Justice Department's legal case for drone strikes on Americans

I've been complaining about this for years...

 

It seems mostly rational to me, if not always morally clear. The Americans in question are first defined as enemy combatants, which reduces this question to 'why is killing an enemy combatant legal, and torturing him illegal?' And that question seems long settled, addressed in Geneva Conventions and so on. In a war, you can use lethal force, but you're not supposed to kill or torture prisoners. That would be why drone strikes would be more acceptable than Gitmo. The citizenship of the person is irrelevant when they are a member of an enemy in a war. We killed plenty of US citizens in the Civil War without thinking twice about whether their civil liberties were violated.

I do still have problems with drone strikes, but citizenship ain't one. Pretending these are not assassinations is ridiculous. The rules they put around the process of determining victims are far too vague and open to abuse. The war we're fighting isn't a real war, declared by Congress with a defined enemy and goal (which I think is the genesis of most of our problems). The damage done to our image abroad isn't worth the benefits in security, imo. But, if you can get over all that stuff, niceties of citizenship seem pretty paltry to me.

 

I see little difference, morally, whatever the legal justifications might be. and i can guarantee that if these drone killings were being carried out by GW Bush, or another republican, there'd be demonstrations in the streets, and calls for his impeachment.

the collective shrug of most on the left, merely reinforces what I've always known- objections to the iraq war, and W's WOT were always about politics, not policy, a particularly despicable state of affairs when american men and women are in harm's way.

 

This is precisely why I voted Libertarian instead of Democrat for President in the last election. No President should have the power to assassinate US citizens on the suspicion that they may be terrorists or 'associated forces' (whatever that means)...

 

Drone strikes, the new carpet bombing. We're coming for you, Cambodia.

 

Two Pauls do not a party make.

especially as their foreign policy views are basically anathema to the right (neo-cons especially).

(I did include "most" for a reason though)

 

It was known that Anwar al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda, and Al Qaeda even confirmed his death and his membership.

It is acceptable for the government to kill Americans who who join forces with those at war with America. It happened thousands upon thousands of times during the American civil war. If somebody wants to join the side at war with the United States they run the risk of being killed in combat.

 

Do you also believe that during the civil war, no Southern soldiers should have been killed unless they were tried and found guilty?

 

The South had standing armies, and a Southern soldier might have literally had blood on his hands. The wars of today have combatants and non-combatants easily melding together. Anwar al-Aulaqi was a "warrior of the internet". His tools were mostly blog posts, Youtube videos, and Facebook.

Now that is not to say that he should be protected from his activities and the risk he knew he had took on. However, there is a degree of due process not followed here that is worrying, especially given that the American military has a proven tendency to classify a very broad amount of people as military combatants, even if they were merely in the area or even providing rescue (this is, by the way, clearly a war crime.)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/aug/20/us-drones-strikes-target-rescuers-pakistan

Given the tendency of domestic security agents to track down "suspect" political activists, and the increasing willingness to shed many principles in the name of security, this should be an issue of concern for many liberals that goes beyond outdated Civil War metaphors.

 

I'm all in favor of due process. I think the govt. does go and has gone too far in many cases, and I think some of what they do is blatantly against the constitution.

However when someone joins an enemy that declares war against the United States and is with that enemy, he becomes a target, just like Southern soldiers during the civil war.

Taking out enemy propaganda was a tactic that was legitimate during WWII. So the idea that this American who has joined Al Qaeda wasn't a legitimate target because he was primarily doing propaganda for the enemy isn't really a good argument as to why the strike was illegal.

For the record I'm definitely worried about due process, and believe that there is much wrong with gitmo, and a lot of what's going on in pursuing the war on terror. I just don't think killing a terrorist who is actively engaged in the fight against the govt. is one of things that's wrong with the war on terror.

 

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/06/u...-on-targeted-killings.html?ref=politics&_r=1&

Early in his first term, President Obama rejected the vehement protests of the Central Intelligence Agency and ordered the public disclosure of secret Justice Department legal opinions on interrogation and torture that had been written in the administration of George W. Bush.

In the case of his own Justice Department’s legal opinions on assassination and the “targeted killing” of terrorism suspects, however, Mr. Obama has taken a different approach. Though he entered office promising the most transparent administration in history, he has adamantly refused to make those opinions public — notably one that justified the 2011 drone strike in Yemen that killed an American, Anwar al-Awlaki. His administration has withheld them even from the Senate and House intelligence committees and has fought in court to keep them secret, making any public debate on the issue difficult.​

 

basso, can you say that you cared about drone strikes before Obama became president? This is looking like more right wing whining.

 

Yes, his citizenship wasn't revoked, nor did it need to be. Once you join an enemy actively engaged in combat operations against the United States, whether you are a citizen or not, you run the legitimate risk of being killed in combat actions.

That's what happened in this case.

I generally agree with the point of not killing American citizens without a trial. But once somebody joins the enemy that has declared war on the United States and is engaged with combat against the United States, he's the wrong poster boy for the cause.

 

I don't know. Like I've mentioned, it happened during the civil war. The Rebel soldiers had all been U.S. citizens, joined an enemy fighting the U.S. govt., and many many thousands were killed without much concern over a trial for each of them.

This isn't really different. A U.S. citizen joins an enemy engaged in combat against the U.S. He gets killed while in service of that enemy.

 

In the Awlaki thread I posted several very coherent and reasonable arguments that confirmed the legality of the above.

But that's ancillary, honestly, as the criteria for "enemy actively engaged in combat operations" is murky to the point of ridiculousness. "Terrorism" or "terrorist" has been actively and intentionally subverted into "whatever and whomever disagrees with US foreign policy". That's the real reason these activities should disturb folks.

The US government itself could not confirm a single reasonable data point that pointed to Awlaki's guilt. None. The only "confirmed" things about him were that he posted some naughty videos on the internet.