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| Good Kill Makes A Point About Drone Warfare You Never Considered |
| 2015-05-16 |
| At first, it seems like Egan's job is disturbing but still better than the alternative. He can kiss his children goodnight, and he doesn't have to worry his plane will get shot out of the air. But then he and his colleagues begin to get sketchy "signature assassination" orders from the CIA. A signature target is chosen based on information about who their compatriots are, not intel about things they've actually done. The idea is that somebody who hangs out with terrorists is probably also a terrorist. And in the world of Good Kill, these kinds of signature assassinations are happening all the time, at least for a few months in 2010. (There is conflicting evidence about how many such assassinations happened in real life, and when, but it is accurate to say that signature assassination exists.) At one point, Egan says that the one constant in life is war. "There is always a war," he says, taking one of about nine thousand swigs of gin he downs in the movie. We realize, as we watch Egan's life fall apart, that drones don't take soldiers out of war. In fact, they bring war right to their homes. Egan can never escape Afghanistan, nor the horror of killing innocent people (because inevitably innocents are caught in the blasts). Because the theater of war is in a cargo container just up the freeway from his house. |
| Posted by:Blossom Unains5562 |
| #7 Targeting the farmers and not the crops forces aggregation of producing venues, which reveals power structure signatures... |
| Posted by: Skidmark 2015-05-16 13:45 |
| #6 Besoeker, Thanks for the link to JPEL. The link has some disturbing info: "In 2009 the UN determined that the Taliban was earning $300 million a year through the drug trade, and according to a leaked NSA document "the insurgents could not be defeated without disrupting the drug trade."[5] In the opinion of American military commanders such as Bantz John Craddock, NATO's Supreme Allied Commander for Europe at the time, there was no need to prove that drug money was actually being funneled to the Taliban to declare Afghan couriers, farmers and dealers as legitimate targets of NATO strikes.[5] In early 2009 Craddock issued an order to expand the JPEL list to include drug producers." I have a problem with drone strikes on farmers. Al |
| Posted by: frozen al 2015-05-16 12:55 |
| #5 thousend swigs of gin huh. Got a problem with signiture kills...go investigate Barry "The Breakfast List" Obama. Its spelled Egon dipshit. Can't disagree with Besoeker. Killing the ant(s) on your countertop helps, but does not solve the problem. |
| Posted by: swksvolFF 2015-05-16 12:22 |
| #4 another movie that will make a buck seventy five in profits. |
| Posted by: Frank G 2015-05-16 10:37 |
| #3 You mean their highly effective international effort to stop Franco in that Civil War? Sort of like how they kept him from winning and becoming a dictator? |
| Posted by: 3dc 2015-05-16 10:15 |
| #2 Not to be compared to the hundreds of thousands who perished under various axis and allied bombing campaigns '39-'45. Yep, Lefty guilt trope. Instead of championing the incredible amount in the reduction of collateral damage, the usual 'it has to be perfect'(not the the Left has ever achieved much beyond mediocre at best) or its literally damnable. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2015-05-16 08:30 |
| #1 Leftist Hollywood bullshi* and rubbish. Yet another attempt to make military personnel out to be nut cases. The JPEL is how it's done. By the way, I don't agree with the process, but that doesn't make 'Good Kill' a factual accounting. Whack-a-mole creates effective media and political optics, little more. Killing 'fire ants' with an ice pick, one at a time, is no less a fool's errand. The people were not the disease, National Socialism was the disease. Same combatant rules should apply. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2015-05-16 02:03 |