From the point of view of Muslims, and the rest of the world without a censored press, the US has funded the Israeli treatment of Palestinians for years and years, also.

WTC was a response to many, many years of US activity over there. While a heinous act, it was a heinous act in response to decades of other heinous acts.

The US acts as if it was just standing around and because some people hate freedom and our way of life. We are so superior people are willing to die just to protest our freedom.

An interesting aside. The US then attacked Iraq, inflicting upon innocent Iraqis more damage than a thousand WTCs, and thinks nothing of it. Will forget that Iraq happened, and wondered why they will hate us. And there is no remorse, no guilt, not even a “sorry ’bout that”.

A little background: The United States was attacked by a radical organization, not a government. There is nobody to stand on the deck of a ship and sign surrender papers. There is no “winning the war” where everybody goes back to their normal lives.

In the radical’s own written manifesto, the attack was primarily because we had Americans on Saudi soil, supporting the U.N.’s No Fly mission.

For this crime, and other imaginary crimes, they attacked and destroyed part of an American city, deliberately selecting civilians as their preferred targets, and would have done more if they could have.

They declared this war, and carried out a first strike.

Now we, Republicans and Democrats, are attacking members of this group who are still carrying out this war, including some that actually planned or organized past attacks.

If you were actually thinking the ethics through, the correct question to ask would be:

“would it be okay for China to use a drone to take out someone who had blown up major buildings in Shanghai and Beijing and killed thousands of Chinese citizens?”

Of course, in the real world, this question would never come up, because the United States (or any other civilized nation), would immediately arrest the bastard and ship him back to China instead of hiding him somewhere in Kansas and supporting him.

The -Wikipedia entry- is all over the map. On the one end we count hearsay casualties from people in the area, with no other proof. On the other end we have CIA claims of zero civilian casualties. Both of these have a very high bullshit quotient.

The real answer is somewhere in between. Who do you believe on that list?

We can get past the numbers, though. The drone system is the most tightly focused mechanism I’ve ever seen for attacking enemy personnel, short of an actual sniper on a nearby roof. The objective is destroying a particular enemy with the absolute minimum of corollary damage. The technology is improving as time goes by.

Is it perfect? Of course not. But we’ve come from Hiroshima and carpet bombing to this. I call it an improvement.

If you have better ideas to deal with those who attack us, let’s hear them.

The US, after all, has caused considerable civilian casualties. Is there a difference because of the scale? Is that the only difference?

Both are terrorism, there’s no definition which will exclude that, and both have enemies in the sight.

Or can we eliminate anything the US does as terrorism, and justified by our noble motives?