[Peace-discuss] Biden administration still killing innocents with drone war, still exposing the lie of the "surgical strike"

[J.B. Nicholson]

Apparently, "The Biden Team Killed the Wrong Person Again" according to the 
townhall.com story at 
https://townhall.com/tipsheet/mattvespa/2023/05/18/the-biden-administration-launched-a-drone-strike-against-the-wrong-person-again-n2623459 
which includes:
> In Syria, the Biden administration announced that they had killed a top-level
> al-Qaeda official, only to walk that back[1] when it turned out they killed the wrong
> guy (via WaPo[2]): [...quotes Washington Post reporting...]

[1] 
https://www.foxnews.com/world/us-walks-back-claim-killed-major-al-qaeda-leader-drone-strike

[2] 
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/05/18/pentagon-drone-strike-syria-civilian-al-qaeda/



Glenn Greenwald also covered this murder of the wrong person and fascistic lying 
about said killing (government lying plus establishment-serving stenographers 
repeating those lies) in tonight's System Update 
https://rumble.com/v2or48g-system-update-85.html (at 13m16s) pointed out that:
> Joe Biden's drone program, once again, exterminated the life of an innocent
> person, this time in Syria where a Hellfire missile fired by an American drone
> killed a 56-year-old father of 10 who has spent his life languishing in poverty
> working as a bricklayer. The US government, once again, lied about their victims
> boasting that they killed a senior Al-Qaeda leader. And the US corporate media,
> once again, mindlessly spread those lies, dutifully claiming took out a senior
> Al-Qaeda official even through they had no idea whether that was true at all. It
> turns out it wasn't.



For those who are about to claim that drone war is insufficiently different from more 
traditional rocket launching or bomb dropping to warrant concern or merit special 
attention, consider that drone war is sold to the public on different terms in order 
to get us to go along with the killing. Drones, not traditional bombing or rocket 
firing, are described as meting out selective and lethal justice because killer 
drones can shoot missiles so precisely they warrant being called a "surgical strike" 
-- a way of killing people with a precision akin to a surgeon in surgery. This is 
meant to comfort us with the knowledge that we're not funding state-sponsored 
terrorism or wildly killing lots of innocent people but instead carefully ridding the 
world of a few select unsavory people who, we're assured, deserve to be killed.

Is that true?

Former drone operator for the Air Force Heather Linebaugh (who served from 2009-2012) 
said this about drone war in the documentary "National Bird" 
(https://youtube.com/watch?v=cnc_pin3GhQ):

> Hearing politicians speak about drones being precision weapons, being able to
> make 'surgical strikes', to me it's completely ridiculous, completely ludicrous to
> even make those statements. It's as flawed as it can be with those people
> operating it from across the world. If they really think they can send a bomb
> through a window of a compound and hit one militant then why are we seeing so many
> civilians die of collateral damage? I'd like to ask those politicians have they
> not been notified of that? Do they not know what's going on in their own war that
> they're controlling?

This documentary features Daniel Hale who was convicted and sentenced for the 
information he shared about the drone program -- (as reported by Marjorie Cohn), 
"During one five-month period during January 2012 to February 2013, nearly 90 percent 
of those killed by drone strikes were not the intended target ... But civilian 
bystanders were nonetheless classified as 'enemies killed in action' unless proven 
otherwise" in 
https://truthout.org/articles/drone-whistleblower-gets-45-months-in-prison-for-revealing-ongoing-us-war-crimes/ 
.

Two years after that documentary was released, former Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard 
(D-HI) did an interview with The Intercept with Jeremy Scahill in which she endorsed 
drone strikes in part based on this lie of precision. In that interview she repeated 
that pro-war propagandistic term while eschewing "causing, you know, a large amount 
of civilian casualties":

https://theintercept.com/2018/01/17/intercepted-podcast-white-mirror/
> Jeremy Scahill: I’m wondering what your position, I know that in the past you
> have said that you favor a small footprint approach with strike forces and limited
> use of weaponized drones. Is that still your position that you think that’s the —
> to the extent that you believe the U.S. military should be used around the world
> for counterterrorism, is that still your position?
> 
> Rep. Tulsi Gabbard: Well, when we’re dealing with the unconventional threat of 
> terrorist groups like ISIS, al Qaeda and some of these other groups that are 
> affiliated with them, we should not be using basically what has been and
> continues to be the current policy of these mass mobilization of troops, these
> long occupations and trillions of dollars going in, really abusing the
> Authorization to Use Military Force and taking action that expands far beyond the
> legal limitations of those current AUMFs.
> 
> So, with these terrorist cells, for example, yes, I do still believe that the 
> right approach to take is these quick strike forces, surgical strikes, in and
> out, very quickly, no long-term deployment, no long-term occupation to be able to
> get rid of the threat that exists and then get out and the very limited use of
> drones in those situations where our military is not able to get in without
> creating an unacceptable level of risk, and where you can make sure that you’re
> not causing, you know, a large amount of civilian casualties.

Despite saying this, Rep. Gabbard was described as being "anti-war" and a "peace 
candidate" when she ran for US President against Kamala Harris. Gabbard has gone on 
to renounce the Democratic party but she has, to my knowledge, never publicly 
addressed her self-contradictory pro-war propaganda.