It also has 10x the population. And due process. There is no relevance to that comparison whatsoever.
> The US has killed thousands of “militants” (and many people who were certainly innocent) with drone strikes in places where we’re not engaged in active conflict and without due process.
If you want to call those "war casualties", then those war casualties look a whole lot like executions.
And if they weren't war casualties on account of not being in a war zone, then they are simply executions.
It is mere coincidence that you respect one country's due process and don't respect another country's due process.
Most places have non-arbitrary paths to punishment or any state actions, codified somewhere. And our media and pop culture just doesn't acknowledge that.
The similarities are greater than the dissimilarities.
Saudi Arabia is a dictatorship run by tyrants who order members of their own family kidnapped abroad, journalists murdered then cut up their bodies to hide the crime, and imprison then extort leading businessmen to consolidate power and money in their hands. They have far more in common with Putin’s Russia than the US.
The US is a long way from that, whatever its flaws (and there are many flaws, chief amongst them making alliances with brutal dictators like the Saudis).
Extraordinary rendition? Foreign policy in most places is different from domestic policy.
The similarities are greater than the dissimilarities.
The sentencing is so harsh for anyone demanding trial and losing that it's mostly a paper right at this time. It does give people the warm fuzzy feeling of justice and correctness though.
If you're used to the EU justice or penal systems (very far from perfect and sometimes not even good, mind you), looking at the US systems must feel similar to a US citizen looking at SA justice - very lopsided, barbaric or cruel, disproportionate, and nothing close to fair.
[0] https://innocenceproject.org/guilty-pleas-on-the-rise-crimin...
> The primary source of law is the Islamic Sharia derived from the teachings of the Qur'an and the Sunnah (the traditions of the Prophet). Saudi Arabia is unique among modern Muslim states in that Sharia is not codified and there is no system of judicial precedent, giving judges the power to use independent legal reasoning to make a decision. Saudi judges tend to follow the principles of the Hanbali school of jurisprudence (fiqh) found in pre-modern texts and noted for its literalist interpretation of the Qur'an and hadith.
> Because the judge is empowered to disregard previous judgments (either his own or of other judges) and may apply his personal interpretation of Sharia to any particular case, divergent judgments arise even in apparently identical cases, making predictability of legal interpretation difficult.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saudi_Arabia#Legal_system
Welp... I guess Saudi Arabia is off my bucket list
But the point is that many people respect the system they are raised under, and are aware of others systems. Its not a comparison of "the US to Saudi Arabia" its an acknowledgment of the nation state reality.
Sometimes cultural relativism gets it right and opens our eyes to our own inadequacies, but this isn’t one of those times. Saudi justice is light-years (or maybe centuries) from US justice.
But that might be tainted by my personal values. I personally value a legal system that refrains from the potential of killing an innocent person.
[0]: https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/policy-issues/innocence/execute...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_by_country#...
The list is growing at a rate of about 1 country per year, which, if continued, would mean that the 21st century would be the last in which countries formally kill their own citizens.
Whew ... there's dozens of convicts on the death row that are presumably innocent. Even if some of them get acquitted at some point, having spent 20 years of your life behind bars not knowing whether the state is going to murder you for something you didn't do is not that far from barbaric.
So ... like another guy said, you're just accustomed to the set of rules of the environment where you belong, in the same way as a Saudi could think of executions as a regular thing (bc, well... they are).
nearly all of us here on this forum would expect to get due process, but the due process for the people who wind up on death row is often a joke.