A sensible thought.
Zawahiri reportedly killed
- Thread starter Raoul
- Start date
Its quite telling that the Taliban protected Al-Qaeda back then and once back in power, continued protecting them. So much for Taliban 2.0.
Last I checked, we were at war with Al Qaeda.
Yep. It’s almost like they were friends the whole time!
You really should look up who was shot in the head on April 30th
the drone operations are terror. should the us military and intel agencies be allowed to live? or is american blood worth more than other blood?
maybe but you're killing and have killed a lot of innocent people who have nothing to do with al qaeda including many iraqis. the drone program and other extrajudicial methods of killing are basically the death penalty except less accurate and open to the murder of children as well as adults.
it's terror meets terror except "ours" is not terror because it's us. not for me thanks.
We know. You don’t have to say it every post. We literally lived through all of it. Hell, I imagine all of us in here have stated that the innocent people who’ve died is not good. Bad. Terrible. Shouldn’t happen. That’s literally why the US invented a damn Hellfire missile with swords on it.
I’m still really damn glad that piece of shit isn’t stealing oxygen anymore.
Terrorists hate drones. Mainly because they terrorize them the same way terrorists terrorize civilians. They can't predict when and where the missile might come from, which creates a sense of constant paranoia, which in turn disrupts their operations. In Zawahiri's case, he apparently had rock solid countermeasures in place, with the exception of a bad habit of hanging out on his balcony at roughly the same time every day. Much as with Bin Ladin and his daily walks in his walled courtyard.
i repeat it because you justify extrajudicial killing by claiming war rights with a specific group. american military has terrorised an entire region and an entire country which had nothing to do with that group, in the iraqi case. so it does bear repeating.
i can understand that but i also believe the facts justify that whatever you think the us intention is its military and drone operators have become terrorists ever since 9/11. 20k-40k dead from these measures. innocent civillians that is. that includes airstrikes, too. that's terrorism. the kid's story from the last page sums it up. used to like playing in blue skies but now only goes out in grey skies because drones operates less frequently. that's a child terrorised from pakistan. one of thousands and thousands who never had a thing to do with aq. so as i said. broken clocks are right twice a day but still broken. same with the drone program. it's murderous more often than not.
Unfortunately civilians dying during war is a part of war. The advantage of drones is that far less civilians are affected and or killed/injured/displaced than during the alternative, which is a full on ground invasion to get a few people.
Yes. Yes I do justify killing the guy that helped planned the Luxor Massacre*, US Embassy bombings in Africa, the USS Cole, 9/11, etc. I do indeed.
*he’d had a death sentence on his head in Egypt for that one since the late 90s.
We never should have invaded Iraq. It was a bullshit war. But this isn’t about Iraq.
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touch grass
You don’t celebrate that one either, eh? Must be something to do with capitalizing letters.
i literally did not know what day hitler died because im normal.
right but justify it here and you justify it generally which means many thousands more innocent people murdered. and an implicit ignorance of those already dead. saying it's bad and shouldn't happen isn't good enough. it's state terror. celebrating what you see as a justified killing just reinforces the idea that it's ok to go about the world like this. that isn't right imo. we won't agree but there's my reasoning which is consistent.
not a big fan of internal bleeding personally but when it happens to a certain someone in 453 AD i toast with whiskey if you know what i mean 
A person who studied history and who teaches history knowing the day Hitler died is literally normal.
Attila gets a bad rap.not a big fan of internal bleeding personally but when it happens to a certain someone in 453 AD i toast with whiskey if you know what i mean
Oh wait, do I need to walk back outside?
I’m pretty sure there’s room for nuance in the drone strike debate and that you’re being a bit dramatic in your generalization.
From what I’ve seen, this dude was killed by a non-explosive missile while alone on a balcony. That’s just a bit different than shooting a high explosive missile into a wedding party.
One can very easily justify non-explosive strike alone on a balcony and condemn high explosives shot into a wedding party.
ok pop quiz, what is significant about july 16th?
Likely lots of things. But you’d have to give a bit more context.
ah well, guess it wasnt that important after all
I'll celebrate this the day Bush, Dick and Blair are given the rope for the murders they orchestrated, but that's never going to happen.
He was a c*nt though. Manipulating people to kill others for his own personal and political gains.
He was a c*nt though. Manipulating people to kill others for his own personal and political gains.
Last I checked the amount of death directly caused by the US makes any American celebrating the death of one terrorist extremely hypocritical unless they keep that same energy for the American political leaders who have killed innocents indiscriminately all over the world.
Nothing personal against anyone, but I find it hard to celebrate this killing as chances are it will lead to a terrorist attack somewhere as "revenge" .
Nothing personal against anyone, but I find it hard to celebrate this killing as chances are it will lead to a terrorist attack somewhere as "revenge" .
Yeah, that’s the rub, isn’t it? Hard to see how intermittently whacking the most senior guy does anything other than create martyrs. And whacking them using a controversial technique like done strikes surely just causes more problems (by fuelling/perpetuating anti-Western sentiment) than whatever problem is solved by killing this one bloke.
Not a fan of his content.
If they've killed him and only him then fair play to them and the technology they have developed to be honest.
I'd be interested to compare the reactions if say, the Iraqi military in a few years time, used similar technology to strike and kill Bush or Cheney on US soil, or Blair on UK soil. But that's neither here nor there today - this prick murdered designed the murder of countless people and the world is better off without him.
I'd be interested to compare the reactions if say, the Iraqi military in a few years time, used similar technology to strike and kill Bush or Cheney on US soil, or Blair on UK soil. But that's neither here nor there today - this prick murdered designed the murder of countless people and the world is better off without him.
Where did I say it was ‘good?’
It was the proper use of military assets to eliminate a high value target. We didn’t use missiles against OBL due to the high probability of collateral damage & it was the right call not to. Here the safe house was smack dab in the middle of a populous city, we learned our lesson in Somalia & probably never even entertained inserting operators.
To not use a (apparently) kinetic stand off weapon which offered the lowest probability of collateral damage because such missions caused such collateral damage in the past is asinine on its face. If you scaled that out, wars would be fought with cotton balls. It’s the military’s / intelligence services’ responsibility to reduce any collateral with the next mission & it appears to have done so.
Does this sentiment also apply to the likes of Obama and Bush Jr?
48k? that's only 16 9/11s, *the* singular nation-defining trauma!
given the low value of human life in the rest of the world, it shows how enlightened the US is by not making it 480k.
It was a clean strike apparently - as in no civilians casualties, including his wives or family members.
Other than the hundreds of times it resulted in the deaths of innocent people and killing the wrong person (the US recently shot a bunch of kids in a care workers car because they thought he and kids were terrorists). Ends justify the thousands of innocent deaths using this same method?
The alternative would be a full on ground invasion of a country, which would be far more destructive in terms of loss of life. Drone strikes and special operation raids (such as the Bin Laden raid) are used specifically because they are far more effective and less destructive than the alternative.
It does with the caveat that there's zero chance either of those two might get bumped off for morality's sake.
This was not one of the ‘hundreds of other times;’ to compare them is rather specious. This was apparently a successful operation which centered around having no collateral damage. The usage of the kinetic Hellfire was extremely surgical.
The alternative was to put boots on the ground which would have been massively daft. The proper choice was made.
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I always think it’s a little disingenuous to only tally up deaths due to jihadist terror that took place in the US when comparing body counts. It also smacks of the whole “brown lives don’t matter” accusation so often aimed at the west.
As per my first post in this thread, I believe that drone strikes like this will probably cause more problems than they solve but if we’re thinking about tackling Al Qaeda in terms of harm reduction we need to consider all the damage done by these organisations, including the regions in which they are based.
A broken clock is right twice a day. To say a method is correct because of this mission, when there have been countless others that have failed and resulted in innocent deaths, is putting head in the sand.
An alternative might actually be looking at what contributes to rise of such organizations that cause such havoc. Or do you actually believe they hate us for our freedom?
I've lived in Pakistan, they've killed us way more than they've killed anyone else and it sure isn't because of our freedom.