“What the public needs to understand is that the video provided by a drone is far from clear enough to detect someone carrying a weapon, even on a crystal-clear day with limited cloud and perfect light. This makes it incredibly difficult for the best analysts to determine if someone has a weapon for sure.
“One example comes to mind: The feed is so pixelated, what if it’s a shovel, not a weapon?
……..We always wonder if we killed the right people, if we endangered the wrong people, if we destroyed an innocent civilian’s life, all because of a bad image or angle”. (Heather Linebaugh, former drone operator, quoted in The Guardian Weekly, 03/01/2014)
What is the moral difference here between the death penalty for murder in America and drone warfare? The death sentence is disappearing as a weapon against crime because there have been so many mistakes. Guess what? Ordinary women and children are being killed in Pakistan, where culpability is uncertain and where errors are easily made. The drone operators do not kill innocents deliberately, I’m sure, nor does the legal system in Texas deliberately kill innocent men. They die because of mistakes or incompetence, and these errors cause tremendous anguish and hatred.
Put like this, how can Epicureans support these endless wars, now conducted with drones?Epicurus would probably say that drones are in the end self-defeating.
One can understand the attraction of drones. On the face of it they target only the baddies, and no one argues with attacking Al Queda. Had the struggle in Afghanistan been concentrated just on the terrorists instead of the government and people of Afghanistan we (arguably) might have come out ahead. But, aside from killing innocents, the use of drones has encouraged everyone else to develop them, including, apparently, Iran. So we are quickly getting blow-back. War and violence always have unexpected consequences. When we are spied upon at home by drones in the sky ( the police are reportedly already onto it), and the Russians and Chinese are using them to spy on us too, just reflect that this will be partly owing to their profligate use in Pakistan and elsewhere. All thanks to the military- industrial complex.