This has happened before, and it was unprecedented when the US citizen [1] was assassinated by the US President with explicit targeting (putting the name on a 'kill list'). As I understand, Awlaki was an Al Qaeda member, mostly concerned himself with writing for 'Inspire' and giving YouTube lectures.
> he became the first United States citizen to be assassinated by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded.[15][16] President Barack Obama ordered the strike.[17] His son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (a 16-year-old U.S. citizen), was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks later.[18] On January 29, 2017, al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar Al-Awlaki, was killed in a U.S. commando attack in Yemen which was ordered by President Donald Trump.[19][20][21][22]
[1] Please note: I am not justifying Awlaki's work. He was an Al Qaeda member. But also a natural born American citizen.
Since he was a US citizen, was he entitled to some kind of due process, maybe via extradition?
Edit: it was in the OP article.
There was some outcry about the president now having authority to kill even Americans without due process – “I think it’s sad,” said U.S. Congressman Ron Paul – but the uproar soon faded, and America’s assassination program accelerated still more. By late 2011, we’d killed more than 2,000 “militants.”
I think the idea is that as long as you can make the case for classifying them as an 'enemy combatant in an active war zone' it doesn't matter that they were a US citizen.
I'm not saying I agree with this -- I'm just trying to respond to your question.
> as long as you can make the case for classifying them as an 'enemy combatant in an active war zone
Under the Obama administration, they decided to count all military-age males in a strike zone as enemy combatants, unless there was explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent [0].
Was a bomb dropped on a wedding to kill a terrorist? Well, all the other men aged 18-50 at the wedding are also classed as enemy combatants too, meaning 'no innocent civilians' were killed. Way to go Mr. Nobel Peace Prize winner.
This guy is not openly anti U.S. though. So it's not really comparable.
He just grown an outward facing (meaning outside of Syria, english language) news/commentary website/following on twitter/youtube from northwest of Syria. He interviews various people, including members of various militias (leaders and non-leaders), civilians, etc. I think he also interviewed some ex-shabaab (Somalia) disillusioned members. He doesn't seem radical.
OGN is mildly interesting, as in it shows what some people deal with in the region, how militia leaders present themselves to the outside world, etc. But most of the news content can be obtained from elsewhere too. It was more unique when he was in besieged Eastern Aleppo.
Bombing this guy would be like bombing The Young Turks, or whatever. It's ridiculous. He's not even in a war zone. He's in Idlib de-escalation zone.
Obama's "Disposition Matrix" was a furthering of Bush era policies. It's not really fair to say he opened this can of worms, though that doesn't make his actions any less terrible.
> the first extrajudicial assassination of an American Citizen
As in, there were extrajudicial assassinations of people before, but this one was too far because this time it was an American Citizen Capital A Capital C?
Well, yes. It's equally evil for the government to murder a Syrian as an American, but more legal under American law. The American has more legal protections under the American Constitution. That's what a large part of the article is about. So moving into killing Americans was a step further and a new legal precedent.
I know for the non-American reader it might come off a bit... wrong, but yes. To be clear, I'd rather we didn't go around droning folks or sending JSOC on an FFF mission unless they're, say, directly engaging troops.
It is incredibly unnerving to see one's own government explicitly authorize the death of a fellow citizen without due process of law.
When you read the Bill of Rights, "due process" is not a right reserved for US citizens. No person should have that right infringed, so it's just as unnerving to see the government explicitly authorize the death of a fellow person without due process of law.
Awlaki’s assassination (really the underlying hit list and lack of due process) is why I did not vote for Obama in 2012. I remain amazed that more people weren’t up in arms about it. I remember Ron Paul being vocal in his opposition at the time but few others that got headlines at least.
> "We kill suspects whose names we know, and whose names we don’t; we kill the guilty and the not guilty; we kill men, but also women and children; we kill by day and by night; we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets."
I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists... I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawnmower.
Mikhail Kalashnikov
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
Yeah well, about Mikhael Kalashnikow. He build the famous AK47 for Stalins UdSSR. NKWD, Gulags, etc. were active since many years by that time, organized state-terrorism against anyone opposed to the glorious soviet system and their leader ... in other words, his words sound quite hypocryte. But when you consider your system belong to the good ... you probably close your eyes to everything else.
But I go along with Einstein. The more technogy is avaiable to the masses, the more powerful a single persons becomes. There might come a time soon, when anyone could just tinker a atomic bomb together in his garage ... we seriously need to change our way of thinking, till that happens.
In terms of total power? Maybe.. Hitler was not the ultimate Dictator like he seem to many today, but in terms of genocide?
Not really. Even if the famine in the Ukraine, you are probably referring to, was a planned event and not just missmanagement and ignorance, it still would be no organized genocide to wipe out a whole race.
Why do you abbreviate USSR that way? The first I assumed was a typo, the second makes it look intentional.
I do not see how that tracks from either the English translation, the original Russian name for the country: "Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик", or the transliteration: "Soyúz Sovétskikh Sotsialistícheskikh Respúblik".
Your comment is incredibly insensitive and flippant.
We can do better when we try to understand someone else's perspective--get into their narrative instead of 5 second superficial scanning and immediately turn off.
Well, you missed a gripping account of the struggles of the judicial system to bring rule-of-law accountability to a secret executive war fighting department.
So to clarify - this sort of political story is okay, but increased white nationalist group activity, Russian interference in 2016 election, and forced separation of migrant families seeking asylum are not? It's a bit hard to figure out the editorial stance on HN lately.
edit: this seems off the front page, which answers my (not hypothetical or sarcastically intended) question.
It's at least partly a commentary on black box machine learning, so I can see the additional relevance. But really that's a stretch, and I think all of the above are relevant for "hackers" as long as they don't flood the front page.
Yeah, it's just unnacountable violence wreaked with help of high technology. HN is more for, say, a technical article about reverse engineering details of an old game, and 50 comments saying "I fondly remember playing that game".
A real hacker would still not care about this when they themselves end up on a kill list, because politics, the air we breathe, and other things are just totally for lamers.
The Russian campaign is a hacker goldmine. AI/human force multiplication for mass social media influence campaigns, hacking social systems, data sovereignty and use of social media metadata...
My understanding is its based on how much it will divide the HN community, causing flame wars and unproductive conversation. Pretty much everyone agrees that US citizens shouldn't be hit by drone strikes.
Really? Because in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki I think it's much more of a gray area.
edit: agree entirely that the case in the article (Bilal Abdul Kareem) is no gray area. The difficulties interleaving points about the generality of a topic and specific cases.
I don't think it's an editorial stance any more than deleting articles about Microsoft and keeping the ones about Apple and Google is an editorial stance: HN has a long-standing policy that if a thread becomes hostile and devolves into a flamewar, it's removed from the front page.
Unfortunately, any thread about Microsoft quickly devolves into a flamewar. Similarly, any thread about politics, especially one that can be brigaded from other places, will quickly turn into a flamewar.
It's not that dang (et al) remove just because they want to, they remove because it becomes toxic. They stay up and in place long enough to know that.
Perhaps. It is a shame because it prevents topics of interest from being discussed here when a vocal minority of accounts objects loudly. Someone mentioned the Overton window elsewhere, and this is such a clear example of gaming it.
Sure. But but those other topics get flagged immediately, and I could make a case they are equally connected. Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition. The Russian 2016 election story is a tech story. And the current research on the nature of extremism is an addiction story, and the nature of the coordination of those groups (cryptocurrency, tor) and some work against them (NLP, AI driven social campaigns) is just as related.
edit: I'm 100% opposed to migrant family separation and think it's vile. I'm talking about how to reunite those families.
I always enjoy HN discussions on non-technical topics, because the community here is far better (and slightly different) than others. Which isn't that difficult considering the state of online comments in general, but still...
HN (and the tech community) has a libertarian streak, in addition to being somewhat left-of-center. Stories like this tend to unite these fundamentally opposing constituencies, resulting in more substantive discussions than other political topics. It also helps that the story is fundamentally non-partisan, in that both major US parties can be blamed for the situation.
I still consider it a blemish on HN's conscience, and a failure of HN leadership's responsibility to the community, that topics where this community is in a prime position to actually affect change tend to bring out the worst in (some) people and have in effect been banned to keep the peace. I'm not just speaking of "diversity in tech", where I can somewhat see how it has the potential of instilling fear in those traditionally profiting from discrimination. There, I can at least understand the mechanism at work, even though I consider it logically flawed.
But even summoning all my powers to understand opposing viewpoints I cannot fathom why this community reacts as dismissive as it does to, for example, stories (and projects / algorithms / ...) of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning. It would seem to be a topic that's both interesting from a technological and scientific standpoint, as well as welcome to everyone working in the space and presumably preferring not to do harm vs the opposite.
My best explanation is that there is a fundamental disgust in the tech community now of everything coming from, or even associated with, the social sciences. My second-best explanation is that tech has taken a sharp right turn at some point in the last 15 years, which would also explain why I remember only united opposition against software patents, and support for open source, from the first slashdot discussions I read. Whereas today, I see lots of sympathy for software patents in HN threats, and Open Source (and especially the GPL) are often spoken of with disgust.
I would say how interesting this topic is from the point of view how much it resembles literary classics like Catch-22 and Kafka's writings, overrides the 'no politics' rule.
I.e. first rule is to submit something interesting, the second is to avoid politics, but, apparently if the topic is interesting enough politics can be included.
The examples you list are the regular kind of political turmoil. This drone thing, given how far spread it is, on the other hand chips away at the fundamentals of why western societies managed to generate so much added value in the past centuries.
Consistent rule of law and functioning judicial system were one of them.
Having some black ops teams on ground violating basic human rights is not as bad as having an automated kill system that picks of targets based on metadata and then forwards that to drone targeting team as a daily standard policy.
To add to that, there is the generic humanistic cry for basic human rights.
After this auto-kill thing with the drones the ground on which to argument for any sort of generic human rights quickly becomes really fragile, getting all sorts of exceptions like, well, geneva convention was written when thinking about white people only and besides, the old school democratic process gave equal rights only if you were a male and ranked among the landed gentry or higher.
To be blunt: it appears as if brown people in far away countries still in 21st century are not considered as important as people of... other complexion... so it's ok to kill them every which way is more convenient.
Who remembers in 2002 when an American citizen was arrested on American soil and transferred to a military prison, where he was held for three and a half years with no trial while the government claimed he had no rights or recourse because they had determined him to be a terrorist?
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Padilla_(prisoner)
I do! As I recall, he sort of was a terrorist though? Something about the planning or discussion of apartment house gasline bombings? They didn't even need an agent provocateur to produce evidence for this one.
On a semi-related note, I hope John Walker Lindh gets a hell of a party upon his release next May.
Does that matter a single iota? Does the US legal system say somewhere you can hold people in prison with no rights because "they sort of are a terrorist, though"?
The US constitution has always given the President powers as commander in chief, to detain enemy combatants as prisoners of war. It's not the same thing as criminal punishment, but the POW camps that have been set up in every war are constitutional.
I am less concerned with whether Padilla was actually a bad guy than whether the process was actually a bad process. If we allow a precedent that the government can remove someone's rights by saying the word "terrorist" then those rights are not worth much anymore.
Exactly, the word "terrorist" is just another example of linguistic gamesmanship. The Gubment doesn't get to recast accusations of murder as accusations of "terrorism" just so they can circumvent the Constitution and Bill of Rights.
In my opinion, the "maybe a terrorist" angle 100% doesn't matter. If you are a citizen then you have the right to a fair trial, due process, etc.
If it was such a slam dunk, why not arrest and prosecute under existing laws? That the federal government felt they needed to take unconstitutional steps undermines their credibility in my eyes.
Exactly. And if these rights are a good thing (which as a nation we have theoretically decided they are), we should be giving them to non-citizens as well. I think it is always good for a) government having to prove guilt instead of the accused proving innocence and b) the severity of the supposed crime not being a determining factor in whether or not the accused gets a fair trial in a timely manner.
You miss the point. The point of a trial is maybe he wasn't a terrorist after all. Someone who is in fact guilty of certain crimes does in fact lose some of their protections, they can be detained.
Innocent people should be protected from arbitrary detention, therefore everyone should get a fair trial to determine if it can be proved they are guilty, while they have the ability to defend themselves. An innocent person who is wrongly accused of bombing a kindergarten is just as innocent as a person who is wrongly accused of stealing a candy bar.
If it's that easy, why take anyone to trial? Why not let the government say whether someone is a murderer, or a thief, or a drug dealer, skip out the court, and execute them straight away?
If you haven't given him a fair trial, you haven't proved he is a terrorist.
Chelsea Manning was also arrested without charge for 18 months. And there have been reports of other "black sites" in the US, too, even ones managed by local police departments.
As a non-US citizen, I find it a terrible thought that somehow it should be morally better (or more legal) to kill non-US citizens than US citizens.
The only concern should be whether they are proven to be dangerous terrorists, not what their nationality is. If it's okay to kill a dangerous Afghan terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan, then it's also okay to kill a dangerous American terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan. Outside of war zones, I don't see any excuse for killing anyone, unless in self defense.
I am still not sure about what to think of the whole drone war. I see how it saves hundreds of thousands of lives, compared to bringing in ground troops, but it sure feels wrong and dystopian.
I humbly suggest that that law has lost it's moral compass and needs to be addressed.
Once you reject the principle that "all people are created equally human", then you run the risk of being on the "wrong side", and treated in a sub-human manner.
In the best of worlds, we could catch the bad guys in a net, put pink, fluffy handcuffs on them while we talk with them gently, get to know them and understand why they did what they did. Then we could hug, and we would become friends, and one day after a not too long stay in our beautiful, green and lounge-like prison resort, we would let them out in society again and they would become productive citizens.
In our world, we sometimes have to fight. Sometimes, it's better to kill the terrorists than to risk that they attack us or to risk our soldiers getting killed in an attempt of bringing them in.
You're not just killing terrorists with drones though. You're killing innocent, wrongly suspected terrorists. You're killing their innocent families. You're killing their innocent neighbors. You're killing their innocent friends. All because you "suspect" one person in the room is a terrorist.
> In the best of worlds, we could catch the bad guys
In the best of worlds, people would understand there's no such clear thing as "bad guys". Drone strikes kill defenseless civilians every day. Who is the bad guy to the father whose ten year old daughter was killed by a drone?
It's your world. You're the person advocating infinitely escalating violence, which has landed us with "Bin Laden did a bad thing" and the US responding by basically becoming a million times worse. If you're thinking "well this is just what they're asking for", you'd be partially right. And if that doesn't terrify you, we have no business talking.
Even (suspected!) terrorists have rights. It's easy to think about the drone war: It's plain wrong. Sending guided missiles into other people's airspace is an act of war, and killing people without even so much as a sham trial is murder.
The more of this stuff we collectively condone the more the Bin Laden's of this world are winning. That's the real tragedy, that after 9/11 the West lost its moral compass.
That was the city of Philadelphia, not the US military. Also, it was generally recognized as a completely unacceptable action. Don't try to pretend like that's evidence of some sort of ongoing US-military-bombing-US-citizens-on-US-soil, it's not.
Because the police have sacks of C4 hanging around? That'd be a big fat no. They obtained essential support from the military.
And sure it was considered unconscionable. Who went to prison in the administration of the time? Hint: not the police, military, or politicians who ordered it.
There's also the case in which the Air Force bombed Tulsa. Still, more African Americans, so it wasn't really a big deal (notice a trend?).
The supplies came from the FBI, not the military. FBI is civilian. Also, wrt the Tulsa race riot, it was individuals with personal aircraft, not the Air Force.
It's fine to be angry but not OK to twist basic facts.
> The logical next step then is drone strikes on US soil? I mean, why not? What's the legal difference?
Because of the way the 9/11 AUMF is crafted, there's no legal difference, just as there would have been no legal difference between bombing Japanese forces in WWII that happened to be found on US soil and bombing then in Japan or some third country.
There are, however, practical and political differences, which is why, e.g. when German unlawful combatants were identified in the US in WWII (after two of them turned themselves in to the FBI, who they had trouble convincing of the reality of the situation, and fingered the rest of the group), the government didn't send an assault force and level the neighborhood, but instead the FBI picked them up (and then handed then over to the military.)
Okay, but let's examine the other side. I am not directly supporting this, but I'd imagine the case is
"This is asymmetric warfare in which the adversary is not a hypothetical threat, but has killed many thousands of people globally (not just 9/11). By joining a hostile armed force they can be legally killed in combat operations against that force. By operating asymmetrically, they are relinquishing more rights under the Geneva convention. Because of the nature of this, trial by jury could put humint allies at risk"
Parts of the way this "war" is being prosecuted is wrong, but I don't think this an utter abdication of a moral compass. There really are people planning and executing plans to kill other people, and they should be stopped.
Obviously this story shows that are some disgraceful flaws in the the way the process is set up and executed.
You care conflating acts of with crimes. When a country does it these things are acts of war, when an individual or a group of individuals does this it is a crime. A really bad one, but still a crime.
I agree with you completely. But it's not like criminal justice resources aren't being utilized in addition to drone operations. And I think the question of how to fight armed combatants in remote areas of the world is a real moral gray area (really: how many people should die to apprehend someone committing crimes of this type in a remote area of the world? The law enforcement/military people that would do this are 3-dimensional and their lives count).
"The "iron fist" COIN path, focused primarily on eliminating the insurgent threat, is historically less successful. A motive-based path (one that focuses on eliminating the incentives to support or participate in an insurgency) has been much more successful."
> But it's not like criminal justice resources aren't being utilized in addition to drone operations.
So? Of course the criminal justice resources are being used but at the same time there is a long list of transgressions that if they weren't a response to terrorism would invite just that.
> And I think the question of how to fight armed combatants in remote areas of the world is a real moral gray area (really: how many people should die to apprehend someone committing crimes of this type in a remote area of the world?
It's actually really simple, and not morally gray at all: If you can name your foe then you ask kindly for the nation where the foe is hiding to extradite them so they can be put on trial. If that fails then you're out of luck.
> The law enforcement/military people that would do this are 3-dimensional and their lives count).
This is the basis of the doctrine of 'force protection', worthy of a chapter all by itself and in many ways a substantial part of the problem. American lives are not worth even a little bit more than the lives of people of other nations.
So, in short: getting your hands on the perpetrators of terrorist attacks is roughly as hard as getting US 'contractors' extradited from the United States to Iraq for the crimes they committed. And that means that if it does not work you do not have an automatic 'ok' to go and kill those people because that makes you stoop to the level of nation state sponsored terrorism, aka acts of war.
The process violates human rights. This is not war, since no war was declared, and even in times of war responses need to be adequate in particular with respect to the number of civilian casualties. It is illegal and unambiguously immoral to conduct political assassinations of suspect combatants without judicial oversight or giving them a right to defend themselves. Add to that the fact that practically every drone strike kills innocent civilian bystanders including children[1], and there is nothing to discuss here.
JOINT RESOLUTION
Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled:
Declaring that a state of war exists between the armed militant groups of Jundallah, Tehrik-i-Taliban, Lashkar-e-Islam, TNSM, al-Qaeda, ISIL and their successor and fraternal organizations within Waziristan and neighboring provinces and the Government and people of the United States, and making provision to prosecute the same.
Whereas, the recent acts of by the militant groups are acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States:
Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of War between the United States and the militant groups of Waziristan which has been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and
That the President be, and is hereby, authorized and directed to take immediate steps not only to put the country in a thorough state of defense but also to exert all of its power and employ all of its resources to carry on war against the militant groups and to bring the conflict to a successful termination.
-------------------
And then they vote on it and it passes. And the Supreme Court finds that there is nothing unconstitutional about it.
By definition you can not declare war on something not another country because you will be attacking the country those people are in.
Armed militant groups are first and foremost the problem of the countries bordering and including the territory these militants operate in.
Any action against them by foreigners not otherwise involved in the region is an act of war in and of itself.
Imagine - I know this is a tricky one - Russia intervening in North Dakota between two rival bike gangs. The United States would see this as an act of war against the USA, and rightly so.
The only way this could happen is if there was a direct invitation from one of the governments of the affected countries and this would then still be limited to the territory of that country.
> By definition you can not declare war on something not another country
So the American Civil War wasn't a war, since the south wasn't another country? The Chinese civil war wasn't a war? The Iruqois Wars weren't wars? The Seljuk-Crusader War wasn't a real war? The War of the Sicilian Vespers wasn't a real war? The War of the Succession of Champange wasn't a real war?
It seems like there's about 4,000+ years of natural language clearly establishing that a war is NOT just about fights between two nation states.
But, hey, I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time Congress has passed a resolution that ended up being found unconstitutional and it won't be the last.
> So the American Civil War wasn't a war, since the south wasn't another country?
No, it was a Civil War. As you already wrote.
> The Chinese civil war wasn't a war?
No.
> The Iruqois Wars weren't wars?
You are really reaching now.
It seems to me that you are trying very hard to hold on to the idea that there is such a thing as a 'war on terrorism' but the whole thing is nonsense, just as much as the 'war on drugs' or any other mis-use of the term.
> But, hey, I could be wrong.
Yes you are.
> It wouldn't be the first time Congress has passed a resolution that ended up being found unconstitutional and it won't be the last.
It's not the constitution of the United States that matters here but international law.
> By definition you can not declare war on something not another country because you will be attacking the country those people are in.
Declarations of war identify an enemy, they don't (inherently, though they could also do this) limit the geographic area in which forces of that enemy will be attacked.
> Imagine - I know this is a tricky one - Russia intervening in North Dakota between two rival bike gangs. The United States would see this as an act of war against the USA, and rightly so.
Yes, but that doesn't make declaring (or prosecuting) war against non-state actors impossible, it just means that prosecuting such a war will either require cooperation of or conflict with other states.
That's often true with regard to third-party states in interstate war, too, whose territory is often violated (or, in some cases, the entire country occupied, as the British did to Iceland in WWII) without declaration of war as part of prosecuting a declared war against some other state.
If you want an example of an actual exercise of Congressional power to declare war that applies (conditioned on Presidential determination) to both state and non-state actors, see the 9/11 AUMF.
IOW, been there, done that, and that's what got us where we are.
America is part of the world, and how things have been done in America is a subset of how things are done in the world. So, in a question about “how do you do X”, a concrete example of how America has done X is germane even if the scope is global.
(OTOH, this is a discussion specifically about American action, anyway.)
That's all fine and good as long as America stays within its borders. As soon as they cross those borders a different body of law applies.
If you are of the opinion that this is not the case then maybe America should withdraw from the Geneva convention and various other useful treaties as well because after all, what's the point in having rules of engagement if you're going to ignore them anyway...
> As soon as they cross those borders a different body of law applies.
Yeah, but declarations of war (whether with or without magic words) aren't really important in a legal sense in that domain. Alexander Hamilton observed that they were falling out of use internstionally before the US Constitution was ratified, and the post-WWII international order has essentially made them moot with the recognition of aggressive war as a crime against peace. Fighting a defensive war once hostility was initiated (or, perhaps, clearly imminent) has long been accepted as valid with or without declaration, so with aggressive war itself a crime, there is no war legitimized by a formal declaration.
The international laws governing armed conflict are operative based on the fact of such conflict and the identity of the parties to it, not declarations of war.
But that's the whole point isn't it? 'Identity of the parties to it'. By ignoring the fact that one of the parties involved here has no identity as such there is no way to wage war on them, with lots of civilian casualties as the result of any attempt to do so.
That's the whole reason the Geneva convention was created to begin with, to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants. Now, it absolutely sucks that the other party doesn't play by the rules but that is no reason to stop playing by those rules ourselves. The moment we do so we stoop to that same level.
Anyway, that's a past station by this point and I'll probably have a hard time convincing you that on the evening of 9/11/2001 America had the keys to a new world order in its hands and squandered the opportunity by seeking petty revenge and economic advantage. The lesson learned that evening is that by doing what your enemy wants you to do you lose, big time. You can't wage war on ideas or on reactions.
> By ignoring the fact that one of the parties involved here has no identity as such
Both the US and each of the groups it had targeted under the 9/11 AUMF has an identity.
Some of the targets are parts of diffuse groups with little central command structure, which makes it very hard to end a war against them (and harder still to draw and end to an open ended war where targets are added by loose association), which is a problem of the crafting of the AUMF, it's continuation in effect, and the Congressional oversight of the war effort.
In an international law sense, there's a host of valid questions about the adequacy and appropriateness of the rules governing conflicts involving non-state actors (such as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.)
> Now, it absolutely sucks that the other party doesn't play by the rules but that is no reason to stop playing by those rules ourselves.
I don't disagree, but drone strikes per se aren't a violation of the rules.
> I'll probably have a hard time convincing you that on the evening of 9/11/2001 America had the keys to a new world order in its hands
Well, yeah, that's a claim that would take some support.
> and squandered the opportunity by seeking petty revenge and economic advantage.
While I doubt the existence of the opportunity you suggest was squandered, I do think the US government did a grave disservice to both itself and the world community with it's conduct in the years immediately following 9/11, most especially, but not exclusively, in the naked war of aggression it leveraged domestic outrage at 9/11 to justify in Iraq.
And I think there are deep problems with the broader “War on Terror”, I just seem to disagree with you on the degree to which those problems are due to violations of clear proscriptions in international law or failure to observe ceremonial requirements.
Leaving aside the question of whether war was declared, and while war without declaration may be its own problem, both US and international law recognize that war exists (and the laws of war apply) when armed conflict is initiated, whether or not a declaration was made previously.
> conduct political assassinations of suspect combatants
If they're combatants, it's not political assassination. It's a combat operation.
If they're suspected combatants, it's still not political assassination. It may not be morally justified, but it's not political assassination. (And it still may be morally justified. You almost never have total certainty in discriminating between civilian and combatant, even in a formally declared war against a formal military.)
That's hair-splitting nonsense. Drone victims are very often neither combatants nor suspected combatants but rather local warlords/politicians. In many cases the US forces do not try at all to determine whether the victims are combatants (i.e., whether they are holding a gun in their hands, for instance).
As the article lays out the assassinations are made based on death lists compiled by US intelligence agencies. They can put whoever they like on these lists, in this case they put a US citizen on it, for example. That's the paradigmatic example of political assassinations, and e.g. on a par with what the US did when they supported death squads in Chile, except that in Chile the death squads were mostly comprised of non-US citizens whereas drone strikes are conducted by US citizens.
What is this "operating asymetrically"? And how exactly does that justify anything?
Seems like I can say US is opperating asymmetrically, so it's ok to kill all US citizens (or at least people who voluntarilly became US citizens). And it will have just as much validity. Like none...
I like your point, but terrorism and war is conflating. I wouldn't want to ignore a terrorist that we know hides in Syria, and that we believe to be dangerous. That could be our moment of hesitating to kill Bin Laden. And unlike Bill Clinton, who had no drones back in 1998 and would have had to use a cruise missile strike, today it can often be done with no civilian casualties.
Sending in troops in this godforsaken places means losing more lives.
Say we have proof that a target is a known terrorist and that no civilians are around. Would you still risk the lives of 10 soldiers to catch him. Or of 2,996 and just let him go?
I do agree that the Americans probably don't have much proof of terrorism or other wrongdoing for many of the targets, and that so far they have stricken several times where civilians were around.
I think the ideal situation in all cases would be taking a suspect, bringing them to trial and awarding an appropriate sentence if they are found guilty. The difference between a US national and a foreign national is a US national has a real chance of actually being seen in court. Though it would be infinitely preferable to do so, I can't imagine the logistical complexity of trying to defeat a terror organisation by individually capturing and trying each suspected member. It's a new kind of war, and not one with a set of engagement rules like those that governed more "traditional" inter-state warfare.
I don't know that it's about being less moral or legal. Rather an uneasiness with the military being used against citizens because it is a clearly understood line which is difficult to cross in "boiling frog" fashion like in other areas (privacy, for example), so it's easy to point out and condemn in concrete terms. Like a rallying landmark against overreach.
That's the problem. They believe it's self defense seeking out and killing these terrorists randomly. I'm sure the way they determine whether they are legitimate threats to us is extremely lengthy, but some slip through the cracks like Bilal Kareem.
I recommend the movie "Eye in the Sky" as a great encapsulation of one aspect of the moral struggles in this area. I wonder if the people who made that movie know that it is being shown at the US Air Force Academy by many of the instructors as part of the required ethics course for cadets.
Most of the comments here, and even the article itself shows just how far the Overton window has moved when it comes to these discussions.
The article makes a few mentions of how perhaps killing non-Americans isn't fine either:
> We wiped out the Geneva Convention by creating the unlawful enemy combatant, a term that simply means a person not protected by the Geneva Convention.
But even for the Rolling Stone the discussion has mostly moved on. The post-9/11 world of killing people in "warzones" (war was never declared) without any regard for the Geneva Convention is taken as a given.
Okay.. what do we do, declare war on Pakistan in order to prosecute a conflict in Waziristan? War with Afghanistan to go after violent Taliban factions in northern provinces? There is not a nation state entity to declare war against, and for example in Afghanistan you have a national population on the order of the city of Beijing, and hundreds of the police die there per year in this internal conflict. The national governments are probably complicit/cooperative for their own reasons. Also, the Geneva convention has obligations for both sides of a conflict, and - even though conduct shouldn't be dictated by the lowest common denominator - it's just not intended for this situation. I think it's possible to distinguish targeted (however flawed) drone campaigns from mass casualty bio/chem attacks like are done in Syria (with Russian support) or other cases.
I think it's worth stepping back and asking the question of why the US is involved in the conflict there in the first place? And to what extent the US is really threatened by people on the other side of the planet?
> why the US is involved in the conflict there in the first place?
Active and believable threats directed at the US, including sending resources and fighters to actively engage the US. It'd be great if we could give just give Iraq a ring and ask them to go shove a boot up these folks other-sides, but since they're massively losing cities and land to these warlords, they're not really in a place to handle the situation themselves. Something about a terrorist group taking large swathes of your land, borderline enslaving your people into forced labor and selling the pretty ones as "wives" to be raped endlessly kind of makes it hard to function as a normal country.
> to what extent the US is really threatened by people on the other side of the planet?
Those are like 1 incident per year. So the US spends billions in conflicts to prevent a handful of such incidents, which could even be considered relatively minor compared to the regular mass shootings in the US? Is it even preventing them or creating them when it's killing so many indiscriminately with drone strikes over there?
Could that money not be spent better elsewhere to prevent other types of deaths? I think the U.S. and American politicians accept increases in budgets to the military so easily, that they don't even think about whether or not those resources are used effectively anymore.
You spent thousands to be treated for cancer, despite only having one tumor a year? Clearly you should be spending that money on a gym membership instead...
It's hard to wage terrorist activities when you're fighting a literal multi-sided war.
Plus there's the issue of how many terrorist attacks there would be if there was indeed no response.
We all know the answer to that one: we'd all be living under "amateur" Taliban, Mafias and worse anywhere near any large city, with constant public executions for "sacrilege" and for "competing" with the Mafia, and for ... There would be no international (or generally non-private) flights, and so on.
All the problems now faced by the US were created by the US. By continuing without acknowledging this there will no doubt be more similar future problems.
What about the innocent people freed by the American response to those events? Or do Iraq citizens being raped and murdered not count? Do we include the tally for terrorist events in the UK, France and other allies as well?
"Oh hey, yeah, sorry that a terrorist group armed someone to shoot up a gay nightclub, we feel real bad about that, but we need at least a hundred more people killed before we can do anything."
I don't remember Iraq having quite such a problem with its territorial integrity before the US invaded, disbanded its army, and allowed its munitions dumps to be looted by anyone with a truck.
The June 2016 incident, the "Pulse" nightclub mass shooting, is a good case in point. The person involved wasn't "sent" to the US, he was a US-born national living in the US who'd never visited the middle East. He seems to have been radicalised by speech in the same way that other mass shooters were.
>He seems to have been radicalised by speech in the same way that other mass shooters were.
During his calls to 911 he said directly that the US bombing campaigns in the Middle East led to his mass shooting. He seems to be a direct example of how backwards US policy is.
Your examples all occurred after we suspended individual liberties and spent untold fortunes and lives to stop it. Would you conclude that to be a successful strategy?
so you're saying because the current legal framework doesn't allow you to randomly start military actions in other countries' territory without their consent, that the legal framework is wrong?
Maybe as a thought experiment, try applying similar logic the other way around: should any other country have gotten involved in e.g. the Ferguson situation? If so, would that be considered an act of war by the US?
If the "Ferguson situation" involved collaborators seeking to secede a section of the US/overthrow of US gov't and had a proven history of using mass casualty tactics to achieve it and the US government had asked for that countries help and had approved those tactics? ... Then no, that would not be considered an act of war.
that's a very long list of "if"s, and they don't all apply to the situations today.
See for example Pakistan:
"Pakistan has repeatedly protested these attacks as an infringement of its sovereignty and because civilian deaths have also resulted, including women and children, which has further angered the Pakistani government and people."
Of course it makes them angry and it should. These type of operations should be handled with the gravest responsibility and killing dozens of noncombatants just because they're gathered for a wedding, for example, is an outrage and beyond unacceptable. But do you think these operations are happening without the approval of the Pakistani government, or do you think those statements are for domestic consumption?
But that's not what's happening. Pakistani militants have planned and executed attacks on US citizens in the US and Afghanistan. Bin Laden lived there and coordinated from northern Pakistan for a decade after 9/11. The operations are targeting criminals who have committed and conspired to commit murder, not an indiscriminate campaign of murder against random citizens of Pakistan. Many innocent Pakistani people (and a Pakistani PM) have been killed by these groups. It's not morally cut and dry.
"the US policy of considering all military-age males in a strike zone as militants"
In other words: even IF you assume that killing someone because they're "militants" is automatically okay, the people "pulling the trigger" barely ever know who they're killing, yet they retroactively count them as "probably bad enough to be droned".
Pray tell. There is international law, and international law. There is NO international law. Law exists where you have clear laws, a clear and separate way to determine how it applies in situations, and a way to rectify situations afterwards, and an enforcement mechanism ... So thankfully none of that exists, all there is is some vague international documents nobody actually respects. Not the US, not Europe, and certainly no-one else.
For instance, one part of international law said that France and the UK (and several others) would declare war on Russia if Russia ever violated the territory of the Ukraine, which it did when it annexed Crimea ... [1]
Is it that "legal framework" you're talking about (international treaties) ? Why don't you complain that a new world war wasn't started, despite the "legal framework" (ie. international treaties) stating that we should to respond to Russia's provocation ?
Weird how people have such selective application of law and weird interpretations.
Interpretations ? Yes, by the way. Why don't you go through those human rights treaties, and verify these questions for me ?
1) if you take actions against a foreign state or military without wearing a uniform, what rights do you have ? None. You can be shot on sight, with collateral damage around you (no limits, so theoretically we could nuke terrorists), by a foreign force, on the territory of a different state than the one controlling the foreign force.
2) WHO makes the determination if you fall under that category from question 1) ? The "on the ground" commander of the force shooting you. This decision is final and cannot be contested by courts afterwards.
3) It does not matter why that force is there, whether they're invading, just visiting, protecting dignitaries, or in fact just entering that territory to eliminate terrorists.
Read through the human rights treaties (start here [2]) and point out where I'm wrong.
So something is missing in international laws. A country can only declare war to another country, so one might ask : what if conventions about wars were to be modified to include this: allow a country to formally declare war to an organization ?
I know this won't happen because of many arguments: it is too tempting to limit the level of recognition of the opposite side, especially fighters who are just "terrorists" and not called soldiers ; it is easier also to do what you want when there is no law, even for countries at war as they see more efficiency when there is no formal control.
So the dilemna is : either there is more formalization of wars with countries vs terror groups, to allow for better rules and control for avoiding civilian casualties and not breeding new generations of terrorists ourselves, with the downside of legitimizing those terror groups (which might help them on the long run) and losing efficiency in the fight, or we allow ourselves to act as what many can describe as murderers, because of the blind killings of civilians by drones.
It is a lose-lose situation, so the choice is really about who we want to be.
I don't know. I don't even know that I'd want to be making those decisions. But I thought the discussion was getting reduced to a caricature of the actual issue, and wanted to elevate it. It strikes me like the trolley problem in that there may not be a "good" solution, let alone one that everyone can agree on.
The author had to pick their battlefield. Focusing narrowly on this case and the new class of violations it represents made the article more impactful. I don't think the author was excusing or even accepting the other things, but when you're trying to make a strong point and inspire action, you have to be as succinct and directed as possible.
> The post-9/11 world of killing people in "warzones" (war was never declared)
Only if you adhere to the false belief that a declaration of war requires particular magic words and that the 9/11-motivated AUMF is not an open-ended conditional (on Presidential determination) declaration of war.
> without any regard for the Geneva Convention
Which of the Geneva Conventions is being ignored, and how?
> Please elaborate on why we should consider that belief false?
Because the alternative, a “magic words” requirement for invoking the power to declare war, is (1) inconsistent with the way every other Article I power is treated, and (2) was conclusively rejected by the courts while the ink was still practically wet on the ratification of the Constitution, in Bas v. Tingy (1800).
> Plenty of Senators disagree with you.
There are all kinds of false beliefs publicly embraced (and perhaps actually believed, but that's harder to assess) by plenty of Senators, but I don't see any evidence that the particular one I took issue with upthread is one of them.
It's interesting how you dismiss things you don't agree with as "magic words". What is the existing AUMF other than a set of "magic words" that gives the President the ability to send soldiers into any country at any time for almost any reason?
Any idea how many countries we are currently fighting in based on this AUMF? Does it bother you that there were/are soldiers fighting in Niger without Congressional knowledge? Did all of these terrorist organizations exist when the AUMF was passed? If not, how can it possibly apply to them?
Unfortunately, I think this is a thornier issue than most of these articles give it credit for.
Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen, but he was serving as a uniformed combatant in the Canadian army. Under such circumstances, I can't imagine anyone would have a problem with the United States military killing John Doe in battle without trial.
Obviously, the circumstances around the kill list are murkier... The "war on terror" isn't a war in the traditional sense, terrorists or suspected terrorists are not uniformed combatants, the CIA is not necessarily the military, and it's not really certain that dropping a bomb on somebody's "cafe experience" is equivalent to killing them in a pitched battle in a declared war.
Still, I have a hard time imagining what rights a US citizen is supposed to be entitled to when they are effectively a foreign terrorist working to attack the US. Are we supposed to have a trial for them without them present? (We all know how that would go.) Ask for their home country to extradite them? (Country will almost certainly either be unwilling or incapable.) Send the Navy Seals to kidnap them and force them to stand trial? (Dangerous and wildly impractical, not to mention boots on the ground increasing the risk of creating a larger conflict with a foreign nation.)
Personally, I have two take-aways on the issue:
1) I wouldn't want to be the judge that has to sort this stuff out, and I hope they do it well. It's not easy.
2) I think the bigger problem is drone killings in other nations FULL STOP. Regardless of who the targets are, it's completely unacceptable for any country to think they can just fly into another nation's airspace and start dropping bombs on anybody they please without a declaration of war, some sort of cooperative MOU, or a join military exercise...
> Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen
You are in table-top-gaming territory. Constructing arbitrary hypotheticals as your base condition doesn't make your arguments stronger, it makes them apply to a non-existent universe.
Part of the problem is that if you haven't given them a fair trial, you haven't proved they're a terrorist rather than an ordinary member of the public.
A. America tries to have a high standard of justice and the value of a life
VS
B. Countries at war usually will summarily kill enemies, defectors, and often innocents for convenience sake with 0 recourse or oversight.
---
I think the questions we need to ask are whether these looser moral standards we apply to actual wars should still apply to the situations overseas that are not declared wars by congress and have been going on for over a decade and involve targets who are not armed combatants on the battlefield.
We also need to ask at what point is a justification owed to the american people on this.
Its almost two decades now, although one could argue that this has been going on for almost three decades depending on when one thinks this conflict started. The thing I find the most insane is that at the end of next year young men and women will begin to deploy to Afghanistan and other bases around the world that were not even born when 9/11 happened. And that is something that we should not accept.
> Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen, but he was serving as a uniformed combatant in the Canadian army. Under such circumstances, I can't imagine anyone would have a problem with the United States military killing John Doe in battle without trial.
Or, for a concrete circumstance that actually occurred, substitute “Canada” for “Nazi Germany”; Americans fighting for the Nazis, in uniform or not, did not get special protection different from other Nazi combatants, either on the battlefield or when detained as prisoners (see, e.g., Ex Parte Quirin, in which two of the eight saboteurs detained and eventually sentenced by military tribunal to death as unlawful combatants were US citizens.)
I just started reading "Society and Sanity"[0]. It's an interesting read so far, and opens with a prediction that if society forgets what a human is, that society will tend towards this sort of behavior-- arbitrary treatment of fellow humans, with the only argument against such treatment being, "I don't like it, and I wish you'd be kinder to people." And the counter argument being, "I like it, and I don't want to be kinder to people." If we're to solve this problem, we have to get back to the essential foundational idea that human beings have intrinsic rights which exist and are not simply concessions of the state.
I presume the point was that, as a fetus is genetically human, treating it as something to be killed at our convenience is an example of the problem ("arbitrary treatment of fellow humans", rather than recognizing that "human beings have intrinsic rights which exist and are not simply concessions of the state").
So, hypothetical law question here: if the US government has deemed you worthy of being killed, are you legally obligated to die?
I asked this question once before in the context of whether you are "breaking the law" if you flee from a cop that is shooting at you, but it seems apt here as well.
It's a somewhat silly question (what punishment would you propose for noncompliance). The obvious legal answer is "no", because you are not obligated to do something unless there's a law to that effect, and there's no law creating such an obligation because it would be silly.
As an approximation, it might make sense to look as some analogues: the fifth amendment right not to incriminate yourself in a criminal trial, for example, speaks to a recognition of every humans' (even criminals') right to protect themselves. If you can't be forced to provide information against your interests, you can certainly not be obligated to inflict the ultimate punishment onto yourself.
A very similar train of thought finds expression in German law, where it is not a crime to break out of prison, a fact often justified by reference to a fundamental human urge to seek freedom (any property damage, or injury inflicted on others is, however, criminal).
Which is what the US did to many members of the ACP after WWI deporting them en masse to Russia (not killing them, Stalin did that for the US government distrusting the foreign communists)
[the article implies the deportees were 'aliens' but I think the legalism here is wafer thin. I think they held themselves to be Americans, internationalists maybe, but not aliens]
I was very surprised when I read that the US state and federal authorities were calmly happy to deploy machine guns against strikers, and even more bemused when they chose to deport people and remove citizenship. I really didn't think states like "us" did that, but apparently I was wrong.
Australia reneges on the AU-NZ treaty all the time, deporting Kiwi's for trivial offences. Green card holders can be stripped and dumped for offences which citizens would walk away from with a finger wag.
When I listen to Noam Chomsky I often think he exaggerates, and then this! And like the article points to, this is not specific to Trump or Bush, but also Clinton and Obama.
I would love to know what U.S. citizens who have put thought into and truly believe that their second amendment protects them from their government abuse think of this.
IANAL but it seems to me the mental workflow of determining the legality of all this is definitely not what I think it should be.
For the non-citizen, it seems clear to me the judge's determining that there is no standing to even raise the issue in a US court is sound. If I was theoretically plotting against some other (non-US) nation - say, Canada for argument's sake - I have no relationship, obligation, or anything really with Canada. And they have none with me. So the idea that Canada should be forced to explain itself to me or prove anything to me is absurd. They owe me nothing and I owe them nothing (unless perhaps I am within their borders, then a few obligations are there for both sides).
For the US citizen, the court definitely has jurisdiction as this is a federal court and we're talking about the actions of the federal branch of the US government taking action against a citizen. Also, this is a civil case, so the question then becomes whether or not there is presiding law on this and whether the claims have merit. There is very little law for this specific type of case (drone strikes). The lawsuit didn't actually claim a rights violation (which seriously surprised me). But before all of that, the heart of this drone strike murder issue against a US citizen has it's roots in due process. The big question is whether or not due process still applies to actions against a citizen when not on US soil. That answer is most definitely not clear and to my knowledge has never been answered by a court. Clearly, the constitutional and the law in general apply within US borders. However, in most cases the law ends at the border. But there are things that citizens can do overseas and face charges for at home. So is the reverse true? Is there anything that the US government can do to us while we are not on US soil that violates the law? Does the obligation to protect (or at least not violate) my constitutional rights still exist once I cross the border? Until this question is answered, I don't think anything else in this case can be answered with certainty.
This also excludes the entire examination of potential criminal (not civil) violations or violations of international law, war crimes, violations of conventions like Geneva, Hague, etc.
199 comments
[ 1071 ms ] story [ 1509 ms ] threadhttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#Death
> he became the first United States citizen to be assassinated by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded.[15][16] President Barack Obama ordered the strike.[17] His son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (a 16-year-old U.S. citizen), was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks later.[18] On January 29, 2017, al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar Al-Awlaki, was killed in a U.S. commando attack in Yemen which was ordered by President Donald Trump.[19][20][21][22]
[1] Please note: I am not justifying Awlaki's work. He was an Al Qaeda member. But also a natural born American citizen.
Edit: it was in the OP article.
There was some outcry about the president now having authority to kill even Americans without due process – “I think it’s sad,” said U.S. Congressman Ron Paul – but the uproar soon faded, and America’s assassination program accelerated still more. By late 2011, we’d killed more than 2,000 “militants.”
I'm not saying I agree with this -- I'm just trying to respond to your question.
Under the Obama administration, they decided to count all military-age males in a strike zone as enemy combatants, unless there was explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent [0].
Was a bomb dropped on a wedding to kill a terrorist? Well, all the other men aged 18-50 at the wedding are also classed as enemy combatants too, meaning 'no innocent civilians' were killed. Way to go Mr. Nobel Peace Prize winner.
0: https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/05/under-o...
He just grown an outward facing (meaning outside of Syria, english language) news/commentary website/following on twitter/youtube from northwest of Syria. He interviews various people, including members of various militias (leaders and non-leaders), civilians, etc. I think he also interviewed some ex-shabaab (Somalia) disillusioned members. He doesn't seem radical.
OGN is mildly interesting, as in it shows what some people deal with in the region, how militia leaders present themselves to the outside world, etc. But most of the news content can be obtained from elsewhere too. It was more unique when he was in besieged Eastern Aleppo.
Bombing this guy would be like bombing The Young Turks, or whatever. It's ridiculous. He's not even in a war zone. He's in Idlib de-escalation zone.
It's a bit more shocking when you realize a Constitutional Law professor is the one who opened up this can of worms.
He was the sitting President and personally authorized the first extrajudicial assassination of an American Citizen in the GWOT.
As the Executive Chief, "The buck stops (t)here."
As in, there were extrajudicial assassinations of people before, but this one was too far because this time it was an American Citizen Capital A Capital C?
It is incredibly unnerving to see one's own government explicitly authorize the death of a fellow citizen without due process of law.
That is just chilling.
Mikhail Kalashnikov
The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.
Albert Einstein
But I go along with Einstein. The more technogy is avaiable to the masses, the more powerful a single persons becomes. There might come a time soon, when anyone could just tinker a atomic bomb together in his garage ... we seriously need to change our way of thinking, till that happens.
I do not see how that tracks from either the English translation, the original Russian name for the country: "Сою́з Сове́тских Социалисти́ческих Респу́блик", or the transliteration: "Soyúz Sovétskikh Sotsialistícheskikh Respúblik".
J. Robert Oppenheimer
Do better.
try harder
We can do better when we try to understand someone else's perspective--get into their narrative instead of 5 second superficial scanning and immediately turn off.
edit: this seems off the front page, which answers my (not hypothetical or sarcastically intended) question.
A real hacker would still not care about this when they themselves end up on a kill list, because politics, the air we breathe, and other things are just totally for lamers.
edit: agree entirely that the case in the article (Bilal Abdul Kareem) is no gray area. The difficulties interleaving points about the generality of a topic and specific cases.
Unfortunately, any thread about Microsoft quickly devolves into a flamewar. Similarly, any thread about politics, especially one that can be brigaded from other places, will quickly turn into a flamewar.
It's not that dang (et al) remove just because they want to, they remove because it becomes toxic. They stay up and in place long enough to know that.
edit: I'm 100% opposed to migrant family separation and think it's vile. I'm talking about how to reunite those families.
The separation of families is an intentionally punitive tactic and could be "solved" by not doing it in the first place.
If your definition of "solving" this is "figuring out where we put these people's kids", simple pen and paper bookkeeping would have fixed that.
HN (and the tech community) has a libertarian streak, in addition to being somewhat left-of-center. Stories like this tend to unite these fundamentally opposing constituencies, resulting in more substantive discussions than other political topics. It also helps that the story is fundamentally non-partisan, in that both major US parties can be blamed for the situation.
I still consider it a blemish on HN's conscience, and a failure of HN leadership's responsibility to the community, that topics where this community is in a prime position to actually affect change tend to bring out the worst in (some) people and have in effect been banned to keep the peace. I'm not just speaking of "diversity in tech", where I can somewhat see how it has the potential of instilling fear in those traditionally profiting from discrimination. There, I can at least understand the mechanism at work, even though I consider it logically flawed.
But even summoning all my powers to understand opposing viewpoints I cannot fathom why this community reacts as dismissive as it does to, for example, stories (and projects / algorithms / ...) of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning. It would seem to be a topic that's both interesting from a technological and scientific standpoint, as well as welcome to everyone working in the space and presumably preferring not to do harm vs the opposite.
My best explanation is that there is a fundamental disgust in the tech community now of everything coming from, or even associated with, the social sciences. My second-best explanation is that tech has taken a sharp right turn at some point in the last 15 years, which would also explain why I remember only united opposition against software patents, and support for open source, from the first slashdot discussions I read. Whereas today, I see lots of sympathy for software patents in HN threats, and Open Source (and especially the GPL) are often spoken of with disgust.
If you're referring to the current news headlines: those do not involve asylum seekers, that's not what asylum means.
https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/asylum
I.e. first rule is to submit something interesting, the second is to avoid politics, but, apparently if the topic is interesting enough politics can be included.
The examples you list are the regular kind of political turmoil. This drone thing, given how far spread it is, on the other hand chips away at the fundamentals of why western societies managed to generate so much added value in the past centuries.
Consistent rule of law and functioning judicial system were one of them.
Having some black ops teams on ground violating basic human rights is not as bad as having an automated kill system that picks of targets based on metadata and then forwards that to drone targeting team as a daily standard policy.
To add to that, there is the generic humanistic cry for basic human rights.
After this auto-kill thing with the drones the ground on which to argument for any sort of generic human rights quickly becomes really fragile, getting all sorts of exceptions like, well, geneva convention was written when thinking about white people only and besides, the old school democratic process gave equal rights only if you were a male and ranked among the landed gentry or higher.
To be blunt: it appears as if brown people in far away countries still in 21st century are not considered as important as people of... other complexion... so it's ok to kill them every which way is more convenient.
On a semi-related note, I hope John Walker Lindh gets a hell of a party upon his release next May.
Does that matter a single iota? Does the US legal system say somewhere you can hold people in prison with no rights because "they sort of are a terrorist, though"?
If it was such a slam dunk, why not arrest and prosecute under existing laws? That the federal government felt they needed to take unconstitutional steps undermines their credibility in my eyes.
So what? Even terrorists have a right to a fair trial, and protection from arbitrary detention.
Innocent people should be protected from arbitrary detention, therefore everyone should get a fair trial to determine if it can be proved they are guilty, while they have the ability to defend themselves. An innocent person who is wrongly accused of bombing a kindergarten is just as innocent as a person who is wrongly accused of stealing a candy bar.
If you haven't given him a fair trial, you haven't proved he is a terrorist.
I try very hard to not use hyperbolic, overly-passionate political rhetoric, and maybe I'm making a mistake this time, but I can't help but say:
Your mentality is what enables fascism, despotism, genocide, and gross in-humanity.
The only concern should be whether they are proven to be dangerous terrorists, not what their nationality is. If it's okay to kill a dangerous Afghan terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan, then it's also okay to kill a dangerous American terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan. Outside of war zones, I don't see any excuse for killing anyone, unless in self defense.
I am still not sure about what to think of the whole drone war. I see how it saves hundreds of thousands of lives, compared to bringing in ground troops, but it sure feels wrong and dystopian.
Once you reject the principle that "all people are created equally human", then you run the risk of being on the "wrong side", and treated in a sub-human manner.
Why does killing have to be the answer?
In our world, we sometimes have to fight. Sometimes, it's better to kill the terrorists than to risk that they attack us or to risk our soldiers getting killed in an attempt of bringing them in.
In the best of worlds, people would understand there's no such clear thing as "bad guys". Drone strikes kill defenseless civilians every day. Who is the bad guy to the father whose ten year old daughter was killed by a drone?
The more of this stuff we collectively condone the more the Bin Laden's of this world are winning. That's the real tragedy, that after 9/11 the West lost its moral compass.
I, for one, am OK with the fact that [almost] all terrorist attacks on US soil in the last 10 years have been domestic.
Give it another 20 years and we will have missile attacks on kindergartens because suspected pedophiles were seen near it.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/B%E1%BA%BFn_Tre
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Arnett
https://rightsanddissent.org/news/may-13-1985-the-day-a-city...
And sure it was considered unconscionable. Who went to prison in the administration of the time? Hint: not the police, military, or politicians who ordered it.
There's also the case in which the Air Force bombed Tulsa. Still, more African Americans, so it wasn't really a big deal (notice a trend?).
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulsa_race_riot
It's fine to be angry but not OK to twist basic facts.
Because of the way the 9/11 AUMF is crafted, there's no legal difference, just as there would have been no legal difference between bombing Japanese forces in WWII that happened to be found on US soil and bombing then in Japan or some third country.
There are, however, practical and political differences, which is why, e.g. when German unlawful combatants were identified in the US in WWII (after two of them turned themselves in to the FBI, who they had trouble convincing of the reality of the situation, and fingered the rest of the group), the government didn't send an assault force and level the neighborhood, but instead the FBI picked them up (and then handed then over to the military.)
There's one blip in that whole history where you can't say the same thing about casualties from such attacks as about attacks.
"This is asymmetric warfare in which the adversary is not a hypothetical threat, but has killed many thousands of people globally (not just 9/11). By joining a hostile armed force they can be legally killed in combat operations against that force. By operating asymmetrically, they are relinquishing more rights under the Geneva convention. Because of the nature of this, trial by jury could put humint allies at risk"
Parts of the way this "war" is being prosecuted is wrong, but I don't think this an utter abdication of a moral compass. There really are people planning and executing plans to kill other people, and they should be stopped.
Obviously this story shows that are some disgraceful flaws in the the way the process is set up and executed.
Fortunately there's been detailed study of counterinsurgency since the end of WW2, looking for the most effective strategies, e.g.: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR291z2.html
"The "iron fist" COIN path, focused primarily on eliminating the insurgent threat, is historically less successful. A motive-based path (one that focuses on eliminating the incentives to support or participate in an insurgency) has been much more successful."
So? Of course the criminal justice resources are being used but at the same time there is a long list of transgressions that if they weren't a response to terrorism would invite just that.
> And I think the question of how to fight armed combatants in remote areas of the world is a real moral gray area (really: how many people should die to apprehend someone committing crimes of this type in a remote area of the world?
It's actually really simple, and not morally gray at all: If you can name your foe then you ask kindly for the nation where the foe is hiding to extradite them so they can be put on trial. If that fails then you're out of luck.
> The law enforcement/military people that would do this are 3-dimensional and their lives count).
This is the basis of the doctrine of 'force protection', worthy of a chapter all by itself and in many ways a substantial part of the problem. American lives are not worth even a little bit more than the lives of people of other nations.
So, in short: getting your hands on the perpetrators of terrorist attacks is roughly as hard as getting US 'contractors' extradited from the United States to Iraq for the crimes they committed. And that means that if it does not work you do not have an automatic 'ok' to go and kill those people because that makes you stoop to the level of nation state sponsored terrorism, aka acts of war.
[1] https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/projects/drone-war
JOINT RESOLUTION Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled:
Declaring that a state of war exists between the armed militant groups of Jundallah, Tehrik-i-Taliban, Lashkar-e-Islam, TNSM, al-Qaeda, ISIL and their successor and fraternal organizations within Waziristan and neighboring provinces and the Government and people of the United States, and making provision to prosecute the same.
Whereas, the recent acts of by the militant groups are acts of war against the Government and the people of the United States:
Resolved by the Senate and the House of Representatives of the United States of America in Congress assembled, That the state of War between the United States and the militant groups of Waziristan which has been thrust upon the United States is hereby formally declared; and
That the President be, and is hereby, authorized and directed to take immediate steps not only to put the country in a thorough state of defense but also to exert all of its power and employ all of its resources to carry on war against the militant groups and to bring the conflict to a successful termination.
-------------------
And then they vote on it and it passes. And the Supreme Court finds that there is nothing unconstitutional about it.
Armed militant groups are first and foremost the problem of the countries bordering and including the territory these militants operate in.
Any action against them by foreigners not otherwise involved in the region is an act of war in and of itself.
Imagine - I know this is a tricky one - Russia intervening in North Dakota between two rival bike gangs. The United States would see this as an act of war against the USA, and rightly so.
The only way this could happen is if there was a direct invitation from one of the governments of the affected countries and this would then still be limited to the territory of that country.
So the American Civil War wasn't a war, since the south wasn't another country? The Chinese civil war wasn't a war? The Iruqois Wars weren't wars? The Seljuk-Crusader War wasn't a real war? The War of the Sicilian Vespers wasn't a real war? The War of the Succession of Champange wasn't a real war?
It seems like there's about 4,000+ years of natural language clearly establishing that a war is NOT just about fights between two nation states.
But, hey, I could be wrong. It wouldn't be the first time Congress has passed a resolution that ended up being found unconstitutional and it won't be the last.
No, it was a Civil War. As you already wrote.
> The Chinese civil war wasn't a war?
No.
> The Iruqois Wars weren't wars?
You are really reaching now.
It seems to me that you are trying very hard to hold on to the idea that there is such a thing as a 'war on terrorism' but the whole thing is nonsense, just as much as the 'war on drugs' or any other mis-use of the term.
> But, hey, I could be wrong.
Yes you are.
> It wouldn't be the first time Congress has passed a resolution that ended up being found unconstitutional and it won't be the last.
It's not the constitution of the United States that matters here but international law.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_war
Declarations of war identify an enemy, they don't (inherently, though they could also do this) limit the geographic area in which forces of that enemy will be attacked.
> Imagine - I know this is a tricky one - Russia intervening in North Dakota between two rival bike gangs. The United States would see this as an act of war against the USA, and rightly so.
Yes, but that doesn't make declaring (or prosecuting) war against non-state actors impossible, it just means that prosecuting such a war will either require cooperation of or conflict with other states.
That's often true with regard to third-party states in interstate war, too, whose territory is often violated (or, in some cases, the entire country occupied, as the British did to Iceland in WWII) without declaration of war as part of prosecuting a declared war against some other state.
If you want an example of an actual exercise of Congressional power to declare war that applies (conditioned on Presidential determination) to both state and non-state actors, see the 9/11 AUMF.
IOW, been there, done that, and that's what got us where we are.
(OTOH, this is a discussion specifically about American action, anyway.)
If you are of the opinion that this is not the case then maybe America should withdraw from the Geneva convention and various other useful treaties as well because after all, what's the point in having rules of engagement if you're going to ignore them anyway...
Yeah, but declarations of war (whether with or without magic words) aren't really important in a legal sense in that domain. Alexander Hamilton observed that they were falling out of use internstionally before the US Constitution was ratified, and the post-WWII international order has essentially made them moot with the recognition of aggressive war as a crime against peace. Fighting a defensive war once hostility was initiated (or, perhaps, clearly imminent) has long been accepted as valid with or without declaration, so with aggressive war itself a crime, there is no war legitimized by a formal declaration.
The international laws governing armed conflict are operative based on the fact of such conflict and the identity of the parties to it, not declarations of war.
That's the whole reason the Geneva convention was created to begin with, to differentiate between combatants and non-combatants. Now, it absolutely sucks that the other party doesn't play by the rules but that is no reason to stop playing by those rules ourselves. The moment we do so we stoop to that same level.
Anyway, that's a past station by this point and I'll probably have a hard time convincing you that on the evening of 9/11/2001 America had the keys to a new world order in its hands and squandered the opportunity by seeking petty revenge and economic advantage. The lesson learned that evening is that by doing what your enemy wants you to do you lose, big time. You can't wage war on ideas or on reactions.
Both the US and each of the groups it had targeted under the 9/11 AUMF has an identity.
Some of the targets are parts of diffuse groups with little central command structure, which makes it very hard to end a war against them (and harder still to draw and end to an open ended war where targets are added by loose association), which is a problem of the crafting of the AUMF, it's continuation in effect, and the Congressional oversight of the war effort.
In an international law sense, there's a host of valid questions about the adequacy and appropriateness of the rules governing conflicts involving non-state actors (such as Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.)
> Now, it absolutely sucks that the other party doesn't play by the rules but that is no reason to stop playing by those rules ourselves.
I don't disagree, but drone strikes per se aren't a violation of the rules.
> I'll probably have a hard time convincing you that on the evening of 9/11/2001 America had the keys to a new world order in its hands
Well, yeah, that's a claim that would take some support.
> and squandered the opportunity by seeking petty revenge and economic advantage.
While I doubt the existence of the opportunity you suggest was squandered, I do think the US government did a grave disservice to both itself and the world community with it's conduct in the years immediately following 9/11, most especially, but not exclusively, in the naked war of aggression it leveraged domestic outrage at 9/11 to justify in Iraq.
And I think there are deep problems with the broader “War on Terror”, I just seem to disagree with you on the degree to which those problems are due to violations of clear proscriptions in international law or failure to observe ceremonial requirements.
Leaving aside the question of whether war was declared, and while war without declaration may be its own problem, both US and international law recognize that war exists (and the laws of war apply) when armed conflict is initiated, whether or not a declaration was made previously.
If they're combatants, it's not political assassination. It's a combat operation.
If they're suspected combatants, it's still not political assassination. It may not be morally justified, but it's not political assassination. (And it still may be morally justified. You almost never have total certainty in discriminating between civilian and combatant, even in a formally declared war against a formal military.)
As the article lays out the assassinations are made based on death lists compiled by US intelligence agencies. They can put whoever they like on these lists, in this case they put a US citizen on it, for example. That's the paradigmatic example of political assassinations, and e.g. on a par with what the US did when they supported death squads in Chile, except that in Chile the death squads were mostly comprised of non-US citizens whereas drone strikes are conducted by US citizens.
Seems like I can say US is opperating asymmetrically, so it's ok to kill all US citizens (or at least people who voluntarilly became US citizens). And it will have just as much validity. Like none...
Sending in troops in this godforsaken places means losing more lives.
Say we have proof that a target is a known terrorist and that no civilians are around. Would you still risk the lives of 10 soldiers to catch him. Or of 2,996 and just let him go?
I do agree that the Americans probably don't have much proof of terrorism or other wrongdoing for many of the targets, and that so far they have stricken several times where civilians were around.
Having read TFA, this claim is laughable.
The only way to do it is via a fair due process and trial.
The article makes a few mentions of how perhaps killing non-Americans isn't fine either:
> We wiped out the Geneva Convention by creating the unlawful enemy combatant, a term that simply means a person not protected by the Geneva Convention.
But even for the Rolling Stone the discussion has mostly moved on. The post-9/11 world of killing people in "warzones" (war was never declared) without any regard for the Geneva Convention is taken as a given.
Active and believable threats directed at the US, including sending resources and fighters to actively engage the US. It'd be great if we could give just give Iraq a ring and ask them to go shove a boot up these folks other-sides, but since they're massively losing cities and land to these warlords, they're not really in a place to handle the situation themselves. Something about a terrorist group taking large swathes of your land, borderline enslaving your people into forced labor and selling the pretty ones as "wives" to be raped endlessly kind of makes it hard to function as a normal country.
> to what extent the US is really threatened by people on the other side of the planet?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_terrorist_incidents_li...
+ June 2016
+ November 2016
+ October 2017
Could that money not be spent better elsewhere to prevent other types of deaths? I think the U.S. and American politicians accept increases in budgets to the military so easily, that they don't even think about whether or not those resources are used effectively anymore.
It's hard to wage terrorist activities when you're fighting a literal multi-sided war.
We all know the answer to that one: we'd all be living under "amateur" Taliban, Mafias and worse anywhere near any large city, with constant public executions for "sacrilege" and for "competing" with the Mafia, and for ... There would be no international (or generally non-private) flights, and so on.
"Oh hey, yeah, sorry that a terrorist group armed someone to shoot up a gay nightclub, we feel real bad about that, but we need at least a hundred more people killed before we can do anything."
That's the usual response to white mass shooters in the US, yes. Especially in response to discussions of gun control.
The June 2016 incident, the "Pulse" nightclub mass shooting, is a good case in point. The person involved wasn't "sent" to the US, he was a US-born national living in the US who'd never visited the middle East. He seems to have been radicalised by speech in the same way that other mass shooters were.
During his calls to 911 he said directly that the US bombing campaigns in the Middle East led to his mass shooting. He seems to be a direct example of how backwards US policy is.
American police kill more Americans than do terrorists. I'd call that an active and believable threat:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/2018/national/police...
https://www.newsweek.com/how-many-americans-do-cops-kill-eac...
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/series/counted-us-police...
https://www.huffingtonpost.com/jerome-karabel/police-killing...
http://www.globalresearch.ca/police-violence-us-cops-killed-...
So when will the war on police start?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Grand_Chessboard
Maybe as a thought experiment, try applying similar logic the other way around: should any other country have gotten involved in e.g. the Ferguson situation? If so, would that be considered an act of war by the US?
See for example Pakistan:
"Pakistan has repeatedly protested these attacks as an infringement of its sovereignty and because civilian deaths have also resulted, including women and children, which has further angered the Pakistani government and people."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drone_strikes_in_Pakistan#Paki...
"the US policy of considering all military-age males in a strike zone as militants"
In other words: even IF you assume that killing someone because they're "militants" is automatically okay, the people "pulling the trigger" barely ever know who they're killing, yet they retroactively count them as "probably bad enough to be droned".
John Oliver had a good segment on the issue:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K4NRJoCNHIs
For instance, one part of international law said that France and the UK (and several others) would declare war on Russia if Russia ever violated the territory of the Ukraine, which it did when it annexed Crimea ... [1]
Is it that "legal framework" you're talking about (international treaties) ? Why don't you complain that a new world war wasn't started, despite the "legal framework" (ie. international treaties) stating that we should to respond to Russia's provocation ?
Weird how people have such selective application of law and weird interpretations.
Interpretations ? Yes, by the way. Why don't you go through those human rights treaties, and verify these questions for me ?
1) if you take actions against a foreign state or military without wearing a uniform, what rights do you have ? None. You can be shot on sight, with collateral damage around you (no limits, so theoretically we could nuke terrorists), by a foreign force, on the territory of a different state than the one controlling the foreign force.
2) WHO makes the determination if you fall under that category from question 1) ? The "on the ground" commander of the force shooting you. This decision is final and cannot be contested by courts afterwards.
3) It does not matter why that force is there, whether they're invading, just visiting, protecting dignitaries, or in fact just entering that territory to eliminate terrorists.
Read through the human rights treaties (start here [2]) and point out where I'm wrong.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budapest_Memorandum_on_Securit...
[2] http://www.un.org/en/universal-declaration-human-rights/
Now what?
I'm just as curious about your ideas, honestly.
Only if you adhere to the false belief that a declaration of war requires particular magic words and that the 9/11-motivated AUMF is not an open-ended conditional (on Presidential determination) declaration of war.
> without any regard for the Geneva Convention
Which of the Geneva Conventions is being ignored, and how?
Because the alternative, a “magic words” requirement for invoking the power to declare war, is (1) inconsistent with the way every other Article I power is treated, and (2) was conclusively rejected by the courts while the ink was still practically wet on the ratification of the Constitution, in Bas v. Tingy (1800).
> Plenty of Senators disagree with you.
There are all kinds of false beliefs publicly embraced (and perhaps actually believed, but that's harder to assess) by plenty of Senators, but I don't see any evidence that the particular one I took issue with upthread is one of them.
It's interesting how you dismiss things you don't agree with as "magic words". What is the existing AUMF other than a set of "magic words" that gives the President the ability to send soldiers into any country at any time for almost any reason?
Any idea how many countries we are currently fighting in based on this AUMF? Does it bother you that there were/are soldiers fighting in Niger without Congressional knowledge? Did all of these terrorist organizations exist when the AUMF was passed? If not, how can it possibly apply to them?
Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen, but he was serving as a uniformed combatant in the Canadian army. Under such circumstances, I can't imagine anyone would have a problem with the United States military killing John Doe in battle without trial.
Obviously, the circumstances around the kill list are murkier... The "war on terror" isn't a war in the traditional sense, terrorists or suspected terrorists are not uniformed combatants, the CIA is not necessarily the military, and it's not really certain that dropping a bomb on somebody's "cafe experience" is equivalent to killing them in a pitched battle in a declared war.
Still, I have a hard time imagining what rights a US citizen is supposed to be entitled to when they are effectively a foreign terrorist working to attack the US. Are we supposed to have a trial for them without them present? (We all know how that would go.) Ask for their home country to extradite them? (Country will almost certainly either be unwilling or incapable.) Send the Navy Seals to kidnap them and force them to stand trial? (Dangerous and wildly impractical, not to mention boots on the ground increasing the risk of creating a larger conflict with a foreign nation.)
Personally, I have two take-aways on the issue:
1) I wouldn't want to be the judge that has to sort this stuff out, and I hope they do it well. It's not easy.
2) I think the bigger problem is drone killings in other nations FULL STOP. Regardless of who the targets are, it's completely unacceptable for any country to think they can just fly into another nation's airspace and start dropping bombs on anybody they please without a declaration of war, some sort of cooperative MOU, or a join military exercise...
You are in table-top-gaming territory. Constructing arbitrary hypotheticals as your base condition doesn't make your arguments stronger, it makes them apply to a non-existent universe.
Part of the problem is that if you haven't given them a fair trial, you haven't proved they're a terrorist rather than an ordinary member of the public.
A. America tries to have a high standard of justice and the value of a life
VS
B. Countries at war usually will summarily kill enemies, defectors, and often innocents for convenience sake with 0 recourse or oversight.
---
I think the questions we need to ask are whether these looser moral standards we apply to actual wars should still apply to the situations overseas that are not declared wars by congress and have been going on for over a decade and involve targets who are not armed combatants on the battlefield.
We also need to ask at what point is a justification owed to the american people on this.
Or, for a concrete circumstance that actually occurred, substitute “Canada” for “Nazi Germany”; Americans fighting for the Nazis, in uniform or not, did not get special protection different from other Nazi combatants, either on the battlefield or when detained as prisoners (see, e.g., Ex Parte Quirin, in which two of the eight saboteurs detained and eventually sentenced by military tribunal to death as unlawful combatants were US citizens.)
[0] https://www.amazon.com/Society-Sanity-Understanding-Live-Tog...
Abortion is a prime example.
I asked this question once before in the context of whether you are "breaking the law" if you flee from a cop that is shooting at you, but it seems apt here as well.
As an approximation, it might make sense to look as some analogues: the fifth amendment right not to incriminate yourself in a criminal trial, for example, speaks to a recognition of every humans' (even criminals') right to protect themselves. If you can't be forced to provide information against your interests, you can certainly not be obligated to inflict the ultimate punishment onto yourself.
A very similar train of thought finds expression in German law, where it is not a crime to break out of prison, a fact often justified by reference to a fundamental human urge to seek freedom (any property damage, or injury inflicted on others is, however, criminal).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids
[the article implies the deportees were 'aliens' but I think the legalism here is wafer thin. I think they held themselves to be Americans, internationalists maybe, but not aliens]
I was very surprised when I read that the US state and federal authorities were calmly happy to deploy machine guns against strikers, and even more bemused when they chose to deport people and remove citizenship. I really didn't think states like "us" did that, but apparently I was wrong.
Australia reneges on the AU-NZ treaty all the time, deporting Kiwi's for trivial offences. Green card holders can be stripped and dumped for offences which citizens would walk away from with a finger wag.
I would love to know what U.S. citizens who have put thought into and truly believe that their second amendment protects them from their government abuse think of this.
For the non-citizen, it seems clear to me the judge's determining that there is no standing to even raise the issue in a US court is sound. If I was theoretically plotting against some other (non-US) nation - say, Canada for argument's sake - I have no relationship, obligation, or anything really with Canada. And they have none with me. So the idea that Canada should be forced to explain itself to me or prove anything to me is absurd. They owe me nothing and I owe them nothing (unless perhaps I am within their borders, then a few obligations are there for both sides).
For the US citizen, the court definitely has jurisdiction as this is a federal court and we're talking about the actions of the federal branch of the US government taking action against a citizen. Also, this is a civil case, so the question then becomes whether or not there is presiding law on this and whether the claims have merit. There is very little law for this specific type of case (drone strikes). The lawsuit didn't actually claim a rights violation (which seriously surprised me). But before all of that, the heart of this drone strike murder issue against a US citizen has it's roots in due process. The big question is whether or not due process still applies to actions against a citizen when not on US soil. That answer is most definitely not clear and to my knowledge has never been answered by a court. Clearly, the constitutional and the law in general apply within US borders. However, in most cases the law ends at the border. But there are things that citizens can do overseas and face charges for at home. So is the reverse true? Is there anything that the US government can do to us while we are not on US soil that violates the law? Does the obligation to protect (or at least not violate) my constitutional rights still exist once I cross the border? Until this question is answered, I don't think anything else in this case can be answered with certainty.
This also excludes the entire examination of potential criminal (not civil) violations or violations of international law, war crimes, violations of conventions like Geneva, Hague, etc.