| I believe government is the only place where that level of incompetence is common. Ha! No. No, even clerks at the DMV get things right a whole lot more often than that. ;) And coming from drone operators and intelligence officers? That's completely unbelievable to me. Those guys are professionals. Quite the opposite, I've seen plenty of footage of the systems in operation, and I find a collateral damage rate of 2% or lower completely believable. With a drone, you can be watching your target for tens of minutes, making sure he's really the guy you want. Maybe you haven't seen it from a drone camera? It looks like this:
http://www.popsci.com/military-aviation-amp-space/article/20... The problem with the 2% figure is that 2% of even 3,000 would only be 60 innocent people killed, but 160+ children have been killed.. Well, it's 2% "so far in 2012". I think they said it was 11% over the life of the program, and that it's gotten much better over time. So even if the numbers are accurate, that still works out. The CIA says it isn't that high, though, and I'm inclined to trust them on that. They do have cameras on the target when they take the shot and all. And I don't know about you, but it's a bit too paranoid for me to believe they're making figures up out of whole cloth. Why not share the data with news organizations? The camera footage almost certainly contains classified information about system capabilities and tactics. From their perspective, keeping systems effective is 100000% more important than looking good in the media. Especially since you look bad in the media anyway, even if you give them all the data (just ask scientists). try and find out how many U.S citizens are killed annually by police and you won't get anywhere. What, like this? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforce... I put "us citizens killed annually by police" into google and it was the first link. What are the chances that they are keeping track of foreign civilian casualties? Pretty good. They care deeply about the effectiveness of their systems. |