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Comment by mikece | Hacker News Reader

"Signature strikes" -- the target has a signature (movement, data, use of a satellite phone or specific cellular number, entourage, etc) that matches that of an HVT (high value taget) that is authorized for termination by drone strike. The CIA has killed lots of the wrong people because "signature strikes" don't require second source intelligence to verify who the target is (eg: is the person using the satellite phone really the HVT or is it a courier or even his kid?). As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this and I fully support those responsible for these programs to be tried as war criminals.

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"Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources. Other sources can be mistakes or intentional lies. What matters is the quality of the totality of the evidence, and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.

Statistical decision making is very slippery stuff.

I would prefer to be tried in a court of law, you?

That's a false equivalence though and not what the alternative option is here. The government was killing its enemies 100 years before the word digital was invented and will continue to do so as long as government exist. They will use every technology invented in the pursuit of doing so. Blaming metadata signature based approaches is no different than blaming their use of satellites, metallurgy, hell the wheel is a big part of their war machine. It has always been this way and it will continue to always be this way.

In 2010, an American citizen was killed in a drone strike by the US military, without a trial or any attempt to make an arrest. This was the first time in history that a US civilian was killed by the US military. Before 2010, we were doing just fine without executing citizens on suspect legal grounds.

Edit: Edited to state that this was not fire of combatants in a combat zone.

Which citizen was it? I've never heard about this before but I wouldn't put it past those war mongering fucks.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32583164

They also killed his 16 year old son and 8 year old daughter in separate attacks. Both of whom were American citizens. (Daughter was Trump)

The basics are that Al-Awlaki was (allegedly) a kind of pro-terrorist or pro extreme Muslim kind of preacher moving about the Middle East spreading his message. Possibly also hooked up with real terrorists / jihadis. A drone strike killed Awlaki and a second drone strike, a couple weeks later, killed his sixteen year old son. The US claimed killing his son was an accident - but that's pretty implausible. Years later, under Trump, a special forces team killed his eight year old daughter.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

> This was the first time in history that a US citizen was killed by the US military.

That seems incredibly unlikely. Friendly fire incidents have been a fact of war, pretty much forever.

The definition of war has become extremely loose in modern times.

Friendly fire is by definition an accident. Killing this citizen was intentional. I feel it's odd to allow them to be conflated.

I find it incredibly hard to believe that no US non-military citizen was killed by either side in the Civil war.

Upon failing to retake Fort Sumter, Union troops turned their cannons on the city of Charleston itself, killing an estimated 80 people over the course of the 500+ days of bombardment. To this day, the area is host to unexploded ordnance (rusted black-powder shells, basically).

Friendly fire, _by definition_, is a mistake.

Friendly fire, _by definition_, is not something the Army _actively plans_ to do.

I don't understand your comment. The claim, to which I responded, said _nothing_ about _active plans_. The claim was simply that it was the first US civilian ever killed by the military.

Kent state does not count? It has happened probably a lot, it is just hard to find good records about now and they actually tell people. Pre-1900s, you just are not hearing about it probably. I don't buy the military getting less moral recently.

State national guard units are not the US military. A dead giveaway is that if something happened on US soil, it is not a US military operation.

Clearly not true.

First item on this list: https://www.military.com/military-life/6-times-military-was-...

> 1863: The New York City Draft Riots > the governor [...] had to call in U.S. Marines.

It's complicated. The cynic's answer is "The United States prides itself on not turning its military on the civilian populace, and the National Guard is the practical method by which they hold a nation together while refraining on paper from such use of force."

As with so many aspects of American governance, they "solved" an either-or problem by implementing both ideas.

> This was the first time in history that a US citizen was killed by the US military

Not close to the first time. Kent State is one famous example. Countless people shot for trespassing on bases

The Ohio National Guard is not a branch of the US military. It reports to the government of Ohio.

Now you’re splitting hairs. A government ordered death is the same no matter if the shooter is a soldier or a national guardsman.

This is a big difference. State national guards operate a lot more like the state police than like the army. Posse Comitatus does not apply to them.

By the way, if you want to split hairs and bring up examples like Kent State, the elephant in the room is the self-defense justification in a lot of these examples. Find a killing that occurred when a soldier believed their life to be in danger.

How about Sherman's March to the Sea?

I wonder if you realize you are rationalizing Kent State the exact same way some Chinese rationalize Tienanmen.

It's incredible that Obama was just given a complete pass on that. But knowing what we know now about the media, it's not really all that surprising.

> Before 2010, we were doing just fine without executing citizens on suspect legal grounds.

Well, no; we just weren't doing it using the military. Or at least weren't doing it using the military in a way that we got caught. The US government (and, I expect, nearly every government since the dawn of governments) has been killing people outside of "the battlefield" forever.

Apparently, you're not going to accept Kent State, but there are non-National Guard incidents from earlier than that. The Bonus Army protesters in 1932 were cleared from DC by the tanks of the 3rd Cavalry commanded by no less than George Patton. Unfortunately, there is no record of total deaths. 5 infantry regiments fresh out of Gettysburg were sent to quell the New York City draft riots in 1863. Again, not known how many they killed, but total deaths well into the hundreds.

This is to say nothing of the many, many times the Army was used to clear natives from lands claimed by the US. Presumably, in most of those incidents, they were not considered American citizens. However, they definitely were in the most recent incident I can think of, the Wounded Knee massacre, which happened in 1980. That was the 7th Cavalry, and they killed 250 Lakota, including women and children.

This, though a reasonable thing to be concerned about, seems unrelated to the conversation about metadata's role in sanctioned assassination.

> This was the first time in history that a US civilian was killed by the US military.

I'm sure that there were plenty of other times it happened, but, for a relativly well-know and documented incident in 1932, check out the Bonus Army[1]

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bonus_Army#:~:text=The%20Bon....

Or Kent State.

Did you forget about the Jim Crow era, when courts themselves were highly suspect?

And union busting police? And modern police, before and after 2020?

Did no civilians die that time in 1864 when the Union Army burned Georgia to the ground?

American civilians are being murdered by the police all the time - with complete impunity.

This will continue until (1) the courts eliminate Qualified Immunity and (2) police unions have to carry liability insurance for all its members.

It is easy to get outraged at the military, but the police is way more harmful here.

> The government was killing its enemies 100 years before the word digital was invented

Citation needed. The current pattern of extrajudicial remote targeted killings outside of a Congressionally-declared battlefield is completely novel and only began in the Predator drone age, as far as I can see

Edit: some data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assassinations_by_the_...

Where is the battlefield when dealing with asymmetrical enemies like terrorists? If only they'd wear uniforms, not hide behind civilians, and stay in the designated battlefield area we wouldn't have this problem.

Cool. In the meantime, they're not (just) killing terrorists.

The point is these killings have not been happening for 100 years as claimed. These are a new type of killing, with a newly invented legal justification

The old version was to carpet/fire/nuclear bomb entire cities. Is that better?

And we did all this during (official) peace time?

The US government was not murdering anonymous strangers using a shadowy intelligence agency with no oversight 100 years ago. Army SigInt was only founded in 1917, and prior the US didn't formally employ any spies, and certainly didn't carry out assassinations.

Other governments possibly did, though probably in a way less organized than today.

In 1896, under circumstances not entirely clear, Sun was caught and detained for 13 days by the Chinese legation in London. It appears likely that Sun ran into a fellow Cantonese who worked for the legation and was found out and seized while visiting him under an alias. The legation planned to ship Sun back to China, but, before this could be done, Sun had converted a British employee at the legation to his side and got word through to James Cantlie, former dean of Hong Kong College of Medicine. The British Foreign Office intervened, and Sun was released from his captivity. The incident engendered great publicity and gave Sun’s career a powerful boost.

From the biography of Sun Yat Sen. They probably wanted to execute him in China for plotting against the throne.

https://www.britannica.com/biography/Sun-Yat-sen

Sure, but we are talking about the US specifically here.

Or the use of chemical and nuclear weapons according to your logic. War has to deal with public perception. See Vietnam or Iraq. Tough reality, huh?

It's not the choice you have though in areas where those killings take place. It's either drone strikes or nothing. Boots on the ground to catch bad guys and bring then to court isn't possible.

Oh, it's possible. It just risks American lives, so it's obviously unpalatable when robots are available (at the cost, of course, of arms-length evaluation of kill orders).

You're essentially saying that it's perfectly reasonable for the CIA to extra-judicially kill any people in Pakistan with virtually no oversight, because the CIA gets to decide who is a "bad guy" and has a right to operate in any foreign country at will, whether the country accepts it or not.

Respectfully, I beg to differ.

This is likely the most upsetting part. As flawed as US judicial system is, it is a system that still has to move within certain known parameters. The fact that judicial system stops applying the moment 'the government' decides it doesn't apply is in itself a big problem that effectively undermines basic trust in the system. I don't want to say that it started with Bush, because each president had their sins, but war on terror put a lot of clandestine stuff right in the open. Obama only made it worse ( since he actually killed a US citizen ). Biden was not better..

I am not some sort of naive activist. I accept there is a price to be paid for the relative comfort I live in. That said, some basic rules have to be followed if only to ensure citizenry that they are followed.

For better or worse, most citizens seem to be getting regular reminders[1] that the rules, at best, are not applied evenly. The trust in institutions is already low. Some basic accountability has to apply even to the highest echelon. Scratch that, it especially needs to apply to it.

[1]https://www.npr.org/2022/08/24/1119185396/paul-pelosi-nancy-...

-> some basic rules have to be followed if only to ensure citizenry that they are followed.

I guess one of those rules could be: Don't travel overseas to participate in a war against the US government. Yes, I understand, this is a hard rule to follow, especially if you're of the rebellious bent, but comfort requires compromise.

Well, I am hardly a rebel. The rule you list is not a rule at all.

I am surprised that I even have to point it out, but you do not stop being an American by traveling outside the country. Hell, you do not stop being an American even if you send money to sanctioned entities.

There is a reason there is a process for those, who deviate from societal norms. It ensures people en masse do not take matters into their own hands. That process does not, or at least should not, include current regime deciding you get deaded behind closed doors. Deviation from it historically yielded very poor results.

If you are not sure why that is a bad idea, and a bad omen, for a republic supposedly governed by law, I am genuinely not sure I can help. I am just sad that some people explicitly believe this.

I heard engineer_22 participates in a war against the US government. Oh wait, you'd like due process?

The "facilities" seem to match. I think that qualifies as enough statistical evidence, no?

Also it's a hard rule to follow if you are a child.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_of_Nawar_al-Awlaki

Everyone in USA knows that every child is responsible for choosing good parents.

If this is how the USA treats its own citizens, it's scary to think about what it probably feels justified doing to foreigners.

>I guess one of those rules could be: Don't travel overseas to participate in a war against the US government.

So how is this different from rules forced by ISIS?

This is assassination we are talking about, not ad serving

Uncertainty is (unfortunately) everywhere; for example, what probability is “beyond a reasonable doubt”? There are many who take issue with that question, but the answers I’ve seen range between 0.1% and 5%, with no general consensus.

What's the appeal process for being assassinated by the CIA like?

Pretty similar to the appeals process for being killed by the terrorist that the CIA chose not to assassinate.

How many Americans died from terrorism? How many foreigners died from anti-terrorism drone strikes?

The other question is how many terrorist did we create from drone strikes?

These are actually easy things to look up. 910-2,200 civilians killed by drone strikes[1]. More than that were killed on 9/11 alone [2].

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilian_casualties_from_U.S._...

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/September_11_attacks

And if you exclude the black swan event of 9/11 which the US was unprepared for, the numbers get a lot smaller, e.g.:

"According to the GTD, 80 Americans were killed in terrorist attacks from 2004 to 2013, including perpetrators and excluding deaths in Afghanistan and Iraq, the majority of which are combat-related. Of those 80 Americans killed, 36 were killed in attacks that occurred in the United States."

https://www.start.umd.edu/pubs/START_AmericanTerrorismDeaths...

Why would we exclude the largest terrorist attack in American history, the thing that the interventions in question were explicitly designed to prevent a recurrence of?

And anyway, if you want to get into that question, then we'd have to start including the civilian deaths caused by ISIS, and that's going to make the balance even more favorable to drone strikes. There's no reason to limit the analysis to Americans, either. Dismantling Al Qaeda, ISIS and other terrorist networks contributed to the reduction in terrorist violence against many groups, not just Americans. Probably not even primarily Americans.

Not to mention the rather obvious fact that the interventions in question were designed to reduce terrorism, and so their efficacy can only be truly benchmarked against the counterfactual world in which they were not implemented. However, conveniently, the balance is still overwhelmingly favorable even in the actual world that we happen to inhabit.

I know we're talking about drone strikes, but we should always and forever note that the civilian casualties from the US' war on terror far outweighs [0] those who died from terrorism. Not to mention the US troops who died to make Iraqi oil available to US businesses, or who continue to die by suicide and social deaths related to their experiences in the war [1].

[0] https://watson.brown.edu/costsofwar/figures/2021/WarDeathTol...

[1] https://www.npr.org/2021/06/24/1009846329/military-suicides-...

Ya, I wouldn't defend the broader war. I think Afghanistan was reasonable and necessary but probably should have been more surgical, and Iraq was basically indefensible. However, conditional on being committed to fighting the wars, I think drone strikes are an excellent tactical choice.

And now think about other countries conducting drone strikes on US soil as they see fit. It would be only fair, right? And what level of collateral damage would be acceptable in that scenario? 2000-3000 would be OK? Maybe 10000-20000 since those other countries can't afford precision munitions and global surveillance network. It's easy to justify any number of collateral damage when it's not you and yours that is the collateral damage.

From your first link: The "estimates of civilian casualties are hampered methodologically and practically";[5] civilian casualty estimates "are largely compiled by interpreting news reports relying on anonymous officials or accounts from local media, whose credibility may vary."

So let's not speak with too much certainty. Drone operators have harrowing stories of false positives that were never reported as such. A false positive is a strike on civilians.

The Unseen Scars of Those Who Kill Via Remote Control https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/15/us/drones-airstrikes-ptsd...

Sure, there's plenty of uncertainty. But there are also far more casualties of 9/11 than the immediate ones. Tons of people got cancer and died, or were seriously disabled, etc. Drone strikes had some similar collateral damage too, I imagine, but certainly not on the scale of 9/11.

We should exterminate the entirety of humanity then, this is the only sure way to decrease terrorism to exactly 0.

Although when you think about it, those single-celled bacteria look awefully suspicious and up to nothing good.

So for you the CIA has the same moral requirements than terrorists groups? That line of reasoning ends up to the conclusion that CIA's assassination is just state sponsored terrorism, and I'm not sure that's the argument you are willing to make.

I didn't say that, nor did I bring up the casualties comparison. The person I was responding to asked what the relative casualty counts were.

About the same as that for being killed on a battlefield, and not much worse than that available to an indigent defendant.

Similar to gmail and youtube suspension process. It happens to you, you or someone makes your case on social media, someone in google may listen and modify the policy rules.

And then you get your life back?

I think that was the point of the sarcasm

Nope. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveil...

The CIA will torture any witnesses of you having had any life and then denies that you ever existed.

But there are also people that acknowledge the existence of uncertainty and draw conclusions from that. Countries without a death penalty for example. Uncertainty being a fact is not a free ticket.

Incredibly chilling for you to have to type this! But yes indeed.

Ad serving probably has less false-positives, because those cost the ad companies money.

You think that false positives requiring the staging/deployment of a multi-million dollar weapon system don't cost money?

It's not about how much absolute money is spent per each false positive, it's about how much you can get away with wasting. If a decision maker in the CIA is not punished for each brain fart, why would they avoid mistakes ? You get the behaviour that you reinforce and tolerate.

Exactly. A false positive likely results in more money because you need to buy more equipment to replace what you just used, and even more to do it "right this time".

Welcome to what happens when NatSec gets to set their own terms on visibility.

Not really, the US military practically has a blank check.

I can think of multiple decade-long government projects off of the top of my head (including from NASA) that had entire programs scrapped because they ran out of money.

Overages from a single military program, like the F-35, have eclipsed the entire budget of those canceled projects.

That has more to do with the fact that Congress hasn't the backbone to call the Executive to heel on spending or transparency, or to empower OIG/GAO to pierce the national security veil.

You can't make actionable tweaks to the system when the books are compartmentalized.

None of that though doesn't cost money. Which is why I question the logic that Ad serving is somehow more responsive or accurate because a false-positive "costs money".

Ad companies don't get to hide their books from the public.

Only if they're public companies. If they're private (eg Dell) then their books are hidden from public view.

Congress is considerable source of explicit allowance for overages in such projects, including at times forcing politically popular purchases that military doesn't want. While forcing inefficiencies in procurement from projects having to buy votes by spreading production.

Ah yes... The sordid NASA/pork barrel effect. I am aware. That's orthogonal to the fact that Congress, besides setting the budget is also tasked wit Oversight. I'm damn sure they've not done/doing a great job of it, because there are many members of the legislature who find themselves straight up lied to by the Executive, yet nothing is done in terms of consequences.

Many examples of the IC lying to Congress can be found with digging. Dirt can absolutely be dug up if Congress sees fit to do so. They just haven't seen fit to glex their oversight powers.

Digging would endanger their own grift after all

This is an excellent summary of how to make decisions, and to continually get better at making them.

> and how well convinced we are of what the accuracy based on past experience; and how much the deciders knew about last inaccuracies, when deciding to continue a practice.

This in particular. How did proceeding this way do in the past? What did we get when we decided to continue with a discrepancy? If the discrepancy did not result in an issue, why? was the information bad, our handling of it, or just chance? If it was an issue, can we avoid overriding it again, can we get better info, can we discard it altogether from consideration?

(note: this comment doesn't relate to the content of the article at all, but about the decision-making process outlined above)

>> "Signatures" aren't necessarily better or worse than other sources.

Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information, and they are almost always better than low-grade intelligence obtained under pressure/influence (like the WMDs in Iraq). That is no justification.

>> Right, they are almost always worse than first-hand information,

You're probably right about this, in a sense, but it beckons a pretty interesting question: provide an example when "signatures" are better than first-hand information.

Counter example: If your job is to find enemy subs, then sonar feedback off the hull of a Akula Class nuclear attack sub may be better than direct visual observation of the sub

Nobody complains too loudly if you fire a torpedo at a blue whale, but there would be dire consequences if you hit the wrong sub. I wouldn't call sonar contacts statistical evidence though, even if it is partially correct.

The counter example doesn't fit. In you example the sub is hostile because it is Russian. Here the people are convicted to death by circumstantial evidence. Very, very bad circumstantial evidence. It is just "worth" it because there are little consequences for the murderers.

If you use the same statistic model to estimate how likely it is for people to be a danger to others for political reasons, also called terrorism in some cases, you very likely would need to shoot those that implemented these decisions.

Don’t forget American citizens are on the table too, no due process required!

EDIT: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki Thank you Jaywalk for the correct link

From the article, it seems like he was collateral damage and not the intended target - the drone strike was targeting Ibrahim al-Banna. That sucks, very much a wrong place wrong time, but I would say that a fairly effective strategy for not being collateral damage is to not hang out with internationally wanted terrorists.

I don't know why the parent poster linked to his son, but this is probably who he was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki

A US citizen who was executed by a drone strike ordered by Obama himself.

I don't really see the problem with this either. It seems like they would have liked to capture him, but it was infeasible. The guy essentially declared war on the US with his actions. What special steps should they take because he is an American citizen?

A little different, but imagine if an American decided to go fight for Germany during WWII. Should he receive any special consideration above what native-born German soldiers got, before Americans start shooting towards him?

Yeah that analysis of if he could be captured alive feasibly was his crappy version of due process.

Not enough for my taste, but it at least caused a hiccup in the meat grinder. And it diminishes Obama's legacy in an objective way that can be repeated ad nauseam, legitimately. He lives on past the bullets as a bullet-point in presentations, discussions, debates and speeches.

Salutations, fellow United States citizen Mr. Al-Awlaki.

Americans are afforded due process rights under the Constitution. I'm not saying he wasn't a bad guy, he clearly was. But it's not the same as a soldier (or police officer, or anyone really) shooting someone who's actively shooting at them. This was a straight up execution of a citizen without due process.

Nobody, including the President, has the right to do that. It was blatantly unconstitutional.

What other due process is there, relative to the Authorization for Use of Military Force act of 2001? Congress gave POTUS the power to go after people like al-Awlaki with it. It's been on the books for 20+ years, the Supreme Court has essentially ruled it is a constitutional giving of power by Congress to POTUS e.g. in Hamadi vs Rumsfeld. If the US military could have captured al-Awlaki without incident, then drone striking him would probably not be considered "necessary and appropriate force". But, it wasn't reasonable to capture him, so what alternative is there?

How about simply not murdering people on the other side of the world?

Here’s a mental experiment for you: what would you do if Russia, lawfully (according to Russian laws) executed people in US? Because that’s exactly what US is doing to the rest of the world.

Well, that sounds like a great idea. But, it needs to be a two way street. Convince terrorists planning terror attacks to not murder people on the other side of the world, then I'm sure America would drastically cut down on the number of people it killed on the other side of the world.

> what would you do if Russia, lawfully (according to Russian laws) executed people in US? Because that’s exactly what US is doing to the rest of the world.

Well, that depends - is the US government a failed state incapable of enforcing its own laws? Or did the US government give permission for this to happen? Then sure, go right ahead Russia. The Yemeni government gave the greenlight for the US to drone strike al-Awlaki.

Number of victims of terrorist attacks on the other side of the world is orders of magnitude lower than number of victims of American invasions. Even 9/11 was a minor episode compared to the invasion it served as an excuse for.

Essentially, you’re assuming US are always the good guys. And the easiest way to explain this is the foundation of all US politics: racism.

Having said that, US _arr_ the good guys at the moment, and let’s hope it stays that way.

Is the US racist against all the Yemeni people and government who also wanted him dead?

US is treating them as lesser people, so yeah. “Everyone who’s not US citizen is technically an Arab”.

Just to be clear, he wasn't "planning terrorist attacks". He was a propagandist.

To make the parallel clear:

If Russia executed people that were waging war against Russia from within the US, that the US had already convicted of making war on Russia, was the US also trying to capture or kill at the same time?

I'd expect the US government to say "thank you".

There’s no conviction involved in either of those situations. Just Russia - or Iran - executing people inconvenient to Russia, on US soil, obviously against US will. Exactly what US is doing to other countries.

> What special steps should they take because he is an American citizen?

The due process afforded in the constitution. With, you know, trials and juries and such.

> A little different, but imagine if an American decided to go fight for Germany during WWII. Should he receive any special consideration above what native-born German soldiers got, before Americans start shooting towards him?

I would say that an operation specifically to assassinate that person without a trial should be viewed as unconstitutional.

Due process is subject to feasibility on American soil as well. Mass shooters seem to get very few days in court.

It's illegal to assassinate even mass shooters in the US. It's only legal to kill them in defense during an active situation.

And just going to through out there that Anwar al-Awlaki isn't accused of taking up arms, just publishing political speech that the US government didn't approve of.

> It's illegal to assassinate even mass shooters in the US. It's only legal to kill them in defense during an active situation.

A drone strike feels like a pretty active situation no?

I'm not being pedantic, just pointing out that there is a ton of grey area that your statement doesn't account for, and we'd need to dive into the details of this situation to determine whether the assassination was justified or not. Even then, it would mostly be a qualitative judgement.

For example, let's say you had credible information indicating someone was going to bomb and elementary school, and you saw them running down your street towards one such school. Would you shoot?

What if, same situation, but you saw them riding a bike or driving a car toward the school? What if you had no idea where they were, but someone told you they'd be in a certain location before the attack and you could only get a drone to the location in time?

I'm not saying the gov was wrong or right with Anwar, just that the arguments presented here fail to account for real world complexity.

> A drone strike feels like a pretty active situation no?

Following that logic, drone striking you in your house is an active situation. No constitution needed.

No, I obviously meant that you're allowed to kill as LEO _in response_ to an active situation.

> For example, let's say you had credible information indicating someone was going to bomb and elementary school, and you saw them running down your street towards one such school. Would you shoot?

> What if, same situation, but you saw them riding a bike or driving a car toward the school? What if you had no idea where they were, but someone told you they'd be in a certain location before the attack and you could only get a drone to the location in time?

The real world is not the TV show 24. The purpose of the constitution is to constrain such actions even if extrajudicially drone striking every person with a modicum of 'credible evidence' against them would be easier or might lead to less tragedies.

Additionally, you're ignoring that there was no active situation Al-Waki was accused of participating in. Just political speech the government didn't approve of.

> Following that logic, drone striking you in your house is an active situation. No constitution needed. No, I obviously meant that you're allowed to kill as LEO _in response_ to an active situation.

My point was that you haven't defined what an "active situation" is. I could say "we should only kill people when we have to" and that'd be accurate, but that'd be useless for the point of this conversation, which at this point seems to be defining "have to".

> The real world is not the TV show 24. The purpose of the constitution is to constrain such actions even if extrajudicially drone striking every person with a modicum of 'credible evidence' against them would be easier or might lead to less tragedies.

Indeed, however, such things happen and people are forced to act during them. I also highly doubt the playbook the military uses is "do we have at least a modicum of evidence? then kill them."

>Additionally, you're ignoring that there was no active situation Al-Waki was accused of participating in. Just political speech the government didn't approve of.

I am ignoring no such thing as I made no comment on his situation other than to say I do not have enough information to make a judgement.

> however, such things happen

Source?

It's common enough that states have statutes regarding the use of deadly force when someone is believed to pose a threat, whether or not they are a threat in that moment. "Fleeing Felon" statutes for instance.

At the time of the assassination order, he had been out of the US for over 6 years, and was a public leader in a war against the US that had already killed thousands of American civilians. He was convicted and ordered to "capture dead or alive" by a Yemeni court.

Should the US conducted the formality of convicting him of treason in absentia? Sure.

None of this remotely excuses killing his children.

The Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure doesn't allow trials in absentia in such circumstances.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/rules/frcrmp/rule_43

Many American officials were public leaders in war that already have killed about a million. Would it be ok for foreign governments to liquidate those people, or should they conduct the formality of convincing them first?

Once again - you’re assuming US was the good guys there. Which is quite an absurd assumption if you look at the numbers instead of propaganda.

You don't see a problem when a head of state orders the summary execution of people they find inconvenient?

>Another U.S. administration official speaking on condition of anonymity described Abdulrahman al-Awlaki as a bystander who was "in the wrong place at the wrong time," stating that "the U.S. government did not know that Mr. Awlaki's son was there" before the airstrike was ordered.

I'm not for drone strikes, but it seems to me if your dad is an armed militant working against the US and killed in a US military operation, and then you go around associating with even more armed militants working against the US, you're asking a lot of your US citizenship to protect you from getting droned.

So defending against an invading empire is a capital offense now?

If you're in a foreign country aiding what is essentially a terrorist group or directly fighting for them on the front lines, why do you expect they would get due process?

Did you just cite Putin?

> As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this and I fully support those responsible for these programs to be tried as war criminals.

Same and seconded. That includes presidents too; take every living president and have them stand for these crimes. There's no reason that being president should be carte blanche for murder.

The has CIA tortured US citizens, destroyed the evidence and got away with it, I doubt anything will happen.

>> I doubt anything will happen.

Well not with that attitude. ;-)

How do you propose to change this attitude in a time when people who organise groups to change this attitude always end up mysteriously killing themselves?

>I doubt anything will happen

The last president who seemingly took issue with these powers was conveniently assassinated. His successor (and the successor's allies) wasted no time in appeasing those powers by beginning lots of wars that killed and destroyed the lives of many people. I too doubt anything will happen.

At the risk of starting a Chomsky flame war and for anyone curious about what happened in those wars, and why nothing will happen: read "Manufacturing Consent".

Yeah I don't believe these "the CIA killed JFK" conspiracy theories. Y'all have had decades and decades to prove it.

> As an American I'm ashamed that my government has done things like this

Have you voted against all of your elected representatives that authorized it?

The only way things like this will change is if the people force them to change by making it clear to politicians that they will not be elected or re-elected if they support them.

How do you suggest voting against the representatives that do this when both the Democrats and Republicans do it?

Politicians currently in office of both parties do it, yes. That doesn't mean politicians of both parties who will be running for office in the future will necessarily do it. There are many ways for voters to communicate preferences prior to elections in order to influence the policy positions of candidates. Of course it won't change drastically in just one election; we didn't get to where we are now with just one election. It took many decades. But change has to start somewhere.

You think only America does this? All countries do it if they have the spy capabilities of doing it.

I am reading "a peoples history of United States" by Howard zinn. It highlights US in a very negative light so with that caveat out of the way, it appears we are continuously ashamed of things we did just a century back. Always.

Maybe in a hundred years we will also talk about the current era as dark times (as long as we are the top dog or maybe number 2). But at that point we will have something else to be ashamed of (but that will not be talked of at that time).

If we spiral out of control or break up, then the story (in hindsight) will be even more amazing.

But then I look at other countries and apart from some good European socialism which is quite recent, there ain't much to be proud of, when you look at any country, of any era.

> when you look at any country

This is true of any group of people, particularly a tolerant one, because actions deemed necessary by some will always be abhorrent to others.

> are continuously ashamed of things we did

Maybe "ashamed" is too strong a word, but thinking smaller scale, if you look back at the way you handled things when you were younger, don't you think you could have done anything better?

Isn't this how we learn and progress as a person? Seems likely to be true for a society as well.

I just riffed off the word "ashamed" from the parent comment. I probably could have described it differently if I wrote it without that context.

I was just playing it safe. Didn't want anybody to think they should be ashamed of themselves for all their previous mistakes.

I have trouble seeing how this is relevant. We're talking about USA's criminal decisions in the middle east here, which was ongoing as recently as 5 or 3 years ago.

And the "other countries are genocidal maniacs as well" caveat only works if the person who is pointing out that the USA is a genocidal maniac is fond of another country, but there is no mention of any country to praise in this thread, just condemnation of USA's actions against individuals. All countries are genocidal maniacs, but only one controls the US military.

I don't bear 1 ounce of shame of anything I wasn't a direct participant in. Not slavery, not the KKK, not any of our lame ass wars, none of that. Should we try to fix the ills of those terrible things? Absolutely. I acknowledge it all happened and it was an awful thing. It always has to be viewed through the context of the times it happened in though. None of this "white man's guilt" crap. Let's all work together to fix it, not continuously spin our wheels feeling guilty and hating each other. CRT is an attempt to push the guilt narrative and that's why I agree with it pitched out on it's head from schools, not because I think history shouldn't be taught but "emotion as history" is a bad road to go down.

> The CIA has killed lots of the wrong people because "signature strikes"

Please cite a source for this claim.

You can find this yourself so easily that your question qualifies as sealioning.

But here you go anyway: https://foreignpolicy.com/2016/04/05/obamas-most-dangerous-d...

> “Signature strikes have resulted in large numbers of bystander casualties in Pakistan and Yemen,” Jameel Jaffer, a deputy legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union, told Foreign Policy.

> The numbers are impossible to pin down, given the lack of clear reporting on the ground in places like Pakistan and Yemen.

Ha, it almost seems like you're saying that since the US doesn't keep good track of how many civilians they've murdered with "signature strikes", no one can claim that "lots of innocent people are dying". Even when many reports and groups say that lots of innocent people are dying, including the article you're quoting.

That would by psychotic though, so I'm surely misinterpreting what your actual point is. Care to clarify?

Quantify how many "lots" are. The parent said the CIA killed "lots" of the wrong people. That is really the only word I take issue with.

"uncountably high"

In other words, we can safely assume US doesn’t go murdering people, because they say their own lists of murdered people aren’t kept tidy enough?

> "signature strikes" don't require second source intelligence to verify who the target is..

Read that Osama bin Laden was verified by people on ground masquerading as health workers.

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