Which part of "attack enemies" implies they were targeting innocent people?
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...
Lot easier to steal land if there aren't any people living there (because the infrastructure to support modern life was destroyed).
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.
"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."
If a nation is conducting drone strikes on another nation's territory, the alternative is usually conventional forces at scale on the ground*.
As the Iraq occupation showed, conventional ground forces at scale cause an even larger number of civilian deaths.
So drone strikes, if kinetic intervention is pre-decided, are a less-bad option from a civilian casualty perspective.
* Granted, there might be a decision not to deploy conventional forces because of the risk / cost, but if there are regular drone strikes, it feels like the aggressor country is past that Rubicon.
Conventional forces aren't deployed in many instances where regular drone strikes are used, thus the country didn't feel it was the right risk/cost to deploy conventional forces.
At the very least, it's a statement that deserves more debate, and I'd point to the many examples of how reducing cost and risk tends to increase the rate of an activity.
So the war crimes are bipartisan.
And I write this as someone who likes Obama.
Yeah, I don't see a problem here. Due process, slippery slope sure... but this was a cut and dry case. I've got better things to do with my time than be concerned with this.
An addition, again from Afghanistan, only 2% of drone strikes were against identified targets. The rest were targets of opportunity. So you make most of the male population of a country killable through the use of appropriate language, and then hit 98% of them because you think they might be thinking about doing something bad in the future.
I can see why this would mess with people's mental health when what they're doing to random civilians sinks in.
It's monstrous.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Authorization_for_Use_of_Milit...
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?
- Built as part of an IRGCN base (that base was closed in 2013)
- Within 100 yards of the perimeter of an active IRGCN base at the time of the strike
- Targeted as a result of extensive use of Palantir's Maven Smart System and Claude by the US military to pre-identify targets
Given all of that, I think the most accurate takeaway would be that the US military is deficient in their target approval process. (Arguably grossly so, though that's an international law legal question)
There's been less investigation into the background behind the Lamerd sports hall attack, but it's fairly certainly an intended US strike, likely for the same reason that the Azadi stadium was hit: assumption that it would be used as a muster point for an Iranian military response.
My takeaway from the atrocities is that there need to be substantial updates to international laws of war around (a) automated target approval (even worse excesses by the Israelis in the initial Gaza strikes) and ultimate human responsibility and (b) more strongly defining what constitutes due diligence in intelligence and classification of military targets.
Currently, both are far too nebulous and will likely lead to both incidents being classified as war as usual. Whereas there was a plausible route to both being removed as targets with even non-manual open source intelligence scraping (substantial patterns of school activity over years and the volleyball game schedule, respectively).