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Comment by ImHereToVote | Hacker News Reader

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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

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.

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

How about Sherman's March to the Sea?

> 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.

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

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

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

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?

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.

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

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.

> 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?

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.

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

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

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

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

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?

>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?

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.

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.

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).

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