Hm, good point. I still suspect it’s metaphorical. Then again, in a world where Fox News is currently saying how Edward Snowden may be a Chinese double agent, it may also be literal and truthful.
By “in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes”, I think that the author meant “in many cases (i.e., many strikes), outright denying that some of the victims are in fact victims.”
The author is probably referring to the reported policy of considering all military-age males in a strike-zone to be militants (and hence not innocent victims). I take the author to be claiming that (1) non-militant military-age male victims of drone strikes exist in many cases, and (2) the reported policy amounts to “outright denying the existence” of those victims.
Yes. Furthermore, the “many cases” doesn’t refer to many people who think that there has never been an innocent victim of a drone strike. Rather, the “many cases” refers to the (allegedly) many innocent victims killed whose existence (as innocents) was denied by reclassifying them as militants.
And the reason this hypothesis is so unlikely as to be not worth considering is:
During the Cold War, the US and British governments were shot through with hundreds of double agents for the Soviets, to an almost ludicrous extent (eg. Kim Philby apparently almost became head of MI6 before being unmasked); and of course, due to the end of the Cold War & access to Russian archives, we now have a much better idea of everything that was going on and can claim a reasonable degree of certainty as to who was a double agent and what their activities were.
With those observations in mind: can you name a single one of those double-agents who went public as a leaker as Snowden has done?
If you can name only one or two such people, and if there were, say, hundreds of regular whistleblowers over the Cold War (which seems like a reasonable figure given all the crap like MKULTRA), then the extreme unlikelihood of the Fox hypothesis seems clear...
If America needs a double agent from a hostile foreign power to merely point out to the media that their government may be doing something that some might find questionable, then America’s got far bigger problems than a few spies.
If America needs a double agent from a hostile foreign power to merely point out to the media that their government may be doing something that some might find questionable, then America’s got far bigger problems than a few spies.
And if hostile government cares more about the democratic civil liberties of Americans than Americans do then there is an even bigger problem. (The actual benefit to China of the particular activity chosen for the ‘double agent’ is negligible.)
Hm, good point. I still suspect it’s metaphorical. Then again, in a world where Fox News is currently saying how Edward Snowden may be a Chinese double agent, it may also be literal and truthful.
By “in many cases outright denying the existence of victims of drone strikes”, I think that the author meant “in many cases (i.e., many strikes), outright denying that some of the victims are in fact victims.”
The author is probably referring to the reported policy of considering all military-age males in a strike-zone to be militants (and hence not innocent victims). I take the author to be claiming that (1) non-militant military-age male victims of drone strikes exist in many cases, and (2) the reported policy amounts to “outright denying the existence” of those victims.
That’s how I read it. The claim isn’t that no one was killed by drone strikes, it’s that no one innocent was killed, so there are no victims.
Yes. Furthermore, the “many cases” doesn’t refer to many people who think that there has never been an innocent victim of a drone strike. Rather, the “many cases” refers to the (allegedly) many innocent victims killed whose existence (as innocents) was denied by reclassifying them as militants.
And the reason this hypothesis is so unlikely as to be not worth considering is:
During the Cold War, the US and British governments were shot through with hundreds of double agents for the Soviets, to an almost ludicrous extent (eg. Kim Philby apparently almost became head of MI6 before being unmasked); and of course, due to the end of the Cold War & access to Russian archives, we now have a much better idea of everything that was going on and can claim a reasonable degree of certainty as to who was a double agent and what their activities were.
With those observations in mind: can you name a single one of those double-agents who went public as a leaker as Snowden has done?
If you can name only one or two such people, and if there were, say, hundreds of regular whistleblowers over the Cold War (which seems like a reasonable figure given all the crap like MKULTRA), then the extreme unlikelihood of the Fox hypothesis seems clear...
If America needs a double agent from a hostile foreign power to merely point out to the media that their government may be doing something that some might find questionable, then America’s got far bigger problems than a few spies.
And if hostile government cares more about the democratic civil liberties of Americans than Americans do then there is an even bigger problem. (The actual benefit to China of the particular activity chosen for the ‘double agent’ is negligible.)