{"id":154599,"date":"2015-05-26T18:23:36","date_gmt":"2015-05-26T18:23:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/?p=154599"},"modified":"2015-05-26T18:24:34","modified_gmt":"2015-05-26T18:24:34","slug":"taking-responsibility-drone-killings","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/newswire\/taking-responsibility-drone-killings\/","title":{"rendered":"Taking Responsibility for Drone Killings"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<p>When President Barack Obama apologized on April 23 to the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an American and an Italian, both hostages killed in a drone attack in Pakistan in January, he blamed their tragic deaths on the \u201cfog of war.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis operation was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we conduct counterterrorism efforts in the region,\u201d he said, and based on \u201chundreds of hours of surveillance, we believed that this (the building targeted and destroyed by drone launched missiles) was an al Qaeda compound; that no civilians were present.\u201d Even with the best of intentions and most stringent of safeguards, the president said, \u201cit is a cruel and bitter truth that in the fog of war generally and our fight against terrorists specifically, mistakes \u2013 sometimes deadly mistakes \u2013 can occur.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The term \u201cfog of war,\u201d <em>Nebel des Krieges <\/em>in German, was introduced by the Prussian military analyst Carl von Clausewitz in 1832, to describe the uncertainty experienced by commanders and soldiers on the battlefield. It is often used to explain or excuse \u201cfriendly fire\u201d and other unintended deaths in the heat and confusion of combat. The term raises vivid images of chaos and ambiguity. Fog of war describes incredible noise and trauma, volleys of bullets and artillery shells, bone jarring explosions, screams of the wounded, orders shouted out and countermanded, vision limited and distorted by clouds of gas, smoke and debris.<\/p>\n<p>War itself is a crime and war is hell, and in its fog soldiers can suffer from emotional, sensory and physical overload. In the fog of war, fatigued past the point of endurance and fearful both for their own lives and for those of their comrades, soldiers must often make split second decisions of life and death. In such deplorable conditions, it is unavoidable that \u201cmistakes \u2013 sometimes deadly mistakes \u2013 can occur.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.counterpunch.org\/2015\/05\/26\/taking-responsibility-for-drone-killings\/?utm_source=rss&amp;utm_medium=rss&amp;utm_campaign=taking-responsibility-for-drone-killings\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When President Barack Obama apologized on April 23 to the families of Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto, an American and an Italian, both hostages killed in a drone attack in Pakistan in January, he blamed their tragic deaths on the \u201cfog of war.\u201d \u201cThis operation was fully consistent with the guidelines under which we [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[519],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-154599","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-newswire"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154599","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=154599"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/154599\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=154599"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=154599"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/rinf.com\/alt-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=154599"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}