Charles McCarry Quotes
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.
McCarry, Charles. Interview by Matthew Kaminski. "The CIA's Novelist." The Wall Street Journal, 21 June 2013.
Ironically, one of the major objections to drone strikes is that they have caused civilian casualties.
Although the Amerian Drone program did inadvertently kill untargeted or mistakenly targeted civilians at that time, the collateral damage rate was smaller than any other weapons system available to the American forces. War has always produced unintended collateral damage. The only way to stop the killing of innocent civilians then and now is to stop the war.
This is always a problem in parts of the world where conflicts operate with many different parties and theater are personal grudges and scores to settle.
There was extensive hostility expressed by civilian populations in Pakistan and other countries where the United States made Drone strikes to take out terrorist leaders. However, there was much anti-American feeling in Pakistan before the Drone strikes.
In WWII the Germans bombed London causing many civilian casualties. In retaliation, the allies bombed German cities such as Hamburg and others. The resolution’s effect was very short lived. There are similar restrictions in the Geneva Conventions but again, if one side breaks the conventions, most other sides will retaliate. Note that in the 3rd condition, the one that is most contentious in the 21st century “negligence” is the operative word. An error or mistake is not necessarily or even usually negligence. Many people believe that international law prohibits the bombing of civilians from reading 3) and similar statements from treaties. However, an honest error, mistake or equipment malfunction which kills
Calley was the officer who gave orders to kill men, women and children of My Lai, a Vietnam village which Army intelligence felt had been sympathetic and given help and assistance to the Viet Cong. Calley was convicted by Court Marshall, but was released after serving a very light sentence. No one above Cally was held in any way responsible.
Grenier was fired by the Republican CIA Director Porter Goss because Grenier had internally been an opponent of Vice President Cheney’s Desire for Torture (like waterboarding) of terrorists suspects and detaining terrorists in secret prisons so the United States legal system could not order the government to stop breaking the law if they did.
Charles McCarry was an American writer, primarily of spy fiction, and a former undercover operative for the Central Intelligence Agency whom The Wall Street Journal described in 2013 as "the dean of American spy writers"; The New Republic magazine calls him "poet laureate of the CIA"; and Otto Penzler says he has produced some "poetic masterpieces". William Zinsser calls him a "political novelist". Jonathan Yardley, Pulitzer Prize-winning critic for the Washington Post, calls him a "'serious' novelist" whose work may include "the best novel ever written about life in high-stakes Washington, D.C." P. J. O'Rourke called him "the best modern writer on the subject of intrigue." O'Rourke learned about McCarry from a working covert operative who called McCarry "very realistic."
