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sailingaway
02-22-2013, 10:29 PM
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/close-read-drones-journalists.jpg


In thinking about drones strikes and targeted killings, it can be instructive to picture them hitting people you know, either deliberately or as collateral damage. Doing so may not even be much of a stretch, nor should it be. (It’s already the case for people living in parts of Pakistan and Yemen.) Last week, I moderated a live chat on the ethics of drone warfare with Michael Walzer, the author of “Just and Unjust Wars”; Jeff McMahan, a professor of philosophy at Rutgers, who has also written about just-war theory; and The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, who is a master of the subject. The discussion took some interesting turns, touching on the idea of a secret committee that the President would be asked to check with before killing an American and the question of whether China would ever assert the right to call in a drone strike on a dissident living in San Francisco. After Walzer and McMahan suggested some criteria for strikes—criminality, risk of American lives—I asked them this:
Doesn’t a journalist working abroad who is about to release classified information about a war crime—thus committing a crime—that will provoke retribution or a break with allies—endangering Americans—fit this definition of a target?
Walzer didn’t initially think that it did. The danger to Americans, he said, had “to come directly not indirectly from the target before he can be a target.” McMahan had a different view:
If the release of classified information really would seriously endanger the lives of innocent people and the only way to prevent the release of the information was to kill the journalist, then the journalist would be liable to attack. But the evidential standards in such a case would be very high and would be unlikely to be satisfiable in practice.
“So Michael wouldn’t kill the journalist but Jeff just might…” I posted, and the chat moved on. But the question of the journalist is worth dwelling on, because it gets at some of the fundamental problems with the targeted-killing program. Who is “dangerous”? And who decides? A Justice Department white paper laying out the circumstances in which the President can kill Americans talks not only about Al Qaeda but also about “associated forces,” not clearly defined. Michael Crowley, of Time, pointed out that Jeh Johnson, the former Pentagon general counsel, has said that “Our enemy does not include anyone solely in the category of activist, journalist, or propagandist,” and I don't mean to say that the current Administration has adopted the logic that it does, though that “solely” can do a lot of work. The vagueness could easily increase with the passage of time, as targeted killings shift from a policy to a precedent. The logical chain, as illustrated in our chat, can move very quickly.


Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/can-a-president-use-drones-against-journalists.html#ixzz2LfFFkJdy

acptulsa
02-23-2013, 10:35 AM
Can they? Obviously.

May they? Not according to the executive order that prohibits foreign assassinations. Not according to the Consitution.

Do they? Only the unprincipled, power mad ones. Otherwise known as all of them.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejvyDn1TPr8

surf
02-23-2013, 11:47 AM
from comments

A drone killing a journalist seems fratricidal.
Posted 2/21/2013, 10:59:11pm by MarcusAnonymous

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/02/can-a-president-use-drones-against-journalists.html#ixzz2LkHDfy8g
good find sailing
the level of acceptance implies that we would be ok if a drone took out our uncle's house....

"we" used loosely

libertygrl
02-23-2013, 12:09 PM
Well, attacks on journalists have been done before so what's to stop them again?


February 18, 2005
The Nation

Shooting the Messenger
The real issue in the Eason Jordan controversy is the US military's killing of journalists in Iraq

by Jeremy Scahill
from the March 7, 2005 issue of The Nation

One of the most powerful executives in the cable news business, CNN's Eason
Jordan, was brought down after he spoke out of school during a panel
discussion at the World Economic Forum in January. In a rare moment of candor,
Jordan reportedly said that the US military had targeted a dozen journalists
who had been killed in Iraq. The comments quickly ignited a firestorm on the
Internet, fueled by right-wing bloggers, that led to Jordan's recanting,
apologizing and ultimately resigning after twenty-three years at the network,
"in an effort to prevent CNN from being unfairly tarnished by the controversy."
But the real controversy here should not be over Jordan's comments. The
controversy ought to be over the unconscionable silence in the United States
about the military's repeated killing of journalists in Iraq.

Consider the events of April 8, 2003. Early that morning, Al Jazeera
correspondent Tareq Ayyoub was reporting from the network's Baghdad bureau. He
was providing an eyewitness account of a fierce battle between US and Iraqi
forces along the banks of the Tigris. As he stood on the roof of the building,
a US warplane swooped in and fired a rocket at Al Jazeera's office. Ayyoub was
killed instantly. US Central Command released a statement claiming, "Coalition
forces came under significant enemy fire from the building where the
Al-Jazeera journalists were working." No evidence was ever produced to bolster
this claim. Al Jazeera, which gave the US military its coordinates weeks
before the invasion began, says it received assurances a day before Ayyoub's
death that the network would not be attacked.

At noon on April 8, a US Abrams tank fired at the Palestine Hotel, home and
office to more than 100 unembedded international journalists operating in
Baghdad at the time. The shell smashed into the fifteenth-floor Reuters
office, killing two cameramen, Reuters's Taras Protsyuk and José Couso of
Spain's Telecinco. The United States again claimed that its forces had come
under enemy fire and were acting in self-defense. This claim was contradicted
by scores of journalists who were in the hotel and by a French TV crew that
filmed the attack. In its report on the incident, the Committee to Protect
Journalists asserted that "Pentagon officials, as well as commanders on the
ground in Baghdad, knew that the Palestine Hotel was full of international
journalists."

In a chilling statement at the end of that day in Iraq, then-Pentagon
spokesperson Victoria Clarke spelled out the Pentagon's policy on journalists
not embedded with US troops. She warned them that Baghdad "is not a safe
place. You should not be there."

Eason Jordan's comment was hardly a radical declaration. He was expressing a
common view among news organizations around the world. "We have had three
deaths, and they were all non-embedded, non-coalition nationals and they were
all at the hands of the US military, and the reaction of the US authorities in
each case was that they were somehow justified," David Schlesinger, Reuters's
global managing editor, said in November. "What is the US's position on
nonembeds? Are nonembedded journalists fair game?" One of the BBC's top news
anchors, Nik Gowing, said recently that he was "speak[ing] for a large number
of news organizations, many of whom are not really talking publicly about this
at the moment," when he made this statement about the dangers facing reporters
in Iraq: "The trouble is that a lot of the military--particularly the
American...military--do not want us there. And they make it very uncomfortable
for us to work. And I think that this...is leading to security forces in some
instances feeling it is legitimate to target us with deadly force and with
impunity."

The US military has yet to discipline a single soldier for the killing of a
journalist in Iraq. While some incidents are classified as "ongoing
investigation[s]," most have been labeled self-defense or mistakes. Some are
even classified as "justified," like the killing of Reuters cameraman Mazen
Dana, shot near Abu Ghraib prison when his camera was allegedly mistaken for a
rocket-propelled grenade launcher. Also "justified" was the killing of Al
Arabiya TV's Mazen al-Tumeizi, blown apart by a US missile as he reported on a
burning US armored vehicle on Baghdad's Haifa Street.

There have also been several questionable killings of journalists at US
military checkpoints, such as the March 2004 shooting deaths of Ali Abdel-Aziz
and Ali al-Khatib of Al Arabiya. The Pentagon said the soldiers who shot the
journalists acted within the "rules of engagement." And Reuters freelancer
Dhia Najim was killed by US fire while filming resistance fighters in November
2004. "We did kill him," an unnamed military official told the New York Times.
"He was out with the bad guys. He was there with them, they attacked, and we
fired back and hit him."

The military has faced almost no public outcry at home about these killings.
In fact, comments by Ann Cooper of the Committee to Protect Journalists have
been used to discredit Jordan's statement at Davos. "From our standpoint,"
Cooper was widely quoted as saying, "journalists are not being targeted by the
US military in Iraq." But as CPJ's Joel Campagna acknowledges, the Pentagon
has not been cooperative in the investigations of many of these journalist
killings. The fact is that CPJ doesn't know that the military has not targeted
journalists, and there are many facts that suggest that it has. These include
not only the events of April 8, 2003, but credible accounts of journalists
being tortured by the US military in Iraq, such as Salah Hassan and Suheib
Badr Darwish of Al Jazeera [see Christian Parenti, "Al Jazeera Goes to Jail,"
March 29, 2004] and three Reuters staffers who say they were brutalized by US
forces for seventy-two hours after they filmed a crashed US helicopter near
Falluja in January 2004. According to news reports, the journalists were
blindfolded, forced to stand for hours with their arms raised and threatened
with sexual abuse. A family member of one journalist said US interrogators
stripped him naked and forced a shoe into his mouth.

In many of these cases, there is a common thread: The journalists, mostly
Arabs, were reporting on places or incidents that the military may not have
wanted the world to see--military vehicles in flames, helicopters shot down,
fierce resistance against the "liberation" forces, civilian deaths.

In his resignation letter, Jordan wrote, "I never meant to imply U.S. forces
acted with ill intent when U.S. forces accidentally killed journalists." The
families and colleagues of the slain journalists believe otherwise. And it is
up to all journalists, not just those in Europe and the Middle East, to honor
the victims by holding their killers responsible. In Spain, the family of
cameraman José Couso has filed a lawsuit against the US soldiers who killed
him, and they plan to travel to the United States for the anniversary of his
death this spring. Will any network have the courage to put them on the air?
Jeremy Scahill, who has spent extensive time reporting from Iraq, is a
journalist with the national radio and TV program Democracy Now!

w ww.democracynow.org. He can be reached at j eremy@democracynow.org
© 2005 The Nation

h ttp://www.oilempire.us/mediawar.html

QuickZ06
02-23-2013, 12:15 PM
Government has been killing them for years.

DamianTV
02-23-2013, 03:07 PM
If they do, what can you do about it?

MoneyWhereMyMouthIs2
02-23-2013, 04:17 PM
Funny how journalists will start giving a shit all of the sudden.

kcchiefs6465
02-23-2013, 04:24 PM
I think Saeed Chmagh (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saeed_Chmagh) would say they will. On accident, purposefully, doesn't really matter when your body is eviscerated.

pcosmar, could you please embed the video of the AC130 gunning down the group of people [two journalists] and the children who were inside the car of the first responders?

Seems every video I find of it, you have to sign in to confirm your age.

paulbot24
02-23-2013, 04:36 PM
Funny how journalists will start giving a shit all of the sudden.

The same thing happened with NDAA and they got "exempted" from that. Their argument in court was that by communicating with suspected terrorists, they could be perceived as "colluding" with them, which would put them in violation of NDAA. They especially took issue with the vague language in the bill and the possibilities of loose interpretations. A federal judge agreed and they all got "exempted." What is sad is they could have used the publicity garnered by their case to spotlight how the vague language in the bill is extremely dangerous for not just the media, but for everybody. However, true to form, they were only interested in covering their own asses and shielding themselves from accountability.

kcchiefs6465
02-23-2013, 04:40 PM
The same thing happened with NDAA and they got "exempted" from that. Their argument in court was that by communicating with suspected terrorists, they could be perceived as "colluding" with them, which would put them in violation of NDAA. They especially took issue with the vague language in the bill and the possibilities of loose interpretations. A federal judge agreed and they all got "exempted." What is sad is they could have used the publicity garnered by their case to spotlight how the vague language in the bill is extremely dangerous for not just the media, but for everybody. However, true to form, they were only interested in covering their own asses and protecting their habit of unaccountability.
They should realize that we have sent missiles at barbeques for one or two men. They probably should try to keep their 'journalism' to phone calls only.

Make no mistake about it, it will be a 'tragic mistake' when they kill another journalist. Foreign policy or drone warfare won't be discussed much though.

pcosmar
02-23-2013, 04:43 PM
By request,,


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

presence
02-23-2013, 04:49 PM
By request,,


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0

that's where I was at on this...

+

Israeli spokesperson admits to targeting journalists in Gaza (http://electronicintifada.net/blogs/charlotte-silver/israeli-spokesperson-admits-targeting-journalists-gaza)

kcchiefs6465
02-23-2013, 04:50 PM
By request,,


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5rXPrfnU3G0
This video pretty much sums up whether or not they can use drones on journalists.

I am sure they will state in no uncertain terms that they cannot, but get caught 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' [with a group of men] and a missile very well could be coming their way. Half assed apologies where no one takes responsibility will follow.

And a h/t to you pcosmar.

thoughtomator
02-23-2013, 04:53 PM
"Yes we can!"

presence
02-23-2013, 05:04 PM
http://priceofoil.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/barack-obama-yes-we-can.jpg