U.S. drone pilot leaks footage reveals accidental killing of children and adults
eminetra.co.uk
eminetra.co.uk
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi...
The points of difference have a strong smell of machine translation. E.g. "Killing for the sake of killing" turns into "I’ll kill you for the killing"; "Connecting Vets" becomes "Veterinary connection".
@dang This article should probably replace the submitted URL (edit: or alternatively, that article in the top reply comments)
related discussion thread: (identifying abuse of machine translation in published journal papers)
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28107614 ("Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science")
Comment chain (along with archive link for EU access): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28299929
Do you happen to know another source or archived version?
Edit: thanks for the updated links!
Added that to the top level as well
but i'm in the UK!!1ones
https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...
The submitted link (eminetra.co.uk) does look like a ML-generated copy.
Thinking better about it...per suggestion of perihelions maybe change to original source:
https://web.archive.org/web/20210825045512/https://www.audac...
or the Daily Mail link?
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9924567/US-drone-pi...
The answer is much worse than I could imagine: “a guy with a radio … which is reasonable grounds for suspicion”. Nothing accidental about it. These should be considered war crimes.
We are absolutely the baddies; between Iraq, Afghanistan and our air strikes on Syria, Libya, and Yemen during the same period killed 1 million civilians. We’re within an order of magnitude of the Holocaust, and we all just pretend everything is ok. I really don’t know why there aren’t more discussions of how this is basically the Islamic Holocaust.
Note, I think it's an absolutely sound and necessary thing to happen, I just never see it happening.
I was directly involved in U.S. CIVCAS mitigation measures in a Daesh convoy engagement by U.S. air power in the summer of 2016. I cannot comment on anything that transpired within the classified space. However, there was substantial reporting on the discrepancy between the measures implemented by U.S. drone strikes during the engagement, and measures implemented by Iraqi helicopters during the engagement. I encourage you to think about what that discrepancy might mean, if true, about how you're using those numbers.
Looking at the breakdown:
https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/files/cow/imce/papers/20...
I dont see how it can be seen as anything but a humanitarian disaster
In the case of Iraq, the deaths were due to two reasons
- President Bush 1's strategy to destroy civil infrastructure (water purification plants, sewage plants), which resulted in...bad water and mass deaths via disease
- President Clinton's sanctions which disallowed almost everything as dual use and prevented critical relief, essentially starving society for 8+ years.
The interview is from half-way thru the Clinton term.
I think it was Ge. Wesley Clark or maybe Col. Wilkerson who said something to the effect of "There was a policy coup, some very hard nosed people took over and never informed the rest of us".
Its true, there was a policy coup, but I've traced it much further back. Besides the JFK episode, the biggest one was Woodrow Wilson and his handlers.
A good examination of these things though is uncomfortable and difficult even for those of us with a passion for truth, but the public doesn't want to hear about it. The elite don't want to discuss it (often because they make money off it). The media wont discuss it because it is controlled by the same people that pushed us into war.
I keep coming back to the media angle, and I also think thats one of the reasons for the increasing attacks on the freedom of the internet; essentially the oligarchs finally understood that as the last bastion of anarchistic freedom of thought, it was their primary threat.
Glad to see you call out Wilson, I consider him possibly the worst President ever. Federal Reserve Bank? His fault. Federal income tax? His fault. European intervention? His fault.
Got to wonder why the need to replace a 5 character 1 syllable word with a longer 7 character 2 syllable word, a little easier to stomach than saying, writing, or feeling like you just killed a child?
Correct, yet the malice lies on said situations being allowed to continue time and time again, and fester
Reality: "A patrol nearby said they took fire from the compound at such and such grid coordinates" It gets bombed. Turns out the unit on the ground was mistaken.
War is hell. War criminals should be punished. But it's not a war crime to make a mistake. I love seeing these posts because it's clear that almost nobody here has experienced war. My ROEs were ridiculously strict on the ground in southern Afghanistan.
It's important to have some context as well:
> According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011.
So sure. Both sides have killed civilians. But one side tries it's best to be accountable and limit human suffering while still carrying out missions. The alternative is to not be there at all.
I suppose that you are from the USA and your family is living there. Imagine that some afghan-controlled drone intended to kill some U.S. soldiers (a legitimate target because they are enemy combatants). But instead they kill your family. If it was a mistake, by the own account of the drone operator, would you still maintain that the killing of your whole family was not a war crime? Would you defend the drone operator in that case? Please notice that at the moment when they were killed, they were just enjoying a picnic in a field, minding their own business, unbeknownst that in another valley a few miles away there was a secret military training camp. I need to hear from you if you honestly think that the murderer of your family would be innocent in that case.
But no, adding a whole bunch of emotional baggage to the act does not suddenly make any collateral death a war crime as you imply here.
Bombing runs are woefully innarcurate though, so the good thing is when we have better weapons we'll start using those instead. Unlike insurgency groups who will often kill civilians as a means. Think that was partly the above poster's point.
Now to more specifically reply. So in the United States we may certainly have war on our doorstep at some point in the future. But our country tries to prevent that at ALL COSTS. We do so by making sure other countries are stable. We may fuck up by inserting into the wrong countries. but if ALL COUNTRIES just stabilize themselves we would NEVER have to go. And by the way, that's why the united nations was created. It would (or should) never allow the united states to insert themselves in a war that was not just. It may end up in an unjust position, but that's not where we started.
This is just wishful thinking. The difference between the Afghanistan when Bush decided to invade it and now is that the Taliban are stronger, have more equipment, and basically sure nobody will ever invade them again after the lessons they gave to the USSR and the USA.
Same when you look at Irak or Libya. Your idea of stabilizing is completely at odds with what happens in reality.
I agree. Allcaps included.
> We do so by making sure other countries are stable.
Ehh... that part is more dubious. For example see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Central_Intelligence_...
That's not a war CRIME, that's just war. If/when the shooting eventually starts with the Chinese (or the North Koreans), I and my family live down the street from some of the likeliest theater ballistic missile targets in the region. If an errant TBM levels my apartment building, I'll absolutely do everything I can to terminate the enemy soldiers with extreme prejudice...but I recognize that they are doing their jobs, and unless it is proven they were clearly aiming for a civilian target (such as a sports event), then no, I wouldn't consider their acts CRIMINAL.
>the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009
Or to phrase it another way, allied forces killed a third as many civilians as the actual Taliban, a regime noted for its extreme brutality and callous attitude to human life. I'm not impressed.
> According to the United Nations, the Taliban and its allies were responsible for 76% of civilian casualties in Afghanistan in 2009, 75% in 2010 and 80% in 2011.
Interesting. How do you get one third out of those numbers?
25% / 75% = 1/3.
>> Source please.
> Seems like plain old common sense to me. You’re never going to hear the US government say it. But that doesn’t make it untrue. It’s just an inconvenient truth.
If that's "plain old common sense," so is QAnon.
In reality they're both conspiracy theory lies that have the psychological advantage of making the world comic-book simple for their adherents.
If people who have an opinion that differs from “sources” is now a Qanon believer then we’re in for a very rocky road ahead. It’s almost like we’re only allowed to have same opinion as our overlords who own the “sources” we venerate. That’s a problem.
It’s not much of a stretch to believe that defense contractors lobbied lawmakers to extend a war that made them so much money. Certainly not enough of a stretch to compare it to Qanon.
Except that the opinion is question was not formed by critical thinking.
> If people who have an opinion that differs from “sources” is now a Qanon believer then we’re in for a very rocky road ahead. It’s almost like we’re only allowed to have same opinion as our overlords who own the “sources” we venerate. That’s a problem.
No, there's an important difference between having an a different opinion than "our overlords" and having an opinion that's a paranoid comic book fantasy.
> It’s not much of a stretch to believe that defense contractors lobbied lawmakers to extend a war that made them so much money. Certainly not enough of a stretch to compare it to Qanon.
That's the kind of claim you need evidence for, it's not something you just get to assume (unless you're fine with defective reasoning processes). Furthermore, even if it is true, it doesn't support the original outlandish claim that "The 'war on terror' was not meant to stop terrorism. It was meant to fan the flames and give the US an endless war that can be fought for generations." I wouldn't be surprised if that claim spawned from "9/11 truther" conspiracy theories.
Where exactly would such “evidence” come from? Do you think the CEO of Raytheon would ever utter such a statement even if it were 100% true?
> Furthermore, even if it is true, it doesn't support the original outlandish claim that "The 'war on terror' was not meant to stop terrorism. It was meant to fan the flames and give the US an endless war that can be fought for generations."
I fail to see how anyone could believe that bombing people from the sky and invading a couple countries would win over favor from potential terrorists. In fact, it would seem the exact opposite is true. We should’ve spent the trillions of dollars using economic diplomacy instead. Now, one could argue honestly that our leaders are just complete idiots. I just happen to think they knew exactly what we were doing.
Just some examples: a leak or confession. People do sometimes have changes of heart. But until you can actually provide evidence, you're just making up "facts" that are convenient to you.
Also, the CEO of Raytheon is very unlikely to be the person that determined what the "war on terror" was meant to do.
> I fail to see how anyone could believe that bombing people from the sky and invading a couple countries would win over favor from potential terrorists. We should’ve...
That failing is yours. There seems to be a lot of hindsight bias there, as well as some weird misunderstandings.
> Now, one could argue honestly that our leaders are just complete idiots. I just happen to think they knew exactly what we were doing.
It's far more likely that "our leaders" were high on "end of history" idealism, and spurred to hasty action by a traumatic attack, and are nearly as unable to accurately predict how a complex world will behave as the rest of us.
Isn't that often the thing with conspiracy theorists? They always have a reason why they don't have evidence and somehow that means they can claim anything that they want.
Maybe not a bullseye, but these are the folks behind "the war on terror." They had a plan for the war prior to 9/11.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_for_the_New_American_C...
> But one side tries it's best to be accountable and limit human suffering while still carrying out missions.
Is that side really doing their "best"? I feel like a lot of these mistakes are avoidable with better procedures, training, and reducing being in situations where mistakes are even possible. I'm not expecting a war to go perfectly but is tens of thousands of accidental civilian killings the best we can do?
When you are putting fallible human beings into the most stressful and demanding situations imaginable, it's unreasonable to NOT factor in a baseline level of human error.
>>>I feel like a lot of these mistakes are avoidable with better procedures, training,
What specific procedures would you like to adjust? Escalation of Force? Rules of Engagement? The entire Joint fires killchain?
https://warontherocks.com/2017/05/its-about-time-the-pressin...
>>>I'm not expecting a war to go perfectly but is tens of thousands of accidental civilian killings the best we can do?
Against adversaries that actively use the civilian population as human shields, or who pretend to be civilians themselves to exploit our ROE? Yeah, that's a decently low casualty rate for TWO DECADES of dropping bombs on a country, across countless thousands of aircraft sorties.
It's still led to some technical solutions to the problem of collateral damage, which is why we have the Small Diameter Bomb family: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBU-39_Small_Diameter_Bomb
and also the R9X variant of the Hellfire missile: https://www.globalsecurity.org/military/systems/munitions/ag...
I'm not saying human error doesn't exist, but that the amount we tolerate is too high.
> Yeah, that's a decently low casualty rate for TWO DECADES of dropping bombs on a country, across countless thousands of aircraft sorties.
It's easy to reduce that casualty rate: stop dropping bombs on a country for two decades. My point is that the cost of a civilian death is too low. If we considered the moral cost and not just the strategic cost, our calculations would conclude that we can't afford to start this war. The dubious moral reasons for doing it are not outweighed by the moral harm that would result.
I get that you're addressing the technical aspects of collateral damage in a war, but an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. In a justified war, we can tolerate civilian deaths as a necessary evil, but if the war is not just, then aren't all such deaths an unnecessary evil?
This might help clear it up: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/malice
Actually, people do. That happens fairly regularly in conflicts. Civilians are often a target by policy. Plus, by neglect - superiors not caring what this or that sociopath does.
In Afghanistan case, there was period when per policy anyone with walkie talkie counted as valid target. Phones did not worked. So there is fair chance some attacks hit civilians and it was policy.
Anywhere I can find info on this?
This link was posted in another thread and seems to be the source that broke the news today.
This story doesn't show any of the 3 words I put in quotes.
Edit: can I get an explainer on the downvotes to both my comments?
> US declared every man with a walkie-talkie was a legitimate target.
and the policy described in the article is, attempting that will likely lead you to why you are downvoted.
The poster's statement was hyperbole to the point of being an outright lie.
(Had to wait since I was silently barred from posting due to 'karma'/downvotes. Not a great algo for public discussion imo, although I acknowledge this thread is now in the weeds. At the very least it should be made public and obvious that I cannot reply.)
nothing new, there's a well known quote from a former NSA/CIA director: "We kill people based on metadata" [1]
[1] https://www.nybooks.com/daily/2014/05/10/we-kill-people-base...
CIA considers any Adult Male over 16 and under 65 to be "the enemy" in most of these places...
It's not a war crime unless you lose the war.
I’m not sure anyone really knows why or what has been achieved by it.
Genuine question. The downside to fb/Twitter etc allowing bloody/violent content would be that you’d get gore trolls and it would turn into /b
The selective enforcement is much harder to prove than selective endorsement, and much sneakier at influencing the public opinion.
Journalism finds a way, like internet, and genetically modified dinosaurs.
That is the parent comment's point: there was more graphic coverage of the Vietnam available to a typical viewer, so the feeling against it was stronger.
Few care about the cost to Afghans. The cost to Westerners has been fairly well hidden from discussion.
In both cases, as much as I like to think facts are what sway my opinion, an emotional connection is far likelier to motivate action.
In one I recently saw, they interview some very sick patients. They have to use walkie-talkies to speak to them from outside the room. Some of them are having a lot of trouble breathing but still say they don't regret getting the vaccine as they don't trust it.
Videos like this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cu2J8zRftJE
This particular one is closer to the start of the pandemic but there are numerous others.
The 9/11 attacks were awful, but I think part of the reason there was such a strong emotional response was simply because for the most part the media showed us exactly what happened. We saw people dead and others desperately trying to escape. We saw the sacrifices emergency responders had to make. We heard from the heartbroken parents who would never see their child again... So yeah, I think you're right, and I'd even go further to say I think it's probably a duty to watch content like this and does us a disservice when the media sanitises terror attacks (such as the ones which have happened in Europe more recently) when they report on them. As awful as it sounds you need to see parents looking at their now deceased and blooded child to even begin to understand the unbelievable suffering involved in these events. Whenever someone says to me something like "terror attacks aren't a big problems, it's just x number of deaths" you know they're saying that because they're getting sanitised information from the media because that isn't a possible any feeling human could have if they saw the suffering involved. I know a similar unemotional rationales are used in support of drone strikes, and I accept the arguments for against their use are complex, but at the very least there needs to be far more caution and accountability. If there is one thing videos of drone strikes have shown me is that there is currently a total disregard for the loss of innocent human lives by people who know there will be zero consequences for their actions.
Given that it's apparently OK to launch one of these at a single suspected enemy informant, couldn't we have saved a lot of time, money and lives by just bribing the entire population of Afghanistan to not do things that the West doesn't like?
The US could have built a lot of roads and propped up a lot of barely profitable enterprises with the money spent on all those military operations.
So nope let's go with teh hellfire.
Lol we also did that.
But I'm confused why you think we disagree.
Editing to add on that I’ll continue to check back on this for at least the rest of the day in case there’s anything else I can potentially shed more of a light on.
Editing to add in that hellfire missiles cannot be redirected once launched.
Is this an actual thing people think drone operators do? Surely the same that would happen to any military personnel who did the same with their weapons, except with a drone there's perfect camera footage to evidence it as well.
A friend and I were having a discussion about the merits of the war. He was antiwar, and I was not opposed to it. During the discussion he asked me "Why don't you join up then?"
I didn't have an excuse. Either I need to change my political beliefs, I am a coward and a hypocrite, or I should join. I joined.
My political beliefs have since changed. I am much closer to a libertarian now than I was before. I still am not antiwar, sometimes violence is the answer.
I learned firsthand the meaning of "It was the best of times. It was the worst of times."
What did you see in your time in the military regarding drones and drone operations that don't have good equivalents in the civilian world (and that isn't classified and has real civilian world uses)?
Similarly, what does the civilian world do better?
Anything you wish someone would build to make life easier?
On purpose is a war crime now, so it has to be accidental.
Starting/continuing a war is not accidental though. It sure can be baseless (imho most if not all recent US wars were baseless).
That said - yeah, I'm glad ISIS's great swoop was thwarted.
You heard something does not make it a good reason to go to war.
Some neighbourhoods of the US are "said to be lovely /s" but does that warrant an invasion?
ISIS took hold of places in Syria because Assad was facing an "attempt to replace" by the US.
Secondly, there has been a complete failure of leadership in rebuilding afganistan and in communicating to the public that you can't just pack up and leave.
I just listened to the podcast with an afgan vet, he was there for 10 years. On the first year they shipped a hydroelectric turbine to install in a damn. On 10 year when he was leaving, the turbine was still sitting on the construction site, noone even unwrapped it.
> complete failure of leadership in rebuilding Afghanistan
Agree. It's been a bipartisan failure with the aid of the media for two decades. But it's also an extremely hard problem, and it ties into an area that America is particularly bad at: state capacity. You can't build a government by being anti-government.
> and in communicating to the public that you can't just pack up and leave
Well, you can and they have. This is going to get a bunch of people killed, but that doesn't stop it happening this way, because that has basically zero traction with US voters.
Not to say that this wouldn't work or is a bad idea! But the US would either have to drop the pretense that they're "liberating" Afghanistan or spin such a move harder than they've ever spun before. It was a lot easier during the Cold War when you could just call the Taliban "communist" to justify just about any military or covert action.
Some of these were barely better then Taliban.
It is realpolitik.
Nasty game for nasty people.
And it could lead to outrage and spontaneous attacks on civilians and the troops protecting them.
Well done, whatever are the reasons for publishing it now, initiated by which player ever.
Though sometimes the timing of things are just coincidences as many a horoscope has surely taught us about connecting dots that are not connected.
If anything this article reminds me of domestic terrorists that define a certain demographic as being enemy combatants and then goes to indiscriminate killing spree. The major difference seems to be that the military personal who actually operated the drones know that what they are doing is wrong, otherwise the room would not have gone silent when the two civilians and their child got killed. Then when it comes to write the report the two civilians becomes combatants and the killing get internally justified.
Your family is walking into Trader Joe’s or Whole Foods and all get killed by a missile from the sky. Or you send your children off to school and the school gets accidentally hit by a missile. Killed in an instant and the family of those victims listed above have no idea why and have zero recourse.
If this started happening on US soil on a daily basis, I wonder if more people would care. The top comment here is talking about the article text and AI vs. the topic of the article.
FTA - 3,797 we’re killed by drones. They were killed by drones they had no chance to defend themselves against.
Police brutality is our domestic version of drone strikes. No chance to defend yourself and zero recourse.
Do we care an adequate amount about it? Maybe, although it seems to not be the culture's cup of tea right now as much as it was in 2020.
Talk about a waste: of lives, of money, of time, of effort that could have gone to far more productive purposes.
Rumsfeld turned them down on the pretense of demanding unconditional surrender. My suspicion is America's persisting collective rage and the firehose of defense spending were beyond anyone's control at that point.
In summary drones make it to easy for the countries like the UK and the US to kill with no risk to their own service men. The missiles are not magic, there will be collateral damage. Solders on the ground could mitigate this
Reducing the risk to your own troops is a fundamental concern of most armies out there and has been for millennia.
Robot warfare is a logical endpoint of such development. I cannot see anyone opting out of this race and remaining militarily relevant.
Robot vs. Robot is unlikely to settle wars - we may as well play chess rather than wage war and humans have too much bloodlust to solve differences that way. What is likely to happen is having country A's robots in country B's homeland killing humans, while battling country B's robots in A's homeland. What constitutes a "war front" will be really confusing when the next war between great powers comes.
True, but airplanes have to fly back. I'd say cruise missiles, then UAVs/drones and loitering munitions have continued to blur the lines. Having loitering bots of war on the ground will be a further escalation.
I have no data about this but my gut tells me a drone could operate more safely than a ground team. The drone pilot is under much less stress while foot soldiers have to make live and death decisions in split seconds.
Also drone strikes are easier to audit than opaque small team operations in enemy territory.
Even in cases where they would want as few casualties as possible, I believe no military would want some "pos tech" telling them what to do (and especially what not to do).
https://www.wired.com/story/pentagon-inches-toward-letting-a...
Also many an anti rocket/missile system that is automated and AI is (maybe already is in some aspects of tracking) being worked upon.
https://www.nationaldefensemagazine.org/articles/2019/10/7/p...
So whilst the step towards automated weapons of destruction does seem inevitable, there is clearly more acceptance of weapons for preventing lives ending unfairly already.
But I do wonder how much of things are driven by worst case hoilloywood visualsations of things. Certainly the whole cold war and peoples mentalities, was very much media driven from the fear aspect. Will AI share the same and will we get to the stage that we see anti AI groups form and the term and history of Luddite gets revised!
Certainly many worry's, but also opportunities. Certainly don't want any AI working out a way to game Asimov's rules of robotics.
I bet HNers with similar life experiences can confirm.
Im French and I live in China with a child born here. The two militaries I paid taxes to maintain are able to find ways to resist US aggression to a point where it would become really painful to treat us like they treated Afghanistan, and we are just as old as Afghanistan.
At some point, these people need to move their asses and at least ask for our help. We understand the US is a huge threat to most of us, we're ready to help, if only you make simple compromises.
But no, they ll spend their time in teenage wet dream, exploiting their population, provocking America before being ready to resist them. So they take the drone and we roll our eyes - how can people in 2021 be so blind to how to build a country...
Straight out of /r/sino
It's kind of funny to think of Chinese citizens meming themselves into another Forever War the same way Americans did 20 years ago.
Even without context, you have to be seriously ignorant to believe that the right solution is starting a war in Afghanistan!
It's not like this is a hard problem for a human to solve given an image of sufficient quality.
On the other hand, AI can be used to identify possible targets, and the drone operator must just click to confirm the strike. The risk is that it's possible to combine an AI with a low threshold to report possible cases and internal rules that encourage drone operators just to confirm any AI report.
https://www.audacy.com/connectingvets/news/inside-america-fa...
It is common for units to come up with code words for various things, especially when the topic is emotionally charged or could be used for propaganda or intel. For example, almost nobody would use the term "FKIA" over the radio, even on a secure channel; they might say "flowers" instead.
Is the idea to pollute the record of history by using the term incorrectly?
This is not Journalism, if you fall for such political theater and intentionally placed stones for the next administration to look bad you are not a real journalist.
PS: I'm from Europe you can down vote anyway if you want ;)