Drones: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)

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So imminent and civilian can mean both the standard definition of imminent and civilian and the exact fucking opposite. How very Orwellian.

👍︎︎ 67 👤︎︎ u/hzg0 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

Take my love, take my land

Take me where I cannot stand

I don't care, I'm still free

You can't take the sky from me

ಠ_ಠ

👍︎︎ 20 👤︎︎ u/Meriog 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies
👍︎︎ 78 👤︎︎ u/perfektengineer 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

No accountability is a scary power for any government in the world & even more so when killing people over their sovereign land.

👍︎︎ 230 👤︎︎ u/perfektengineer 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

I like that he focuses on an aspect of our Drone Program that often goes ignored: the psychological effects of living with it day-to-day. There's something degrading and dehumanizing about it.

👍︎︎ 100 👤︎︎ u/thebigdamnhero 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

Suddenly I feel a lot safer living in the UK with our nearly continuous cloud cover.

👍︎︎ 115 👤︎︎ u/TK_Bluh 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

We've gotten to a very strange place in history and society where our comedy programs are more thought-provoking, ask harder questions, and are more truthful than the news.

👍︎︎ 280 👤︎︎ u/ZippoS 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

Does anyone know where I can watch the full episodes? Youtube makes me feel like there's a lot more than what they're posting...

👍︎︎ 12 👤︎︎ u/murder_nectar 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies

Is it just me, or does anyone else think John Oliver is better than Stephen Colbert and Jon Stewart combined? Don't get me wrong. Love those guys, and maybe I'm just used to them and so JO seems fresh and funnier. But he seems to have this sense of selecting just the right issue, one to which we can all relate, comparing it to something totally out there and humorous, and then bringing it back to relatable again. Plus the accent, I guess. Us Yankees love accents.

👍︎︎ 258 👤︎︎ u/TabulaRasaNot 📅︎︎ Sep 29 2014 🗫︎ replies
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drugs they're the third most annoying thing in the sky after mosquitoes and plastic bags caught in the breeze they are not gorgeous weird kid from American Beauty they're trash and they kill sea turtles you've got turtle blood on your hands but all of a sudden drugs are everywhere we even use them to shoot romantic wedding videos and what could possibly go wrong with that I don't know if this fight it's funny whether it's fine or not but look overseas drones are a slightly more serious matter for instance this week we reportedly launched deadly drone strikes in both Waziristan and Yemen you probably didn't hear about them on the news unless you were watching this the u.s. has carried out another drone attack in Pakistan's restive tribal areas killing at least eight people that's the only footage reporting either strike that we could find and it's from the Iranian government's english-language TV station that channel is buried deep in your cable package I think it's actually somewhere between c-span jr. and can the Kirstie Alley Network but there is there is something strange about the fact that we launched two deadly drone strikes in two sovereign nations that almost no one here heard about but then again why would it make the news we use drones all the time hard numbers are very difficult to come by for reasons that we'll get into but by one estimate during the Obama administration we've launched eight times the number of John strikes than we did under his predecessor and while they've declined a bit recently drone strikes will be as much a characteristic of the Obama presidency as a bomber care or receiving racist email for words from distant relatives and it's easy to see why drones are so popular they cost less than manned planes and they kill a lot of terrorists their slogan should really be appealingly cheap and incredibly deadly but unfortunately that's already been taken by Hardee's and and and they're not just popular with the white house surveys consistently show a majority of Americans approve of our use of drone strikes to fight extremists abroad in fact we're so comfortable with them nobody blinked an eye when the president said this the Jonas Brothers are here they're out there somewhere sasha and malia are huge fans but boys don't get any ideas I have two words for you Predator drones you will never see it coming you'll either your eye or tis riddled with shrapnel fired from the sky gurgling your last blood-soaked breath it's it's funny cuz it's possible I could do that that's something I could do but while our drone program is widely accepted we really know relatively little about it we spent a lot of time this week trying to find some concrete answers to basic questions and it's surprisingly difficult for instance how do we decide when to use a drum strike now on the surface the Obama administration's answer seems straightforward we only take these kinds of actions when there's an imminent threat when capture is not feasible and when we are confident that we're doing so in a way that's consistent with federal and international law okay that sounds reassuring until you look closer at it because our rules for drone strikes a little like Harvey Keitel's balls we've all seen them in the piano Bad Lieutenant or on snapchat and from a distance you think oh I understand the contours of those but if you were to really examine them you discover that they're actually lost in a haze of fuzziness and gray areas much like the rules for our drone strikes as Eric Holder just said drone strikes are justified if you can show an imminent threat now that sounds clear there's not much of a linguistic loophole there unless you make one NBC News has obtained this confidential 16 page Justice Department memo it says an imminent threat does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on US persons and interests will take place in the immediate future what an imminent threat does have to take place in the immediate future because that's what the word imminent means when someone says I'm going to have a baby imminently it doesn't mean I may or may not have a baby at some point in the future it means get your car keys my water just broke and it turns out imminent isn't the only word with a surprisingly fluid definition when it comes to drone strikes what defines a civilian when it comes to civilian casualties has also allegedly been open to interpretation there's also been some dispute over the way civilian casualties are counted the CIA often counts able-bodied males military age males who are killed in strikes as militants unless they have concrete evidence to to sort of prove them innocent hold on if it's assumed you're with the terrorists if you're in the same vicinity and around the same age as them then by that standard as a British man in my 30s whenever I go home to London I'm a member of Coldplay and that's offensive to me that's offensive I'm not being in that band for years we consciously uncoupled a long time ago perhaps the most incredible thing about our drone program which again a majority of us support is not how little we know about who the government is killing but how little they themselves seem to know NBC News has examined classified documents detailing 114 drone strikes they also reveal what US officials don't know like how many killed between seven and ten in one strike 22 22 in another it suggests US officials don't always know exactly how many or who they're killing that is a little disturbing because the question how many people have you killed in drone strikes it's not one of those questions where it's okay to say I don't know it's not like asking someone who was the voice of Disney's Aladdin or what are skittles made from it's different it's different than that and the crazy thing is it literally always been like this the very first CIA drone strike back in 2002 killed three men reportedly because they thought one of them might have been bin Laden in part and this is true due to his height and under that rationale it's kind of remarkable that we didn't take out Jeff Goldblum at some point over the years now reports later indicated the victim was actually an innocent man who was collecting scrap metal and look how the Pentagon immediately set the template for every discussion we've had about drone strikes since you said you don't know who is killed in this attack whether it's civilians Hotel Boehner I'm sorry exactly we don't know the identities of the individuals involved but you're convinced they're Taliban we're convinced yep we're convinced it was an appropriate target based on the observation based on the information that it was an appropriate target we do not know yet exactly who it was it's never a good idea to make a major decision about someone when you can't even say exactly who they are hey guys I got married last night oh really who is he I don't know exactly at this time but unconvinced he's an appropriate husband based on his height and yet we've consistently let the government get away with answers like that because drone strikes are one of those things that it's really convenient not to think about that much like the daily life of a circus elephant or the fact that Beck is a Scientologist you will you only don't want people reminding you about those kind of things but if you happen to live underneath drums not thinking about them is not an option having drones hovering above you is bound to mess with your head especially because you might not even be able to see them even though I know there's a predator directly overhead I still can't hear a thing and if you look up to the exact spot where we're being told the predator is flying right now there's nothing but clouds and blue sky congratulations everyone we did it we managed to make one of the last remaining Universal symbols of pleasantness blue sky completely terrifying we but while we may not spend much time thinking about our drone strikes here in countries like Pakistan where they actually happen they have to deal with them so much there there are even weird satirical cartoons featuring an American drone and his friend a dengue fever carrying mosquito Italian but the would be a bedazzler Pakistan yes I like that yeah I like that Danny yeah I'm gonna borrow your head do ya get more diplomatic alive which gear Gandia maybe please Allah say a hero easily it on Pakistan me Marty Gary hey to be fair that would be a lot funnier if you spoke Urdu and lived in constant fear of being murdered by a drone if you did that's basically who's on first in fact drone strikes are such a routine feature of life in Pakistan this is how news networks present statistics about them Pakistani who kumejima this ecologic Jalopnik palace visitor partner is right at the fatiha Orca hockey America drones have their own graphics package you do not invest in quality graphics like those unless you know you're gonna get a lot of use out of them it's like Las Vegas local news having white tiger mauling graphics they're going to get their money's worth but to really understand the psychological impact of living underneath drugs listen to this Yemeni man a man who loves America addressing Congress last year only a week after his village was struck by a drone I spent there living with an American family and I attended an American high school that was one of the best years of my life the friendships and values I experienced and described to the villagers helped them understand the America that I know and that I love now however but when they think of America they think of the terror they feel from the drones that hover over their heads ready to fire missiles any time the drone strikes at the face of America too many Yemenis and that kind of makes sense because think about it this way if there were Italian armed drones hanging over your head right now it would probably affect the way you think about Italy in word-association your first answer for Italy would not be lasagna it would be specter of imminent death or more likely expect over the imminent death followed by lasagna if you grow up underneath drums it's going to affect the way you see the world listen to this thirteen-year-old Pakistani boy whose grandmother was killed in a drone strike I tell me he left that I no longer loved blue skies in fact I now prefer gray skies the drones do not fly when the skies are gray and for a short period of time the mental tension and fear eases look it is completely natural for us not to want to think about the consequences of our drone program but when children from other countries are telling us that we've made them fear the sky it might be time to ask some hard questions the problem is after a week of looking at this it seems there are shockingly few available answers in fact the best summation we could find of the framework we use to authorize and justify drone strikes is from this former defense department advisor right now we have the executive branch making a claim that it has the right to kill anyone anywhere on earth at any time for secret reasons based on secret evidence in a secret process undertaken by unidentified officials that frightens me yeah it probably does frighten you because what you just described sounds terrifying and look any counterterrorism effort will always require an element of secrecy but with our drug program not only do we not know who we've killed the legal guidelines have loopholes large enough to drive a flying death robot through and after a week spent trying to comprehend the rationales legality and broader consequences of our drug policy I'm starting to understand how this guy feels exactly [Applause]
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Channel: LastWeekTonight
Views: 14,080,985
Rating: undefined out of 5
Keywords: HBO, John Oliver, Kathy Griffin, Miss America, Miss USA, Donald Trump
Id: K4NRJoCNHIs
Channel Id: undefined
Length: 12min 56sec (776 seconds)
Published: Sun Sep 28 2014
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