A Citizen Is Suing the US for Putting Him on the 'Kill List'

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?

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.

The only way to do it is via a fair due process and trial.

Why does killing have to be the answer?

Abortion is a prime example.

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.

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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.

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.

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.)

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).

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.

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.”

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.

On a semi-related note, I hope John Walker Lindh gets a hell of a party upon his release next May.

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.

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.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.

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

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.

try harder