Yeah I'm sure wiki helped you down that path.

There are two drone programs, one is military and the other is CIA.

IIRC the military program deals with engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CIA programs deal with the Yemen and Pakistan engagements. Its almost certainly due to the law of how the military can be used in undeclared warzones.

The chemical facility attack was obviously a mistake.

The attack on militant camps is much more tenable, and is probably ok. The more you are attacking a group of people or facilities who we have openly declared hostilities with, the more it becomes a legal act of war. It was, after all, a militaristic camp. This contrasts pretty squarely with targeting a specific individual for death in a peaceful area.

yeah

Alwaki's US citizenship is a crucial factor here. Killing foreign nationals by executive fiat based on secret evidence is problematic, but the US government has to justify its actions to the foreign nationals' government or face diplomatic consequences. A US citizen has no third party to protect him, only his Constitutional guarantee of due process.

Once you're dead, I'm not sure having a third party to protect you matters much.

Of course not. But that's like saying "when your car is pulverized by a semi truck I'm not sure if wearing your seat belt matters much." It a is true statement but isn't an argument for not wearing your seat belt.

In order to grow the economy you need more capacity, so I'd suggest Obama make more overlords so he can drone harder.

And suzzler, it is not clear to me that al-Alwaki's speech was even outside the bounds of constitutionally protected free speech. And even if it was, is his extrajudicial killing really an appropriate response?

I remember that I first heard of Awlaki when he was widely reported as the liaison between the Ft. Hood shooter and AQAP. Surely that's not constitutionally protected free speech?

Is the Ft. Hood shooter even a terrorist? He killed a bunch of soldiers about to be deployed to a war zone, seems like a legitimate military action. It's a war, right? Or is it only a war when we do it to them?

But let me guess you "heard" from "an unnamed senior official" that al-Alwaki was the liaison between the Ft. Hood shooter and AQAP. Seems legit.

From wiki. So Hasan exchanged emails with al-Awlaki, but since it was determined that Hasan's attack wasn't part of a broader plot and that he had no co-conspirators how is this relevant? It can't be said that al-Awlaki was Hasan's liason with AQAP, because Hasan acted alone and not in collaboration with AQAP. Al-Awlaki appears to merely be a cheerleader here, which is not at all illegal.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort_Hood_shooting

Yeah, the FBI and Army had the e-mails before the shooting and didn't find anything actionable. Awlaki is more likely to have aided the underwear bomber by helping his travel to terrorist training and the like. But even that is not punishable by death. I think the bottom line is that Awlaki was a the star motivator and recruiter for AlQueda causes, which is why he was assassinated. He probably had his hand in a great number of plots by providing spiritual support and getting them in contact with others who could materially help them. No doubt he committed a great number of crimes, but not quite as heinous as the government would like us to believe.

What page are you quoting that from?

Edit, oh, you edited it with it in before i posted, the page didnt update for some reason when i replied. TY.

The strongest evidence I've seen is NPR reporter Dina Tempel-Raston saying that she saw a transcript of the underwear bomber's interrogation saying that he was trained by al-Alwaki. So the best evidence of al-Alwaki's guilt is a second-hand account of a reporter being shown a page of a translated interrogation transcript. No chance of that being taken out of context or presented in a misleading fashion, right?

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/s...ryId=123894237

Not a single named government source in the piece.

I think it is worth noticing how the basic conversation hasn't changed despite the shift in the underlying issues. So for example, let us go back to the patriot act and bush era disputes between those supporting civil liberties saying it went too far for, say, warrant less wiretapping of US civilians and the other side usually argued pragmatically that the intelligence benefits outweighed the suppression of civil liberties. In some sense we are having the same discussion now with little net change in rhetoric. However, the issue isn't warrantless wiretapping, it is the targeted assassination of us citizens without due process in countries upon which there is no declared war.

I also remember, how one risk in the bush era people cited was essentially a slippery slope argument where if you give up this bit of civil liberties, then the tomorrow we will be asked to give up more. This was met with scuffaws at the time, but have we not now seen this to be at least somewhat true?

So it's ok to kill militants if they're "in camp". But if they hide out in a peaceful area they're off-limits?

You don't get the distinction? If Sicilians declared war on the US and plot our demise, the President has power to send the Army to invade Sicily to protect American interests. If the Governor of Sicily is strolling unarmed through a piazza on a trip to Rome, and a CIA agent walks up and puts a bullet through his head, that is illegal assassination. What happened to Awlaki is much closer to assassination than act of war.

It's legal to wage war against an armed group of individuals.

It's illegal to kill a single unarmed individual in a peaceful setting.

Sure, there is some grey area in between, and you can kill an unarmed indvidual in self-defense (say he is about to give a command to detonate a bomb). Awlaki was not close.

I'm just glad we're discussing actual issues now and I'm not getting damned to the fires of hell for the time being. I agree Al-Alwaki is troubling and not nearly as clear of a case as OBL pre-9/11 would have been.

I guess I just am willing to say I could certainly see cases where it's justified given everything the president knew (which we have only a fraction). But I could also see history coming down on it as a major new abuse of power.

Like most things I tend to view this more as a practical matter (because of my defective moral compass and all) of what kind of blow it deals to Al Quaeda and message it sends to future demagogue wannabes vs. the chances of blowblack or setting dangerous precedent for future administrations to exploit. I know I'm supposed to feel moral outrage about a guy like Al-Awlaki, who would have gladly sent a bomber to blow up my family Christmas party if he had the chance, but it's just not there.

FWIW Yemen had issued a death warrant on Al-Awlaki on their own. So it's not like we just popped into a peaceful country like Italy and bombed some guy they had no beef with.

Plenty of others have said they are okay with drone strikes itt under certain circumstances. I don't recall a 'peaceful setting' being a dealbreaker for them.

We've been on slippery slopes in the past like McCarthyism and pulled out of it. As long as we remain a democracy it's hard for me to see how civil liberty absuses can get too far out of hand. Maybe I'm wrong.

But when someone starts limiting the vote (republicans) or talks about taking it away entirely (*cough* AC-land *cough*), that's when I perk up.

If the president knew enough to make the killing justified, he still should have presented that evidence in a court of law. You have to come up with a pretty convoluted scenario where the president has enough information to justify putting Awlaki on a hit list, but then is also justified in sitting on that information for months rather than presenting it in court only to release the drones long after that information is known to him.

oh well, we'll never know the reasons why but we can know it's justified because otherwise it wouldn't have been done.