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Comment by golergka | Hacker News Reader

Is the author seriously suggesting to view deliberate terror attacks against civilians the same as military strikes (drones or planes — I don't see a difference) performed against enemy combatants, by people who are trying to minimize civilian casualties as far as they can?

Yes, it's horrible that sometimes your only choice to kill a high-ranking terrorist is by taking innocent lives with him. But granted how many innocent lives you can save by it, it's more horrible not to do it.

There's never been a war where a victory didn't cost civilian lives, regardless how just was the cost. I really wish western governments would talk about this openly and have a serious discussion about these issues though, instead of awkwardly trying to hush it.

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> Is the author seriously suggesting to view deliberate terror attacks against civilians the same as military strikes (drones or planes — I don't see a difference) performed against enemy combatants, by people who are trying to minimize civilian casualties as far as they can?

Why not?

Let’s that the countries of Xanadu (“X”) and Yalü (“Y”) are at war with each other. Isn’t it meaningful to compare the number of X and Y citizens killed by each other, regardless of how it is carried out?

If X says “We’re careful to minimize killing Y’s civilians,” shouldn’t we judge X by how successful it is in minimizing those casualties? Or should we say, “Oh, well, X is trying their best, so no need to keep count or compare the counts.”

Quite obviously “terror” attacks and “military” attacks are different things. But it’s perfectly legitimate to compare them by the number of civilians killed. It shouldn’t be the only way in which we compare them. But it’s still informative to compare them.

> Why not?

Intention does matter. A military which aims to reduce civilian casualties and fails is less evil than a terrorist who deliberately targets civilians.

We have statistics. We know the probable outcomes. The man who pushes the button doesn't know if he's going to kill civilians and how many of them in that particular case, but the average number of civilans killed per bomb is well known. He knows that his actions will cause the death of a certain amount of innocents, and still he pushes the button in order to advance the political or military objectives of the entity he belongs to. On the other hand, if terrorists were able to drop bombs on the homes of high ranking army members and politicians of the West from drones travelling at 30 thousand feet and controlled from thousands of miles away, wouldn't they do so? Of course they would. Would that make them better?

> We have statistics. We know the probable outcomes.

Yes and no. Those things are possible if we have sufficient data, but I'm under the impression the way the CIA classifies a civilian vs. a combatant is inherently biased to reflect a much brighter outlook than a rational, detailed, slower, more careful approach would (although I have no hope for such an alternative).

> but the average number of civilans killed per bomb is well known

By whom? The CIA considers (considered?) every male of combat age in certain regions an "enemy combatant" or "militant" or something similar [1]. Under that definition, only women, children, and elderly _could_ be labelled as "civilians". What incentive is there to minimize harm to combat age men who are not "enemy combatants" when they are defined as such?

The CIA (who I am under the impression controls most drone strikes in {Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Syria, Yemen, Somalia}) doesn't go collect DNA then forensically work the case for every person killed in their strikes as if there was a DNA collection of all terrorists. _They_ are the people expected to tally up the terrorist vs. civilian in your visualized scenario, yet they are the same people who refuse to distinguish between combat age males and combatants.

You seem to be arguing that there is a moral high ground in trying to limit the number of innocents killed (which I agree with), but the article is about controlling media information. Perhaps your post would have been a reply to the grandparent post.

[1] http://www.salon.com/2012/05/29/militants_media_propaganda/

> The man who pushes the button doesn't know if he's going to kill civilians and how many of them in that particular case, but the average number of civilans killed per bomb is well known. He knows that his actions will cause the death of a certain amount of innocents, and still he pushes the button in order to advance the political or military objectives of the entity he belongs to.

This is exactly my original point: his "military objective" is usually to prevent far more civilians from dying in the end.

> Would that make them better?

Attacking officials of opposing force in high-precision strikes instead of civilians? Yes. It actually would make them better, yes. May be not "good", but definitely better. How is this not obvious?

No, your original point was that terrorist attacks against civilians are inherently worse than attacks which try to minimize civilian casualties as far as they can. Then you added that civilian casualties are horrible but justifiable when targeting an even more dangerous terrorist.

But you are confusing two aspects that are completely unrelated: the first is a matter of means (how can you wage war), the second of objectives (why you do it). And then you assume that the western justifications can be taken at their face value (we kill to prevent more being killed, no political purpose implied) which is even more naive.

Finally, you seem to admit that having higher precision weapons would make terrorists better people. Maybe, who knows, as good as we are? That was much of my point.

I strongly disagree with you about them being “less evil,” but even if I agreed with you, that wouldn’t invalidate what I said. Which is, there are a number of ways to compare countries X and Y, and civilians killed is a legitimate way to compare them.

“Amount of evil” is another, and we could agree, disagree, or debate it indefinitely. But in the meantime, that’s a separate category of consideration.

Your argument suggests that only X are responsible for Y's civilian deaths. But given that X and Y are at war with each other, if Y sets up military operations in the middle of Y's civilians ("human shields") whereas X keeps its civilians and military apart, then I don't think it's fair to say that X are performing worse (less ethically, or whatever) if more of Y's civilians die in the conflict than X's civilians.

> It shouldn’t be the only way in which we compare them. But it’s still informative to compare them.

Unfortunately I think it's as uninformative to compare them as it is uninformative to not compare them. I think it only makes sense to count a civilian death in the context of what the civilian was doing in an area targeted by the military of the other side. That is relatively easy in the West to understand, since these areas aren't in the middle of warzones. In areas of conflict it becomes impossible to understand because of propaganda.

Ironically, much of the personnel involved in the U.S. drone program lives and works stateside, among the civilian population.

Yet no muslim terrorist has accidentally killed innocent civilians when targeting drone operators, have they? They rather simply always target innocent civilians.

Many definitions of terrorism require targeting civilians. So your statements are trivially true. There have been attacks on people in uniform by people identifying as Muslims. These were labeled as terrorist attacks too, so your second statement is not true if you follow the broader definition.

One wrong does not justify another, unless of course you decide to follow their logic.

We were talking about drone operators as being equivalent targets to whoever Americans blow up with drone (with concomitant collateral damage). I pointed out that no muslim terrorists have killed people while attempting to kill drone operators (or other specifically targeted military personnel).

And why jump through verbal hoops with 'people identifying as Muslims'. Don't we have a word for that - 'muslims'? Is there any chance of someone not being sure if you are talking about people or goats, thus the need for further clarification?

You should walk round tumblr and see all the otherkin people "identify" as. We don't count any of them as wolves or mermaids.

But that's because we don't consider it sufficient for someone to identify as a woolf or mermaid to be one. Whereas if someone identifies as a Christian/Jew/Buddhist or whatever - that's sufficient reason for everybody to accept that.

It's pretty handy to seperate out a tiny number (maybe 200,000 people) of terrorists from the much larger group of non-terrorist Muslims.

Like we don't talk about the Christian terrorists killing doctors in the US, we use other language to describe them.

> I pointed out that no muslim terrorists have killed people while attempting to kill drone operators (or other specifically targeted military personnel).

I don't see how this is relevant. We already accept that terrorism is not justifiable, we're discussing whether drone strikes are terrorism.

> And why jump through verbal hoops with 'people identifying as Muslims'.

Because being Muslim is not a terrorist's defining characteristic. One defining characteristic would be a disregard for human life.

>I don't see how this is relevant. We already accept that terrorism is not justifiable, we're discussing whether drone strikes are terrorism.

I replied to this comment "Ironically, much of the personnel involved in the U.S. drone program lives and works stateside, among the civilian population." My point is that the fact that drone operators live among civilian population makes no difference since no muslim (or otherwise) terrorists have tried to attack them, thus killing innocents as collateral damage - which is how civilians in Afghanistan or Pakistan are killed.

>Because being Muslim is not a terrorist's defining characteristic. One defining characteristic would be a disregard for human life.

So why are they 'people identifying as Muslims' instead of 'muslims'? Are other muslims refusing to accept them as muslim?

Separately, their religious identity is their defining characteristic. Same way that communists' who killed millions in Russia and China political affiliation was fundamental to their identity.

While we probably can't say this about middle east civil war participants, the muslim terrorists who kill people in the West are driven primarily by their religion. If they weren't, they would be small-time crooks or drug dealers at worst. Somehow their religion turned them into murderous psychopaths - let's not beat around the bush here.

> I replied to this comment "Ironically, much of the personnel involved in the U.S. drone program lives and works stateside, among the civilian population."

I think that comment was meant to convey that drone operators are hard to reach for your average terrorist. Why is it important to state that 'Muslim' terrorists have only attacked civilians so far? (A claim that is not true as I've pointed out before.)

> Somehow their religion turned them into murderous psychopaths

'Somehow' some people get turned into murderous psychopaths by religion and some others do not. Is that the depth of your analysis?

>I think that comment was meant to convey that drone operators are hard to reach for your average terrorist. Why is it important to state that 'Muslim' terrorists have only attacked civilians so far? (A claim that is not true as I've pointed out before.)

I don't think that's what the comment conveyed. I believe his point was to show that US drone operators are also living in civilian areas (similar to Hamas or whatever who operate among civilians). Thus if someone were to attack them, they could claim to kill civilians purely as collateral damage.

>'Somehow' some people get turned into murderous psychopaths by religion and some others do not. Is that the depth of your analysis?

False. Somehow we (today - perhaps it was different around the Crusades or 100 year war in Europe) don't have a problem of Christian terrorism, Jewish terrorism or Buddhist terrorism. Yet there is a really big problem of Muslim terrorism - so there must be something in whatever version of that religion (perhaps backward but rich Saudis spreading their version of it are responsible) that's causing it.

> If X says “We’re careful to minimize killing Y’s civilians,” shouldn’t we judge X by how successful it is in minimizing those casualties? Or should we say, “Oh, well, X is trying their best, so no need to keep count or compare the counts.”

Compare what to what? How do you find out how many civilians would have been killed or lived in an alternate version of history?

US killed more japanese civilians than Japan killed US civilians. This doesn't mean that US was evil and Japan wasn't. It just means that US was successful and Japan wasn't, nothing more.

If you go by the spirit of the argument, you should compare total civilian deaths caused by a side rather than reciprocal deaths. Japan killed way way more civilians in general than the USA, during world war 2.

You are making a lot of assumptions, which Greenwald actually addresses and refutes at the beginning of the article. The targets are often not combatants; in fact, many of the targets have no known identity at all. If anybody strains to minimize civilian casualties, they're doing a piss-poor job of it. In fact, often it looks as if non-combatants and civilian structures were deliberately targeted.

But you are of course right. As long as you a priori define allied action as legitimate military strikes, and enemy action as illegal terror attacks, you will always be right. And that is the very point of the article.

Let's agree to disagree on that one. Because the discussion we should be having is, what objectives is the "War on Terror", (or, as I like to call it, because terrorism is just a method of warfare, War on War) trying to achieve, and are they worth the price?

> The targets are often not combatants; in fact, many of the targets have no known identity at all.

I'm genuinly curious — do you honestly think that the fact that attack X killed civilians means that it was supposed to killed civilians? That people who make this kind of decision had reasons to believe that they actually made the right choice?

We're all very wise in hindsight — but I find it very hard to believe that military officers in this situation often have access to 100% solid intelligence. You could argue that they should increase their standards for given intelligence, but that brings us to the second point.

> If anybody strains to minimize civilian casualties, they're doing a piss-poor job of it.

All analysis I've seen on the matter only looks at casualties from the airstrikes. Where's the other side of the equation: where's the same analysis about completed military objectives in campaign as a whole, and where's analysis about lives that were saved as a result?

> In fact, often it looks as if non-combatants and civilian structures were deliberately targeted.

I have heard such claims, but I never saw them being backed up with data that would suggest that decision-maker in this particular place actually had solid reasons to believe that he was targeting civilians and civilian infrastructure. Once more: we're all wise in hindsight.

I honestly feel that people who are making this kind of arguments aren't even trying to imagine what's war is, with lack of information and awful choices that you have to make. Do you honestly believe that there are ways to solve this kind of situation without innocent people dying in suffering?

While it is not quite possible to look into the heads of the operators, targeters, and the chain of command, the documents that have been publicly available for some time, as well as the actions of the allied governments paint a clear picture:

Non-combatants are targeted as a matter of course, deliberately in double-tap attacks, in "signature" strikes, and targetting of public gatherings such as weddings and funerals. Morover, the intended and collateral casualties can not only be seen in hindsight, but right there on the target acquisition screen.

The US government does not prosecute war crimes committed by its own citizens, no matter how egregious, or how public they have become. What you are asking is the kind of certainty that comes with some investigation. It is hard to see when you don't want to look. The scraps that the likes of Greenwald have managed to piece together (largely documented in reportages for The Intercept) are very damning, but the whole picture must be even worse. Do you really mean it that you don't see how civilians are deliberately targeted?

We should have an objective in these wars, which is something that we've never had. If there is nothing that we want to achieve apart from fighting terror with terror forever, and in the process shuttering civil liberties at home, we should leave.

> Is the author seriously suggesting to view deliberate terror attacks against civilians

No. The prompt for the article is pointing out the difference in coverage & attention from the white house and press about a casualty from a US drone strike when the innocent victims were Western. Various terror attacks are mentioned, but that is not the core topic of the article.

> the same as military strikes performed against enemy combatants,

From the article: "Indeed, Obama officially re-defined the term “combatant” to mean “all military-age males in a strike zone.” In other words, as The New York Times reported in 2011, all males between 18 and (roughly) 54 killed by U.S. drones are presumed to be combatants — terrorists — “unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.”"

> by people who are trying to minimize civilian casualties as far as they can?

from the article: "There are so many heinous stories of U.S. drones blowing up children and innocent adults. Obama used cruise missiles and cluster bombs to kill 14 children and 21 women in a Yemeni village (weeks after winning the Nobel Peace Prize), while a 2012 drone strike attacked a Yemeni wedding convoy and “killed 12 passengers in the vehicle, including three children and a pregnant woman.”"

And then the more recent one: http://www.cbsnews.com/news/us-doctors-without-borders-ameri...

...

In other words, your first sentence is a straw man. The comparison is not between terror attacks and military strikes, the military strikes are often not against enemy combatants (and they're almost never against high-ranking terrorists), and the attacks are not trying particularly hard to minimize civilian casualties. That you would try to make such a point, despite all evidence to the contrary, is the result of precisely the propaganda that the article is trying to pick apart.

EDIT: rdancer's comment probably makes this point better than mine: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10795263

We already view deliberate terror attacks against civilians the same as military strikes performed against enemy combatants. For example, the article mentions the Fort Hood shooting, an attack on US soldiers at a US military base that was described as terrorism by the media.

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