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Originally Posted by Hugh
Erm. no.
a)There is a huge difference between voting in a party, which a number of years later, decides to carry out a policy of genocide, and working in a camp where the genocide is carried out.
b) It's not about not giving a toss, it's about recognising real-world outcomes - in war, civilians get killed, it's only if the actual intention is to kill civilians when it becomes a war crime. If we didn't take any action which caused risks/death to people near the targeted individuals, we would have no way of striking back - that's why AQ and ISIS embed themselves within the populace.
I'm not being cold-hearted, just realistic.
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Jean Charles De Mendes springs to mind, Civilian shot dead by British police under the suspicion he was a terrorist. They've been in and out of court since 2005.
We wouldn't allow drones to take out terror suspects in the UK. Nor would we accept the death of 50 British members of the public as realistic.
1000 civilian deaths caused by Western drones to 50 potential terrorists killed isn't realistic, it's legal mass murder. That's over 900 strikes on evidently unverified targets with no legal response. You can't possibly come to the conclusion they were just caught up in the crossfire on 900 different occasions because they weren't. They were very wrongly marked as kill with evidently dire Intel. Despite this they continue to kill civilians. It's not accidental. It's based on the exact same presumption as Mendes. They were wrong then and they're even more wrong now.
The western double standards are truly a mess. The Russians waltz into Ukraine and it's a world outrage. The British and US march into the middle east looking for mythical weapons and find nothing...totally justified.