This topic interests me in particular for two reasons: drone strikes are carried out in prime by the United States Air Force, and one of my best friends is Pakistani. Why are these reasons that motivate me to research the ethical question concerning foreign drone strikes? For one, I have full intention to join the USAF upon graduation from USC (I'm here on an Air Force ROTC scholarship). This means that I have the chance to either deal directly with drone strikes and I'd very much like to be knowledgeable about the ethicality and morality of the issue in advance in order to change it. Plus there's the fact that if I am deployed, I could very well be deployed to the Middle East, the area mostly affected by our drone strikes. The other reason this is a topic that interests me is that my best friend is Pakistani. On the surface that does not mean much. However, when you hear stories about how his countrymen and relatives back home deal with drone strikes it forces you to think about the issue. As Americans we don't often think about drone strikes; and if we do it's kind of something we just brush off because they don't happen here. That's the other reason I've decided to think about the issue; not many Americans do.

The central claim of the NBC report was that the US government doesn't always know whom exactly they target when they conduct drone strikes. They often label people as "other militants" when identifying the people killed, if they ever identify them at all. The major source was an expert on the topic and a US Government document that specifies who was killed in each drone strike.

The major values at stake that are addressed by the report given by Richard Engel concern humanity and a sense of trustworthiness with the government. The interests at stake include NBC's overall reputation, and possible backfire on the company if for some reason they reported false information.

I would say that NBC and its reporter are credible sources. It's a large reputable company with a large amount of resources. NBC is however known to lean more on the liberal side of arguments.

The central argument that surrounds this article written by Spencer Ackerman is that drone strikes inevitably harm unintended victims. In particular, Ackerman's article focuses on the story of one man, Faheem Qureshi. He was an unintended victim of Obama's first ordered drone strike, and now 7 years after it happened, he only has vision in one eye, his uncles and cousins were killed in the blast, and he is considered a cripple in his village, which means he can't provide for the women in his family (which is the cultural custom). This man's personal story along with photographs that were published with the article is the evidence to support these claims.

The values at stake for this article (and seem to be at stake for most articles of this view) are the ethicality of certain aspects of war along with how humane something is. The main interest that Ackerman is attacking is the unrestricted drone warfare.

Spencer Ackerman is currently a journalist for the The Guardian, publishing articles dealing with national security in the US. In 2012 he won the National Magazine Award for Digital Reporting and he has a degree from Rutgers University. Thus, he's considered a reliable source for this topic. As for the source, The Guardian is typically viewed as left wing and liberal. This means its audience mostly consists of younger adults.

This is the first source I have used so far that seems to support drone strikes while still raising somewhat of an ethical question. The author of the article, Lee Ferran, discusses how a recent drone strike killed two cars full of terrorists, one of them being a US citizen. He interviews the man who commanded the operation, and he describes the strike in detail. It was mostly praise for how flawlessly it went, until it was discussed how cold it feels pressing a trigger on a computer 7,000 miles away. This addresses the issue that it takes away the human element from killing. 

The values and interests at stake were a bit complicated. On one end the author argued that the drone strikes were extremely effective, but you could tell from the interview with the retired commander of said strikes that they left an emotional toll on him, and that he felt bad about the lack of human interaction; it was done through computer screens. For the most part, the article valued the accurate and almost clinical deadliness of the drone strikes while a small part brought light to why they seem wrong to some.

Lee Ferran, a prominent journalist for for ABC, wrote the article. That being said, ABC in itself is a good source, although noted for leaning to liberal side.

The argument is pretty easy to debate on, no matter what side you choose. It's a prominent issue for Middle Eastern countries, and a key military strategy that President Barack Obama has adopted. For the most part, the things I have researched yield only facts: while drone strikes have the potential to completely effective without civilian collateral, the fact of the matter is that our standards for targeting in these strikes is often way in that so called "gray area" of morality. On top of that, sometimes we don't even know who exactly we kill, and civilians are dying whether the US Government chooses to acknowledge it or not. I can say that the sources I have used in research haven't changed my opinion, but have broadened my knowledge and deepened my understanding of the issue (which is what's supposed to happen).  As of now, while I might be acting cocky, I don't think my research question needs revision.

