of an american and also an italian hostage by an american drone strike along pakistan s border with afghanistan this year. and the intended target that day was the al qaeda compound. the administration said yesterday they had no idea the two hostages were hidden inside of that compound. one of the big questions around this story is why it has taken months for the administration to come forward and to report on these two deaths these two innocent deaths. it appears the cia knew something had gone terribly wrong after the strikes said six bodies not four bodies were pulled from the rubble. for weeks before that strike, intelligence feeding back to the cia from drones monitoring the compound have shown four men going in and out of the compound, just four men. so after the strike the cia expected to see four bodies. and then when they saw six, well that s when they knew they had
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maybe we ll decide that this is you know, that that is not a moral problem. but i think we ought to talk about it. we re doing this in countries with which we re not at war. international law, there are questions about that. and the president says he has the authorization under the authorization to use military force against al qaeda. but i think that should be debated. what do you think though when you poll this question right now, it comes back very popular. yeah. sure. for the criticism that s been out there for the filibuster from rand paul a couple of years ago. this polls well right now. no it does poll well. and why not? because as you said we re not risking american lives. we did not risk american lives to take out that all ka qaeda compound. and that s an important thing. i m happy that we didn t risk american lives and i m happy if they got rid of bad al qaeda
people plotting to attack the united states. but we need to talk through these questions. one other question we need to ask is whether drone strikes eliminate more terrorists than they create or vice versa. there are civilian casualties. the administration down plays this initial aspect. human rights organizations have a much higher estimate. there certainly have been hundreds of such casualties in the drone wars. and if you extrapolate from that those sort of mushy figure certainly we have em bittered and angered some substantial number of people who probably have been gone on to join this group or join that group or otherwise impede what we re trying to do over there. so, you know, you don t make friends that way. you don t make friends by the kind of discussion and
but war never goes as planned, not even war conducted by repeat control. gene, thanks for being with us. let s talk about this. there is a balancing act i still can t quite figure out when i think about this. one way of looking at this is saying that over the last two years because of the drone program we ve had we ve taken out an awful lot of bad guys out there. we have put a real dent in al qaeda because of this and have done that while paying a much lower cost in terms of casualties on our side than we normally or used to have been the case. that s absolutely the case. that s why this is hard it is a hard issue. it is not really a democratic versus republican issue, it really hasn t been and really shouldn t be. i i think that we can t escape the what i see as moral questions, as legal questions. this is war by assassination. and i think we ought to figure out what we think about that. we have a law against assassinating foreign leaders. this isn t quite the same thing but i m