Casually accept this as the cost of doing business in a dangerous world. Eugene robbins is a columnist and david corn is from mother jones. Both are msnbc political analysts. Lets take a look here at ed carney, the president s spokesman, talk about this. It was a briefing today and carney defended the president s position on drones but also faced some tough questions. Lets listen. I wont talk about specific instances, but the fact is that the methods that we use are designed specifically to avoid civilian casualties. I think its fair to say that far fewer civilians lose their lives in an effort to go after Senior Leadership in al qaeda along the lines we were discussing here as opposed to an effort to invade a country with hundreds of thousands of troops and take towns. Why are you dancing around the question of whether or not we kill civilians . Why wont the government admit . I dont think im dancing around it. I didnt dispute it. You didnt necessarily what i cant do civilians have be
0 enough. i m with gene. you got to have what about the principle? do we have the right to kill a person who s decided to be against their country? do we have the right? i think if you find someone operationally involved in terrorist activity or terrorist group that is active and has the ability to strike, yes. it s a high standard. in other words, a soldier on the other side. not someone who s just a propagandist but someone involved in some operational way so to the blog sites somewhere in the world that s putting anti-american attitudes, you can t kill them. no. on the issue of principle, did we have the right to kill benedict arnold? sure. and the case is in yemen, the american citizen who was planning attacks who had plotted at least a couple that we know of, very active. high ranking in al qaeda. and we killed him with a drone. so i shed no tears for him. and i think nobody else does. if you give the power to this president, then you expect the next president