratic groups fighting.
They probably didn’t kill just innocent people.
So far about 3,000 of them, including 160 children (the 3.00 includes more children than 160 but I'm singling that out).. in this war alone.
I promise you that you didn't kill 3,000+ IRGC members.
Did I ever claim they only killed innocent people?
Which part of "attack enemies" implies they were targeting innocent people?
Some searching led me to this report from an NGO called "AirWars" [1] which, in connection with The Guardian, reports that "at least 22,679, and potentially as many as 48,308 civilians, have been likely killed by US strikes".
You can't bomb an apartment without also hitting the neighbors. And while we know the US has the the technology to hit a car driver without (physically) hurting the passenger, we also know that this is not the type of technology deployed regularly.
I don't think a drone operator would be naive enough to believe that they are killing exclusively military targets and no one else.
[1] https://airwars.org/tens-of-thousands-of-civilians-likely-ki...
Israel will happily flatten a whole apartment complex to get one guy.
Israel actually has the capability of targeting a single apartment in an apartment building, and has done so dozens of times in the current war against Hezbollah.
Doesn’t that make it even worse that they also choose to flatten entire buildings?
Does Israel actually have the capacity to target the whole of Hamas with those small accurate bombs, as they get intelligence on them? If Hamas is in the basement can the small bomb get them? And if they forgo the opportunity will it be possible to target that person again soon without civilians nearby?
They also have been giving civilians warnings to leave areas before they "flatten a whole apartment complex"
Not so much anymore:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roof_knocking
Hope they checked their text messages
The real truth is that Israel is happy to flatten entire, crowded, apartment complexes. That "one guy" is just an excuse.
Most recent example (out of at least 100,000 examples in just these last 3 years alone) would be their "defence" (hah!) minister delightedly boasting how they have Gaza'fied South Lebanon and destroyed over 15,000 structures.
seems small when compared to the overall effects of war
"An estimated 3.6-3.8 million people died indirectly in post-9/11 war zones, bringing the total death toll to at least 4.5-4.7 million and counting."
https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu/costs/human
What point are you trying to make, exactly?
Obama's department of defense classified every male between 16-65 hit by drone attacks as enemy combatant until proven otherwise...
So the war crimes are bipartisan.
And I write this as someone who likes Obama.
GWB got heat for extralegal extraordinary renditions. Obama solved it by just killing them. I guess we can’t ask the dead guys if they’d prefer to go to Guantanamo.
obama also drone striked killed us citizens with no due process in the name of the game
Why would they need due process? They weren't the targets and their deaths were accidental collateral damage.
At least one of those American citizens was the intended target of a drone strike.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki
US military standard for "did we kill civilians" with drone attacks is "do these appear to be combat aged males, based on satellite photos".
It's monstrous.
Let's see. They were part of the US military, right? In just this war alone, they started by triple tapping an ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, murdering nearly 200 little children.
And on the same day, they attacked a SPORTS STADIUM, completely vapourising a women's volleyball team who were in the midst of a game.
And that was just ... DAY ONE.
By now, we should be asking - if you're a member of the US military on active duty in an active war - prove that YOU DIDN'T kill a child, mother, handicapped person in a wheelchair, or a grandpa.
Truth hurts, doesn't it?
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Yes, the US government is literally everywhere.
We sure do. They mostly work in federal government and government contracting corporations. There are multiple clearly documented repeated drone strikes on US citizens, even US citizen minors, who never were even indicted with a crime, that ended in assassination. Like the two intentional strikes it took to kill 16 year old US citizen from colorado, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Abdulrahman_al-Awla... . See also the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix executive program in general.
Why are you citing these as cases of terrorism and murder when the American citizen wasn't the target? Collateral damage happens in missile strikes.
Are American citizens always innocent? From what I have seen many Americans are guilty of a lot of bad stuff.
This american citizen minor certainly was. And the claim of collateral damage is already shown false by the fact that they went after the kid (16 years old) intentionally, twice. Even after they knew his father was already dead. Oh, and by the way, they never indicted the father or showed evidence against the father either. Neither were in a war zone of any sort.
The other examples on the second wikipedia link were literally non-US citizen journalists who later sued the US in a US federal court he brought where he showed up and wasn't arrested because he didn't do anything wrong.
I'm with you that being a US citizen doesn't mean someone is "good". But in this case I've literally given non-US citizen examples too that you passed over for this mistargeted aside.
Until proven guilty, yes they are always innocent.
That is true for all people. Not just Americans. It’s just disgusting to say that all Americans are innocent but we can assume others are guilty. As far as I know Bin Laden was killed without ever being tried in a criminal court.
Are school shooters in America innocent if they are killed before getting a trial?
I’m speaking with regards to the American legal system. Yes the endless foreign wars are also unconstitutional.
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I admire Aaron Bushnell, but that page unironically uses phrases like "Satanic Talmudic supremacy"
Thanks, updated link below: seems to have been changed since last time I saw it back when it all happened, sorry!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Bushnell
Looks like a clever little psyop to discredit him.
its a quote of a person, so the usage is justified
It's a good phrase
Were all US soldiers in the Revolutionary War war criminals? What about the North in the Civil War? Or WWI/WWII?
Nearly every soldier in any war will have directly or indirectly killed an innocent civilian. Which ones are war crimes and which aren’t?
How do you decide and who gives you the authority to do so?
I'd say anyone who chooses to kill a civilian, whether based on an order or not, is a war criminal. I really don't care if they thought they were there for a noble cause or not.
What if they choose to kill a person who was a civilian until they were drafted into the enemy army the day before?
What if the civilian they kill has a substantial effect on the enemy's military capabilities, for example by being someone famous who loudly endorses the honour of signing up to fight for one's country, thereby motivating thousands of young men to do just that?
What if killing a soldier’s children might make him lose his resolve or act erratically? What if destroying an entire city full of millions of civilians might make the enemy lose hope and surrender? What if poisoning the land and water for decades could prevent the enemy from reconstituting itself? What if killing all the women could prevent the production of future soldiers?
Once you open the door, where do you draw the line?
What does indirectly killed mean?
Sounds like a weird way to phrase collateral damage?
Collateral murder.
Civilians die in wars, and that's with the best intentions of all parties to the conflict. If one or both has got radicalised, then a lot of civilians die in war.
you are justifying 9/11 attack on the US, the similar logic to yours was used by Al-Qaeda
No, I'm explaining to you that accidental civilian casualties in a war is a normal part of the terrible activity that is war. Good soldiers with the best of intentions will kill civilians in a war, because war is chaotic and very dangerous.
Radicalised soldiers and armies will give less and less concern to civilians, and at a certain hated level civilians actually will get targeted by individual soldiers or squads. If it then moves up the command chain and there's not enough accountability or pushback from the top leadership then you get to proper genocidal actions like what happened at Srebrenica.
Targeting civilians for death is not acceptable or justifiable.
This is the Israeli take that is continually pushed to normalize their approach to "removing baby terrorists"
Who gives US president authority to just murder whoever he wants?
Nobody. He just seized it. No one gave it to him; hence their upset that people like duterte are being kept in the Hague.
US voters
A group which has been known to collectively make a mistake or two
Correct. Either all soldiers are war criminals or none of them are. The world is black or white, without nuance.
The author of that page appears to be a Holocaust denier[1]. Not exactly the example I would put forwards, especially if I want to make an unannealed appeal against Israeli war crimes.
[1]: A search for that name mostly brings up links to pages for SS apologia.
Yes: the content is very different from what I remembered it as from back when I first visited it after Aaron died, I don't know how the website went where it went, and I'm sorry I didn't check prior to posting.
Updated link:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Bushnell
>someone defending their country
Can be used to justify anything.
"War crimes" is something of a shorthand for being involved in an aggressive war; they are a surprisingly minor influence on the discourse because they are small in comparison to the decision to go to war at all.
I think the more baby-steps approach to western cognitive dissonance is to at least get them to be consistent about when it is a good idea to go to war. I'm more than happy to get downvoted pointing out that killing 100s of thousands of Russians and welding them strategically to China was a terrible policy, uniting Asian manufacturing and resource giants is catastrophic for western power. But people were grumpy and didn't want to talk about realpolitik because the Russians are so evil.
Now we have the US attacking Persians in Persia for trying to govern Persia because the US sphere of influence covers the whole world and doing serious damage to the West's access to global oil markets and we have this muted and philosophical response from the powers that be. It isn't just immoral, it is also actively stupid - if we can tolerate this behaviour from the US, why can't we also tolerate Russia on a far smaller and easier to understand scale? How are all the sanctions and weapons deliveries to Ukraine actually justified in the minds of the people making the decisions? It clearly isn't a moral calculation and it seems to be stupid strategy.
If we got some thoughtful and transparent thinkers in power there'd probably just be less wars, they seem to be the fast path to poverty and the upside is hard to spot. There are serious questions about why any of the major conflicts right now looked like a good idea to the people in Washington and wherever NATO is in Europe. Brussels I suppose. Can we try peace and prosperity as a strategy?
Hey is friendly fire a war crime?
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The US hasn't fought a just war since WW2 and even that is actually somewhat questionable
The citizens of South Korea might have some thoughts on that.
The South Korean government was a military dictatorship at the time. And the North was wealthier. Without the power of foresight, you couldn't justify the war as bringing democracy or economic prosperity, it was purely a geopolitical struggle. It took a lot of historical revisionism to erase that inconvenient little fact from western consciousness.
The majority opinion at the time, in the west, was that communism led to less economic prosperity, less democratic institutions, and less freedom. So maybe it wasn't a guarantee that the south would become a democracy or prosperous, but doing nothing would guarantee the opposite.
Also, the North wasn't democratic either so it was two nondemocratic groups fighting.