Thread by @Pinboard

None of these commanders were "on the ground", the decision to kill a bunch of Afghan kids was made by people looking at drone footage on video screens. The main threat to US forces doing the targeting was lower back pain and eye strain.

https://twitter.com/DanLamothe/status/1438945511344648192

Commanders like to talk about the "fog of war" as if that excuses indiscriminate killing without consequences. But part of that concept is that you yourself are under threat and have to make immediate decisions with inadequate information, not sitting in an air-conditioned office

Biden's maudlin and performative sense of empathy seems to end at the US border.

The US military's response to killing children in a country we're not at war with ("my bad"), based on nothing but a gut feeling by someone watching video camera footage, is unacceptable.

https://twitter.com/1TVNewsAF/status/1438947100813926411

Remember that we did not withdraw from Afghanistan— our avowed policy is to continue these kinds of strikes (the jargon is "over the horizon capability") indefinitely, based on intelligence that was laughable even when we had tens of thousands of troops occupying the country.

This is the real asymmetric warfare of the 21st century—low-intensity perpetual bombing of Muslim civilian populations by first-world militaries, coupled with larger-scale punitive operations if the people we bomb dare to attack a military target.

The only way our forever wars will end is if the targeted populations find a more effective way of killing American soldiers. It is the only deterrent with political impact. We've seen in Yemen how no amount of suffering by innocents has any impact on national security discourse.

In the meantime, we need a full Congressional investigation of every drone strike conducted in the War on Terror and its victims. The US national security apparatus needs to be held accountable for a two decades long campaign of indiscriminate extrajudicial murder.

The opening words of the Declaration of Independence proclaim that "all men are created equal, and are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life" There is no way to reconcile those words with murder of innocents of any country by drone.

This most execrable part of our foreign policy is the one on which there is absolute bipartisan agreement. Military bills sail through a gridlocked Congress, amended only if the amounts are judged too small. For twenty years, there has been no one to vote for to put a stop to it

"No disciplinary action expected". The proper punishment here is to put the commanders and analysts in a pickup truck and make them drive around Hadhramaut for a few days delivering water and groceries, trying not to look suspicious from above.

https://twitter.com/LucasFoxNews/status/1438936911259779080

A very interesting thread on how US drone strikes are conducted from a former practitioner:

https://twitter.com/marcgarlasco/status/1439000985024794624