Noam Chomsky Quotes

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

In fact, it's doing it all over the world. Obama, first of all, is running the biggest terrorist operation that exists, maybe in history. The drone assassination campaigns, which are just part of it. All of these operations, they are terror operations.

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

The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan?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'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.

I take my own experience and other assassinations through history and get a lot into the drone program, which doesn't work, as well.

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.

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

Stop the drones; stop the killing!

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

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 suicide bombings have increased. There's too many of them.

War is terrorism, magnified a hundred times.

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?

Even today, after the second failure of another world war, perhaps one can speak of a third war, one fought piecemeal, with crimes, massacres, destruction.

A drone strike is a terror weapon, we don't talk about it that way. It is; just imagine you are walking down the street and you don't know whether in 5 minutes there is going to be an explosion across the street from some place up in the sky that you can't see. Somebody will be killed, and whoever is around will be killed, maybe you'll be injured if you're there. That is a terror weapon. It terrorizes villages, regions, huge areas. It's the most massive terror campaign going on by a long shot.

Few years ago I did a movie, Good Kill, about drone pilots and for four or five months I'm obsessed with the Air Force.

I personally didn't see personal atrocities in the sense I saw somebody cut a head off or something like that. However, I did take part in free-fire zones, I did take part in harassment and interdiction fire, I did take part in search-and-destroy missions.

Israel does not target civilians. It targets the terrorists.

For those suggesting criticisms of drone kills should wait until the election: that'd be reasonable if he stops killing until the election.

American citizens have been killed abroad by drones with no due process, no accountability, no judicial review.

And for the people who promote drones as the answer to everything, there is a danger from being distanced from the reality of the ugly mess of war.

US government policies are continuing to do exactly the same thing [produce terrorism]. Two days after the Boston marathon bombings, there was a drone strike in Yemen attacking a peaceful village, which killed a target who could very easily have been apprehended. But of course it is just easier to terrorise people.

Israel demonstrated real hooliganism during the course of the recent operation, which I demanded.

I believe we should use any and all means necessary to take out people who pose a threat to us and our friends around the world. And it’s widely reported that drones are being used in drone strikes, and I support that and entirely, and feel the president was right to up the usage of that technology, and believe that we should continue to use it, to continue to go after the people that represent a threat to this nation and to our friends.