How a Drone War Works

1. President orders somebody killed, based on God knows what.

2. By their mystic arts, people operating drones decide they have found the person the President wants dead.*
3. Drone blows up that person and whoever else happens to be around.
4. All victims (funeral goers, teenagers, etc.) are labeled “combatants” for the crime of happening to be in the area of the guy the drone operators are pretty sure was the guy the President wanted dead.
5. Kids are labeled “collateral damage”.
6. Administration labels strike a success.
7. If somebody asks, “What about that kid?” court prophets say, “War is hell. Better the innocent should perish than the guilty escape.”
8. If somebody asks, “How do we even know if the target was guilty of anything? How do we even know the target was the guy on the President’s kill list?”, Administration retorts, “Everywhere is the Battlefield in the War on Terror!” and ponders adding subversive questioner’s name to secret kill list. Return to step 1.

Feel safe, or you you may be a Enemy of the State.

*Or we kill “suspected militants”, even when their full identities are not known. Previously, the CIA was restricted in most cases to killing only individuals whose names were on an approved list. Since 2008, however, it has been US policy to target nameless individuals if it looks to the CIA like they might be up to something terroristical, based on God knows what.**

**On a related note, readers on the “Lying for Jesus” thread are asking me, “Agencies like the CIA lie for the Greater Good and *that’s* obviously okay and never leads to grave mischief, so clearly it is crazy to suggest that Christians should not make lying a regular part of their complete breakfast. You, sir, are a rigid black and white fundamentalist”. Yes, that’s right. “Faithful conservative Catholics[TM]” are declaring it “fundamentalism” to repeat the obvious teaching of the Catechism and warn that instead of the ends justifying the means, the use of evil means leads to evil ends–as the God-damned (and I use that term with theological precision and not as profanity) murder of that child above demonstrates.