I could be wrong but I'd tend to believe it is because they are a clear threat and not because one has poor choice in friends or makes suspicious trips to unusual destinations.
"The National Security Agency is using complex analysis of electronic surveillance, rather than human intelligence, as the primary method to locate targets for lethal drone strikes – an unreliable tactic that results in the deaths of innocent or unidentified people."
Its the same issue as the 'no-fly' list, you don't know if you are on it, so you can't provide a defense for yourself. There is no way to challenge you name on the list (short of years of trials). The recent case of the woman proved that they can mess these things up and get them wrong, so imagine them getting it wrong due to a similar name or misunderstanding and you end up on a kill list. So the worry is that a kill list becomes like a no fly list, you don't know you're on it until you hear a drone's missile coming at you.
> I could be wrong but I'd tend to believe it is because they are a clear threat and not because one has poor choice in friends or makes suspicious trips to unusual destinations.
I'd love to be able to trust the governments ability to decide who and what is a 'clear threat', it'd make a lot of things a lot easier. But unfortunately history - including fairly recent US history - is chuck full of evidence to the contrary.
Not to mention the difference between "clear threat to the country" and "clear threat to the government".
To the extent that there is a difference, I'm much more concerned about the former, but worry that the government may (naturally) be more concerned about the latter.
A recent Radiolab episode, "60 Words", investigates exactly this question, among other things. There is a kill list, and decisions about who is or is not on that list are made by non-elected officials. Worse still, the Congressional oversight committee whose job is ostensibly to oversee this sort of thing apparently did not even know about the existence of the list until 2013, at which point the list had probably existed for around a dozen years.
One question: why do we have a judicial system and public laws and all that at all? Could the same kind of people that can be relied upon to only put people on those kill lists that are a clear threat not also take care of determining all other punishments and stuff? I fail to see what all of that complexity is needed for in other cases when it's apparently unnecessary for putting people on kill lists!?
Well, in the case we're discussing, saying mean things about America and Obama on YouTube was the guys major claim to fame. There may have been credible intelligence that he was going to start putting al-Qaeda associated .gifs on Tumblr but of course something that sensitive is still Top Secret.
This is important: I don't even think that the administration ever claimed that that Al-Awlaki has had any known direct connection to a terrorist attack. He was targeted because he publicly advocated and supported them. His speech was enough for a death sentence for him and his 16 year old son, two Americans.
And the government doesn't feel like it's obligated to make a public case for what they've done.
How would knowing that the rule is "We kill those who are a clear threat to others" help the enemy?
I am pretty sure that they are already operating under the assumption that, because they want to kill others, America wants to kill them. If that is indeed our legal justification for killing them, publicizing it would not modify their behaviour in any way.
This isn't about getting the list of people targeted for killing. This is about getting the legal justification for the killings at all. If the justification is as you suspect it is, then there is no value in hiding it. That they are fiercely protecting the justification itself strongly suggests that you are wrong.
I am pretty sure everyone is aware of that particular rule.
But the devil is in the details. How does the US define 'clear threat', exactly, I think would be useful for an enemy to know and possibly exploitable.
And I don't think the US is hiding the overall justification which is "These are people who wish to use violence to act against the United States and its citizens to push their own political agenda. In short; terrorists."
I mean, these are not people who are running for Mayor in their particular part of the world and we don't like their policy decisions. They are doing things like running training camps where they teach others how to make IEDs.
> "But the devil is in the details. How does the US define 'clear threat', exactly, I think would be useful for an enemy to know and possibly exploitable."
Rest assured that anyone who could be considered a terrorist knows that, if they surface on the US's radar, they will be targeted. They take it for granted that they are targeted, because that is the safe assumption to make.
> "And I don't think the US is hiding the overall justification which is..."
I am not interested in the "PR justification", which is indeed "Turrusts!" I am interested in the legal justification. The only thing that they want us to know of that is that it is secret.
If it were nothing out of the ordinary, it would not be so secret.
(Also, normally I try to avoid doing this, but since you are being so persistent in using strong wording in your comments, I feel that I don't have any choice: These are not people running training camps or making IEDs; these are people accused of doing those things. The difference is important, because it is the reason we are having this discussion. It is particularly important because it is suspected that their legal justification extends beyond people who have actually allegedly done anything, and in fact also covers "people who have communicated with those who have allegedly done things" or "any 'military-aged' male in the family of anyone who has allegedly done things")
The legal justification is that we are at war and these people have been deemed combatants in that war.
If these people are not terrorists, what would the US have to gain by killing them?
I am all for oversight and checks and balances. We need to be sure that we are killing actual threats. But I also understand that, as a practical consideration, it might be counterproductive to make the oversight public.
We don't have the luxury of doing full investigations and putting people on trial. It sounds nice, but it is impossible.
For the record: I think it is unfair that you charge me with "Using strong language" and in the same breath deride my position as merely parroting PR "Turrist" propaganda. Cheap shot.
If all those jews were not terrorists, what did Germany have to gain by killing them?
Not that the question is bad, it's just that it's not rhetorical at all, you might want to try to actually answer it. And while you are at it, you might also want to read up on how most of the things that were done to jews (and some other minorities) in the third reich were also legal, at least according to german law at the time.
(edit: and mind you, they also had ways to justify those laws, it's not like they just made the "be evil law", of course it was all about protecting the home country or race or whatever, if you wait for an abuser of power to declare themselves an abuser, you'll generally wait until after all the bad stuff has happened ...)
The legal justification is that we are at war and these people have been deemed combatants in that war.
Who exactly are we at "war" with? On what Constitutional basis was this "war" declared? Under what conditions will hostilities cease? On the enemy's side, who has the authority to sue for peace or sign surrender documents? What laws of war under the UN, Geneva Convention, and/or various treaties apply to this one?
You don't get to do anything you want, and kill anyone you want, just by declaring a "war" on an abstract noun.
> Please show me where the U.S. has officially declared war on these countries it continues to blow up civilians in e.g. Yemen.
The US declared an open-ended war against those people and organizations that the President determines were involved in the 9/11 attacks, and al-Qaeda is one of those organizations. While one might argue (as many have) that the an open-ended declaration of war was a bad idea, or (as others have) that "al-Qaeda", given its nature, is more of an ideological alignment than an actual organization, the power to declare war has never been Constitutionally limited to declarations with nation-states as the target of the war declared.
> There was no declaration of war, there was an authorization for the use of military force. Two very different things.
No, they aren't different Constitutionally at all. The AUMF is an exercise of the Constitutional power to declare war, which does not require any particular language to be used in exercising it, just as the Constitutional power to levy a tax depends only on whether the effect is a tax, not whether the Congressional action imposing the liability calls it a tax.
(It's possible that statutory provisions passed by Congress under its other powers may be conditioned on the specific language in a declaration, such that there may be different effects of something like the 9/11 or Iraq AUMF and something that explicitly uses language like "declares war", but that's a distinction caused by the exercise of other Congressional powers, not a Constitutional distinction that makes the former something other than an declaration of war from a Constitutional perspective.)
How exactly do you know that the AUMF-2001 invoked Congress' power to declare war rather than Congress' power "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."?
> How exactly do you know that the AUMF-2001 invoked Congress' power to declare war
Because its the only Constitutional power of Congress which could support it.
> rather than Congress' power "To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing Powers, and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof."?
The necessary and proper clause isn't an independent alternative to other Constitutional powers, there still has to be a base Constitutional power to which the function is necessary and proper.
The base power needn't be a Congressional power given the section I highlighted. It could be an Article II power, such as the CinC power.
You've also overlooked the possibility that the AUMF is simply unconstitutional.
In any event, to end this sub thread, at least for my part, whether we are at war or not still doesn't answer the question because declaring war is not a carte blanche to ignore the rest of the constitution (see Hamdi v Rumsfeld). It in no way comports with war traditionally understood to assassinate personel vaguely associated with the enemy involved in the production of propaganda thousands of miles from any active battlefield. Nor is such a killing 'necessary and appropriate' in the words of the AUMF.
> The base power needn't be a Congressional power given the section I highlighted.
That doesn't change the answer. There's no other Constitutional power to which there is even a colorable argument that the AUMF is "necessary and proper" such that it would be supported independently of Congress power to declare war.
> It could be an Article II power, such as the CinC power.
It's doubtful that any such power exists -- the designation of the President as Commander-in-Chief of the military in Article II is a limitation on Congress' Article I power to regulate the military (specifically, it prevents it from dividing the roles that the founders saw as having an executive character by creating a separate C-in-C of the military, which its Article I powers would otherwise permit). But its not a power of government -- the designation of the President as CinC doesn't give the government any power that doesn't come from some other provision of the Constitution, it simply limits the manner in which other Constitutional powers may be exercised (it distributes some powers to the President to the extent that they already exist within the federal government, but for them to exist within the federal government, they must be grounded elsewhere in the Constitution.)
> In any event, to end this sub thread, at least for my part, whether we are at war or not still doesn't answer the question because declaring war is not a carte blanche to ignore the rest of the constitution
The answer was offered to the question of when did we declare war on the targets of these actions, and was not intended to say anything more about the Constitutionality -- and, even more so, appropriateness even if Constitutional -- of the actions, which is, I think, a much harder question that can't be answered without a thorough application of principles to the changing factual circumstances of technological means and realities of modern warfare.
You're delusional. There is plenty of evidence even operators of drones don't always have evidence that the people they're killing are "terrorists", they just "feel" it.
Without disclosing the rules, it opens us to moral hazard. There is no incentive to feel accountable, and as we've learned lately, the government does not do well without accountability.
Please tell me the US government had the foresight to avoid choosing---as the name of a core algorithm employed by its covert services---a name shared by the fictional criminal organization for world domination in the Marvel Comics universe, which is itself opposed by that fiction's analog to America's covert services.
Someone in the chain of command is either deeply ignorant of Marvel Comics (completely understandable) or deeply, deeply cynical about the state of the world (completely concerning).
If the name was chosen deliberately, and not randomly by a computer, then it was probably chosen with the mythical beast in mind, not the comics. Hydras were snakes with many heads, and the problem with decentralized terrorist organizations has often been compared to the problem of killing a hydra; every time you cut off a head there seems to be another.
I'm not sure if there is an algorithm named Hydra; I guess GP is misremembering "Captain America: The Winter Soldier" a little bit (the right names would be Project Insight and/or Zola's Algorithm).
You are correct, in Marvel universe Hydra is the crypto-nazi org, not the algorithm. The algorithm was developed by a nazi scientist Zola, and Project Insight is the tool of its execution, namely flying carriers with tons of guns (it's pretty hard to imagine more vulnerable technology for world domination but whatever, they crash spectacularly and that's pretty much the point :)
Does it matter how they got on a kill list or what the criteria is (in determining whether there's a difference between these two scenarios. Yes, it matters overall)? You're comparing killing an armed hostage taker and saving a person whose life is in imminent danger to bombing someone halfway across the world when we have no idea what they're doing or what they will be doing; all we know is what we think they have done and what we think they will do.
If there's a hostage taker pointing a gun at someone's face, I can see what we're trying to do: step in at the last minute and prevent someone who is already visibly committing a crime (brandishing a weapon, threat of lethal force) from killing a person. Some unarmed guy outdoors, though? From a mile away? Because a committee put him on a list? What was he about to do that we stopped?
The concern being that we don't know is what makes this matter such a grave concern. Something of this nature, if decided as legal, needs to be enshrined in law so there can be no question of its use, lest we find ourselves facing the death penalty for traffic tickets.
I could be wrong but I'd tend to believe it is because they are a clear threat and not because one has poor choice in friends or makes suspicious trips to unusual destinations.