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Documents Show Obama Administration Lied About Use Of Drones (Original Post) matthewf Apr 2013 OP
. blkmusclmachine Apr 2013 #1
So, they don't even know who they are killing. fasttense Apr 2013 #2
They create new enemies so fast that the only winners are the 'Money Trumps Peace' crowd. Octafish Apr 2013 #3
Well, shit. AtheistCrusader Apr 2013 #4
Military/CIA = Hired thugs. Arctic Dave Apr 2013 #5
I disagree angrychair Apr 2013 #6
“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification OnyxCollie Apr 2013 #8
This message was self-deleted by its author OnyxCollie Apr 2013 #7
A war criminal since day one cpwm17 Apr 2013 #9
 

fasttense

(17,301 posts)
2. So, they don't even know who they are killing.
Fri Apr 12, 2013, 11:42 AM
Apr 2013

Let's speculate about the Obama administration's speculative killings.

Children, women, grandmothers and fathers. All sound so dangerous and require immediate drone murder.

Octafish

(55,745 posts)
3. They create new enemies so fast that the only winners are the 'Money Trumps Peace' crowd.
Fri Apr 12, 2013, 11:57 AM
Apr 2013

The rest of us are enemies of the state or human resources to be harvested for cannon fodder.

Those wealthy enough to move their cash offshore are exempt, of course.

angrychair

(8,594 posts)
6. I disagree
Fri Apr 12, 2013, 12:59 PM
Apr 2013

Given the subject matter and that there is a thing called "operational security" that not only prevents but should keep specific details secret and the "who, what, where when and how" details of events to a minimum or should even be misleading on purpose.
I have stated in other threads that there should be more over site in these type of operations but I have also stated that making judgements, without knowing all the details, is unfair.

Consider Vietnam war vets coming back home to vile and vitriol after their tours were over. Calling them "baby killers" and such. Not understanding that they wake up with night terrors almost every night and are haunted by the incident that forced them to act when they wish they didn't have too.

There are injustices in every combat theater and there should be an accounting for it but we all should refrain from snap judgements with only pieces and parts of information and little to no background (you actually know far less than you think you know)

 

OnyxCollie

(9,958 posts)
8. “There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
Fri Apr 12, 2013, 05:36 PM
Apr 2013

“There Must Be a Reason”: Osama, Saddam, and Inferred Justification
http://sociology.buffalo.edu/documents/hoffmansocinquiryarticle_000.pdf

One of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election was the strength
and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to
the terrorist attacks of September 11. Scholars have suggested that this belief was the
result of a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration.
We call this the information environment explanation. Using a technique of “challenge
interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and
9/11, we propose instead a social psychological explanation for the belief in this link.
We identify a number of social psychological mechanisms voters use to maintain false
beliefs in the face of disconfirming information, and we show that for a subset of voters
the main reason to believe in the link was that it made sense of the administration’s decision
to go to war against Iraq. We call this inferred justification: for these voters, the fact of the
war led to a search for a justification for it, which led them to infer the existence of ties
between Iraq and 9/11.

~snip~

In this article we present data that contest this explanation, and we develop
a social psychological explanation for the belief in the link between Saddam
and Al Qaeda. We argue that the primary causal agent for misperception is not
the presence or absence of correct information but a respondent’s willingness to
believe particular kinds of information. Our explanation draws on a psychological
model of information processing that scholars have labeled motivated reasoning.
This model envisions respondents as processing and responding to information
defensively, accepting and seeking out confirming information, while ignoring,
discrediting the source of, or arguing against the substance of contrary information
(DiMaggio 1997; Kunda 1990; Lodge and Tabor 2000). Motivated reasoning is
a descendant of the social psychological theory of cognitive dissonance (Festinger
and Carlsmith 1959; Kunda 1990), which posits an unconscious impulse to
relieve cognitive tension when a respondent is presented with information that
contradicts preexisting beliefs or preferences. Recent literature on motivated
reasoning builds on cognitive dissonance theory to explain how citizens relieve
cognitive dissonance: they avoid inconsistency, ignore challenging information
altogether, discredit the information source, or argue substantively against the
challenge (Jobe, Tourangeau, and Smith 1993; Lodge and Taber 2000; Westen
et al. 2006). The process of substantive counterarguing is especially consequential,
as the cognitive exercise of generating counterarguments often has the ironic
effect of solidifying and strengthening the original opinion leading to entrenched,
polarized attitudes (Kunda 1990; Lodge and Taber 2000; Sunstein 2000; Lodge and
Taber 2000). This confirmation bias means that people value evidence that confirms
their previously held beliefs more highly than evidence that contradicts them,
regardless of the source (DiMaggio 1997; Nickerson 1998, Wason 1968).


~snip~

We chose to focus on Republican partisans because of the well-documented
partisan difference in the perception of the validity of this link. We assumed
that Democratic partisans would not have a strong desire to defend the Bush
administration on this issue, thus severely reducing the variation we would
capture in responses. Our choice of subjects means that we are investigating how
partisanship produces and reinforces political (mis)information. Our choice of
subjects should not be taken to imply that the processes we are examining here
are particular to conservatives: we expect that, had we conducted this study in
the late 1990s, we would have found a high degree of motivated reasoning
regarding the behavior of President Clinton during the Lewinsky scandal.
Previous research on motivated reasoning has found it among respondents of all
classes, ages, races, genders, and affiliations (see Lodge and Tabor 2000).


~snip~

Another respondent takes this argument a step further by speculating that
the president must know things the rest of us do not:

I think the best thing you can do with this is to hope that the president has enough information
to do the right thing. And then you need to trust him to do that and as part of the country you
need to support that. . . . I mean, you may make the comment of saying, “Well, boy I wish
they wouldn’t have done that because it just doesn’t seem like from our point of view that that
was the right thing to do.” But on the other hand you gotta realize that maybe they know more
than what we do about what’s really going on. Now granted, they clearly said that they don’t
think there was any link between those two, but that’s not to say that maybe it wasn’t the same
problem.

Response to matthewf (Original post)

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