Thursday, March 7, 2019

What's worse, Trump not reporting civilians we kill with drones, or Obama lying about them?

"President Donald Trump has overturned an Obama-era requirement for intelligence officials to publish an annual report on air strikes in places like Yemen, Libya and Pakistan — a document that experts called the main means for publishing official information about CIA drone strikes."

This sounds like Trump is making Obama’s drone program even worse. But Obama’s policy was more dishonest. The Obama administration assumed that every adult male killed by drones was a “combatant,” not a civilian, unless that was disproven by specific evidence. In effect, Barack Obama profiled Central Asian or Middle Eastern men by presuming them guilty. At least Donald Trump is going to openly not care about the civilians we kill, which, while callous, is less misleading than Obama’s statistics on civilian deaths that were artificially lowered based on gender and nationality bias.

0 comments: