Barack Obama Quotes

The truth is that, in trying to get at terrorists who are in countries that either are unwilling or unable to capture those terrorists or disable them themselves, there are a lot of situations where the use of a drone is going to result in much fewer civilian casualties and much less collateral damage than if I send in a battalion of marines.

We've been talking about this for a good while, the immorality of drones, dropping bombs on innocent people. It's been over 200 children so far. These are war crimes.

The only difference between Obama and Bush is that Obama is killing more people.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

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.

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.

We need to focus on killing the bad guys, not getting stuck in Middle Eastern civil wars that don't keep America safe.

During my lifetime, America has been constantly waging war against much of humanity: impoverished people mostly, in stricken places.

Bush and his commanders in the war on terrorism are willing to waste non-terrorists to kill terrorists. Right or wrong, that is not caring about the dignity of every life.

The evil lot who did that thing on September 11 did it because they wanted to create a war between America and Islam. And by invading Iraq, we gave them what they hoped for.

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

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

Stop the drones; stop the killing!

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

To defeat Islamic extremist terrorism, we must put them on defense. If they are at war against us - which they have declared - we must commit ourselves to unconditional victory against them.

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.

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. It's just the weapons platform.

The United States has been essentially engaged in an ongoing war that most people date from 2001. That war has taken us to Afghanistan, to Iraq, in a lesser way to other countries - Libya, Somalia, Yemen.

How can you claim infallibility and claim that in these 114 [drone] strikes there was just one mistake -- one person killed that was a civilian -- and at the same time say, 'Well, we don't really know how many people were killed or who they were, but we know they weren't civilians'? I don't know how you can do that.

The war against terrorism is terrorism. The whole thing is just bullshit.

I recently had the opportunity to vote to give the president limited authority to begin strikes against terrorists in Iraq and Syria.

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.

We're not allowed to carry out harsh interrogations anymore, but we're allowed to fly over somebody's village, without due process, and kill them all?

If we have actionable intelligence about high value terrorist targets and President [Pervez] Musharraf will not act, we will.

The drones are a terrorist weapon, they not only kill targets but also terrorise other people.