+1

Who decides, how, and what if they're wrong.

(I don't think they were in this case, but the slope is steep and slippery.)

^^^ This, plus about a million.

I find those things troubling as well. Something like this assassination should not be celebrated or gloated over. It's demanding we have a level of trust that the neo-cons destroyed. We have to depend on sources that we know have not been truthful in the past.

Nah. No slack to traitors who actively seek to kill Americans. I don't care if they kill 'em with a drone attack or someone in a trench coat putting a bullet in their skull.

FOAD actually.

I am of the unshakeable opinion that Anwar al-Awlaki received due process of the law.

He was certainly brought to justice. And since he believes in the afterlife and all that, he got what he wanted. It was just a little sooner than he wanted.

"For the record:"

1. If al Awlaki was not an American citizen (natural-born, even), it would have acceptable to kill him without due process.

2. If the GWOT was a conventional war, and al Awlaki was wearing an enemy uniform, it would have been acceptable to kill him without due process.

3. But because al Awlaki is an American citizen engaging in unconventional warfare against the United States, he is entitled to more due process that lawful combatants (of any nationality)?

Nb. AUMF, sec. 2(a):

I don't know why there is a tendency to make this more complicated than it is.

In the classic bank robbery hostage situation, the bank robber has two choices:

(a) turn himself in
(b) police snipers

It is not an element of Due Process to allow the ongoing commission of a crime by a suspect. If a suspect engaged in ongoing deadly crime does not turn himself in on notice that he is wanted and cannot be captured without substantial risk, that suspect often ends up getting shot to death.

If he wanted Due Process, he could have presented himself at the US consulate and be taken into custody.

I'm with the fpoon guy and those who followed. (The rest of this post I initially wrote on another forum earlier today.)

I'm a believer in and a supporter of the Constitution. And in American citizenship. One reason I got sucked into the birther vortex was, the idiot birthers claimed that if President Obama was adopted in Indonesia by Lolo Soetoro, he lost his U.S. citizenship.

This, of course, is as stupid as claiming both your parents must be citizens of the U.S. on the day you're born for you to be a natural born citizen. The honest truth is, if President Obama's mom had remarried 10 times in 10 foreign countries and all 10 of his stepfathers had adopted him, he'd still be an American citizen UNLESS he reached the age of 18 and voluntarily renounced his citizenship.

You can do that. Renounce your American citizenship, that is.

Which, functionally, you could say that Awlaki and Samir Khan did. By engaging in terrorism against the U.S., they effectively renounced their U.S. citizenship, as we say in legalese, nunc pro tunc, ipso facto, and race itsa locator.


What they did is fundamentally inconsistent with American citizenship, and should be ruled in a court of law to have vitiated all their rights to Constitutional protection. I'm going to name it "constructive renunciation" of their American citizenship, and piss on their graves.

Fuck 'em if they can't take a joak.

But I wouldn't want any other president to have the power to do what my president did. So I'm still conflicted.

The argument made the ACLU (and others) concerns the imminence of the threat. That is, if no one is holding a gun to someone's head, there's no imminent threat to justify a killing away from a battlefield.

But that's a somewhat simplistic notion of terrorism. Plans are put often put into motion days or weeks (or more) before the threat materializes.

Oh, and I listened to Rush Limpballs today to hear him yappin' about Awlaki. I remember the week Osama was taken out by President Barack BadAss. Rush spent the entire week flailing and flopping, trying desperately to find a way to deprive Obama of the credit. Did you know we invaded a friendly country and brutally murdered an unarmed civilian?

For shame! For shame!

But today's show was a double bonus.

First, Rush correctly pointed out, as JT8 and others have pointed out, that the ACLU is not happy with the extrajudicial assassination of an American citizen without due process of law.

But Rush couldn't figure out what to say about that. Can you imagine? You're Rush Limpballs, and you're supposed to take sides between the ACLU and President Obama? Whose side do you pick?

It's a giant


Second, for some reason Rush went birfer today. He read an editorial by Judy McLoed, the editor of CanadaFreePress. There was Rush on the radio, calling the president "Barry Soetoro" and saying he didn't show any "identity documents" before being elected. It was a birfer's wet dream.

Hmmm, where were the "bleeding heart conservatives" yelling due process when the Feds killed Baby Face Nelson in ...

The Battle of Barrington Illinois? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baby_Face_ ... Barrington

ironic, eh.

For the record -

I'm glad the bastard's dead. I think that killing him was absolutely the right choice. I'm troubled by the situation as a whole, not by this particular action.

It seems very clear that the conflict of the last decade is a new kind of war, and that the laws and traditions that we've abided by in past conflicts aren't elastic enough to cover everything involved in the present situation. We are dealing with a loosely organized, relatively vague entity that is not tethered to any particular location. It's unconstrained by national borders. It does not, for the most part, fight conventional battles. It's members are not uniformed. It's leadership is difficult to determine. It has little fixed infrastructure. Its members are frequently found in civilian communities, but those communities may not always be willing hosts. They have little or no desire to hold ground.

The enemy that we are fighting has no intention of restricting its actions to fit within the bounds of any accepted international law, the laws of war, or any law other than their own unilateral declarations.

The laws and traditions that are supposed to govern how we wage war were established at a time when wars were fought by nations, by soldiers on battlefields who were attempting to take physical territory away from their enemy. They don't fit the current conflict, and strictly abiding by them is a really stupid idea - I get that, I really do.

What I don't like - what makes me really, really uncomfortable - is that we appear to have decided to make up the new rules as we go along. I probably have an unrealistically naive view of history, but it feels like the legal/philosophical issues involved would have received more serious attention from political figures in the past. For that matter, it feels (at least to me) like it should receive more attention from them now.

I'm probably articulating all of this really poorly, but it just seems like this whole thing is challenging our basic commitment to the rule of law, or maybe like it should be forcing us to think about what the rule of law actually means. Terrorists will never sit down at a conference table in Geneva and work out a set of rules to govern their conflicts with nations, but does that mean that nations shouldn't sit down on their own and work out a new set of rules to govern dealing with international terrorists? Yes, setting up rules will restrict our own conduct. Yes, it will make things easier in some ways for the terrorists. But isn't a willingness to form and abide by social compacts one of the things that is supposed to be setting us apart?

Yeah, this is idealistic, I know. But it still bugs me some.

I'm with Res Ipsa.

Because res ipsa loquitur. If this terrorist didn't want to be in the crosshairs all he had to do was turn himself in. If any of you bleeding hearts didn't like this result, all you had to do was fly to this terrorist's HQs and help bring him back to the U.S.

Oh, what? No volunteers?

Carry on.

A big "me too" to Mike's thoughtful post. The man was a terrorist and a traitor to his country and his fate couldn't have happened to a nicer guy. But, as many far smarter and better informed than I have pointed out, this is a new kind of war and I think a lot of people in authority really ARE making it up as they go along. It's not helped by the fact that there are so many gray areas here and we're stuck with politicians who refuse to think beyond black-and-white. Is every Al Qaeda footman and lackey evil and deserving of death, or are are large percentage going along with their leaders' twisted ideology in order to provide for their families since it's the best paying job they'd be able to get? Are they like the Nazi and Fascist soldiers who were allowed to return to what was left of their lives at the end of WWII or do they need to be exterminated to the last man? Why is it A-OK for the US to kill a Saudi Arabian man living in a country with which we're not at war, but somehow reprehensible to kill an American living in yet another country with which we're not at war?

I don't have answers, and I don't think a lot of very intelligent people in the highest level of our government do, either. And that makes me very nervous.

FWIW, the process of being approved for targeted killing isn't (as far as we know) totally capricious and arbitrary. The NSC is constantly reviewing data and adding/removing names as needed.

So, is the process sufficiently due? (Is it enough "process"?)

And: Transparency. It involves, fundamentally, taking the executive branch at its word.

Preface: I'm glad they're dead. I'm praising the president for what he did.

However ...

I spent the entire Bush administration warning conservatives that his brazen arrogation of all possible power to the presidency -- the way he told the courts again and again that in time of war they had no power to second-guess his blatantly unconstitutional decisions -- would not be so attractive to them (the conservatives) when the next president came along and held that same degree of power. That was one reason I didn't want Hillary. I felt she would love to have that degree of power, and wouldn't roll back to a position of equilibrium among the three brunches of government.

President Obama hasn't rolled back to a position of equilibrium, either. Nevertheless, I trust President Obama. I trust his judgment. I think he did the right thing for the right reasons. I support his decisions. I just hope we never get a president with poor judgment, a president with the power to determine that an American citizen is an "enemy combatant" without anyone to second-guess that decision, a president who abuses that power. Down that road lies tyranny.

I'm glad these two scumbags are dead. I'm praising the president for what he did. But a tiny voice in my head is wondering about the precedent, and about future presidents, and about what might go wrong someday.

This. And what Foogie said, too.

That might be exactly where the people at the highest level of our government ought to be -- uncertain. Dick Cheney never had or has any uncertainty; he knew the truth at all times and is eager to tell us that he did. So did and does Rumsfeld. I am beginning to think that George W. Bush might have figured out that his neo-conservative handlers were doing him and the nation harm.

I want President Obama, the Directors of National Intelligence, CIA, FBI, and NSA, and the Secretaries of State and Defense constantly challenging each other about this kind of decision. I want several somebodies to be worrying about what we are calling due process (although that concept applies to criminal law, not to war). I want them all to be finally satisfied that they have all the goods on the right person. Then I want them to act swiftly and deadly, avoiding as much unwanted killing as is possible.

The fog of this war is almost impenetrable. I want them all to recognize that and think hard about the act of killing an American citizen. And I do not want them to celebrate.

Awlaki was killed on the battlefield of his own selection.

His fault.

He should have surrendered.

Indeed. And I am sure that the great constitutional issues raised by some also passed through the thoughts of President Obama. Ultimately, however, I think he'd rather take that risk than have the blood of thousands more innocent Americans on his hands. I vividly remember the President at the memoral service for the Ft. Hood victims of Hassan. I'm sure he remembered that, too.

Agreed.

Agreed.

And Agreed.

But I'm still uncomfortable about how we've chosen to go about dealing with the overall situation.

MikeDunford - We kill terrorists who are trying to kill us. It's really very easy.

In addition to choosing his battlefield, Awlaki also chose what he was and chose to crow about it and shove it in our faces at every opportunity.

I have no qualms.