This is old news. People just don't care. Drones are being sold in malls now.
Before I dropped out of college, I was studying Political Science. For a debate, I researched a number of reports on this in 2010-2011 that showed pretty clearly that drones are the dumbest thing ever. A cray unacceptable number of civilians are killed, routinely, by this ineffectual tactic. It's also extra-judicial, meaning there's no laws around it and it probably breaks a number of very good international laws.
But your ability to see that fact is hinged on whether or not you believe the USA CAN AND SHOULD RUN TEH WORLD.
In a class of 30 undergrads, all studying polsci, we debated this question. One side was for weaponized drones and the other against.
I was the only one on the "against" side that believed we should not use weaponized drones, period. Everyone else on my team decided that they should be used, but we need clear cut laws created to govern their usage.
The college educated are super obedient and committed to protecting the status quo, whatever it is.
I found that, if you look at the experience of the Israeli military, who used "targeted-killings" well before these US drone attacks, it's clear that killing leaders does not decrease the number of attacks. What it does is create even more attacks, but those new attacks kill less people. It's not really a solution to anything, but kicking the can around.
Which is good if you want an endless war.
On the legal side, it's extra-judicial, like I said already. I had members of the Army War College come to my school and they were straight telling us that there's no laws.
The problem is that for these killings to be legal, and not war crimes (hint: they are.), the target needs to be on a battlefield. But they aren't.
But, if you stretch the definition of battlefield, then it becomes legal. Which is what the government has done. That's what all these secret court orders and laws are about. There's plenty of representatives, like Sen. Lindsey Graham, who believe that the "homeland" is part of the battlefield.
You're the enemy, no matter where you are, it's Battlefield Earth.
It's really a problem of how you imagine your community. It's easy to not care about the government killing innocent people overseas if you are a superior human and better than those inferior sand people. But if you realize that if the government will do it to them, they'll do it to you, then you would be against drone attacks just for self preservation reasons alone.
