Tim Kaine Quotes

Needless to say, there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile launched by a keystroke executed thousands of miles away.

Where land mines are indiscriminate, cheap, and brutal, drones are discriminate, expensive, and brutal. And yet they are insufficiently discriminate: the assassination of the Taliban chief Baitullah Mehsud in Pakistan in 2009 succeeded only on the seventeenth attempt.

Outside the context of armed conflict, the use of drones for targeted killings is almost never likely to be legal.

A drone isn't any different than a bomb; it's not any different than other weapons that are used, where there is always a capacity for people to be killed who you wished were not.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict. Other nations also possess this technology. Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it.

Ground combat almost always kills more civilians than drone strikes do.

It’s hard to know whether drone strikes have provoked more anger than other forms of Western power.

I think the reason that drones have become so controversial is because they're used in Pakistan; they're used in Yemen; they've been used in all kinds of places.

The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan? Because we've upped the drone strikes and most of the country doesn't even really know what that means or who we're killing or... it's such a new weapon that we don't know what the long term impacts of that kind of military action is going to be.

Drone attacks subvert the rule of law - we become judge, jury, and executioner - at the push of a button.

It takes minutes to play, but 'Unmanned' sticks with you for long after the credits roll. As a part of a two-man team for an unarmed drone, you experience one day in the life of this man who's tired of staring through the camera of a drone flying around the Middle East and keeping his finger on the trigger.

I cannot grasp the difference between killing people with drones or rifles and knives. The objective in war is to kill the enemy before he kills you. I can't fathom the almost religious zeal with which the use of drones is being opposed.

It is true that when there's a drone attack, those - that the - the terrorists are killed, it's true. But 500 and 5,000 more people rises against it, and more terrorism occurs, and more - more bomb blasts occurs.

Stop the drones; stop the killing!

The discomfort of my colleagues, where it existed, didn’t stem from targeted killing itself.... The discomfort existed because it felt like we were doing something, on a large scale, that we’d sworn not to. Most of us felt as though we were violating Executive Order 12333.

… civilian casualties [with drone attacks] have proved formidable. Haphazard intelligence has often been to blame, as earn local tipsters have provided the United States with false information in order to take out innocent rivals.

What scares me about drone strikes is how they are perceived around the world. The resentment created by American use of unmanned strikes... is much greater than the average American appreciates. They are hated on a visceral level, even by people who've never seen one or seen the effects of one.

In Yemen, the United States conducted more drone strikes in 2016 than any year except 2012, the peak of the campaign in the country, according to data collected by New America.

Drones are just another weapon, and they turn out to be a very effective weapon that puts no American troops at risk, and I don't see why we shouldn't use them against identified enemy targets.

To me, drone use is a moral issue.

Armed drones have become Barack Obama's way to engage in terrorist-infested hellholes without putting 'boots on the ground.' For years, the CIA has been running a secrecy-shrouded program of targeted killings in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen, and more recently in Somalia, Syria and Iraq.

When I read the script [of Good Kill], it read like a science fiction film. And Andrew [writer/director Andrew Niccol] is known for sci-fi. But when I spoke to him, he said this picture was 100% factual, which blew my mind. I realized then how little I knew about the drone program. And I felt that, if I knew so little about it, there must be others who should be educated about what's going on.

What I do know is that drones are a modern weapon. When used effectively, when taking out ISIS or terrorist leaders, that's pretty impressive. When bombing wedding parties of innocent people and killing dozens of them, that is, needless to say, not effective and enormously counterproductive. So whatever the mechanism, whoever is in control of that policy, it has to be refined so that we are killing the people we want to kill and not innocent collateral damage.

Our enemies are real. But so are the moral questions and long-term political implications of drone strikes.