Bernie Sanders Quotes

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.

I've got no problem with drone strikes.

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The drones are really interesting - how have the troops withdrawn from Afghanistan?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

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

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.

In America, we're getting too comfortable with our ability to take kinetic strikes around the world without having enough process to avoid consistently the kinds of civilian casualties that can end up actually hurting us in the war against radicalization.

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.

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.

The United States is the first nation to regularly conduct strikes using remotely piloted aircraft in an armed conflict. Other nations also possess this technology. Many more nations are seeking it, and more will succeed in acquiring it.

Whatever one thinks of the justifiability of drone attacks, it's one of the least 'brave' or courageous modes of warfare ever invented. It's one thing to call it just, but to pretend it's 'brave' is Orwellian in the extreme.

It is true that when there's a drone attack, those - that the - the terrorists are killed, it's true. But 500 and 5,000 more people rises against it, and more terrorism occurs, and more - more bomb blasts occurs.

Needless to say, there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile launched by a keystroke executed thousands of miles away.

Drones can be a highly effective way of dealing with high-priority targets, but they should not become the drug of choice for an administration that is afraid to use successful, legal and safe tactics of the past.

The CIA's drone campaign is extraordinarily effective, and the agency is getting progressively better at targeting senior leaders and disrupting their networks.

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

Stop the drones; stop the killing!

… civilian casualties [with drone attacks] have proved formidable. Haphazard intelligence has often been to blame, as earn local tipsters have provided the United States with false information in order to take out innocent rivals.

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

I think carpet bombing is an absolutely tremendous idea if the enemy accommodates you by laying himself out like a carpet in the middle of the desert without any civilians or infrastructure around him. Sadly, the Islamic State has learned that that is a losing proposition and does not accommodate us in that way.

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.

After a short period of time in Pakistan, it's clear that drones are not a security solution. If you believe in drones, the original idea was to go after so-called high-value targets, which according to the NYU-Stanford study 2% of the people killed by drones are high-value targets - now, who are all the rest of the people? Well, it's a secret program, so therefore the CIA doesn't have to tell us anything, yet they claim that with each attack they're getting militants. Now we have people coming forward, saying, actually, no we're not terrorists.

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.

The stories coming out of Iraq everyday - the violence, the chaos, the deaths of Americans, the deaths of Iraqis... Of course the deaths of Iraqis are not played up as much. But when they count the corpses they see women and children. We are constantly killing the people who are suspected of something. Now, in the United States or under any decent system of justice, you don't kill people on suspicion. That's what you do when you bomb a house because there are suspected leaders there. But we've been doing that again and again and the result has been a toll of thousands of civilians.

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.