How about drone strikes which target and kill a US citizen and his teenage son?
It's my experience that people who bring up Anwar al-Awlaki and his son --- particularly when using the term "US citizen" in the same breath --- rarely know anything specific about what actually happened.
To start with, al-Awlaki and his son Abdulrahman weren't killed together, but at separate times.
Abdulrahman was never targeted. He was killed a month later because he was for some reason in the same cafe as Ibrahim al-Banna, the day-to-day operational leader of AQAP. al-Banna was the target of the attack. The USG had no reason to know of Abdulrahman's presence in Shabwa, Yemen, which wasn't under the control of the Yemeni government and continues to be the site of bloody conflicts between militants and the Yemeni state. What was Abdulrahman doing there? Super-parent Anwar al-Awlaki brought him there, to an AQAP war zone that was hosting conflicts not just with the US but with its own host country.
Anwar al-Awlaki was targeted by the US. al-Awlaki was a US citizen. But, like the tens of Americans who left the US to fight for Hitler in World War 2, al-Awlaki deliberately placed himself outside the protections of his citizenship and from that vantage point tried to wage war on his home country. al-Awlaki built up a serial murderer's resume as a sponsor, planner, and coordinator of multiple attacks on civilians in the US and UK. The only reason anyone questions his role in those attacks is because they ususally failed --- the planes didn't blow up, the stab victims didn't die.
People have strange ideas of how "citizenship" works. The American government has no arrest powers in Shabwa and Anyan Province Yemen. There is no due process in that part of the world whatsoever. The USG had three options in al-Awlaki's case: (1) ignore him and hope that he didn't eventually manage actually blow up a passenger plane, (2) kill him with a targeted airstrike, or (3) invade Yemen to capture him. The USG chose the option that killed the fewest innocent civilians.
Dude. If you ever get a firm diagnosis or find a support group please let some of us others know. It's like an epidemic.
You make a good point, but not one that fundamentally changed the options on the ground.
It appears there was a lawsuit against U.S. It was brought by al-Awlaki father after U.S. put him on a kill list (while he was still alive).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#Lawsuit_agains....
That this particular case seems obvious to you, should not be reason enough for you to accept the whole doctrine.
Am I misunderstanding your question?
Look, I understand you're trying to support your argument by drawing comparisons to another better-defined war, but your particular choice of wars is baffling. Most often, comparisons are made to the American civil war; Lincoln's explorations of executive power in the face of an existential threat to the republic are profoundly relevant to this debate. WW2... I'm at a loss.
The 2001 AUMF, for example, is as far removed from the US declaration of war against the axis as you can get. It's everything that a typical formal declaration of war isn't, with the vaguest possible definitions of who the enemy is and where the battle can be fought. It has no real limits of any kind, and has henceforth been used as a license for indefinite military action.
>"Nobody in al Qaeda wears a uniform; they deliberately avoid them, to maximize the probability that their opponents will kill innocent civilians."
I may be a bit slow, but honestly I already knew this :) Yes this conflict is very different from the canonical 20th century wars which naturally shape our views of what war "ought" to be. Our laws and treaties are inadequate, and leave us in troubling gray areas, and I'm not convinced there are any good ways out.
BUT...
I'm also pretty sure a good solution is NOT to simply give the president the license to do whatever he wants to whomever he labels a "terrorist", regardless of location or citizenship. This is precisely the license assumed by the Bush administration during John Yoo's tenure. It appears to be the basis of your own assertions as well; please tell me I'm wrong.
The AUMF was a declaration of war. The Constitution doesn't lay out the specific form of a "declaration of war"; the Korean War, for instance, was fought under the aegis of a UN declaration. Wars fought under informal authorization by Congress date all the way back to Jefferson and the First Barbary War.
It's a popular myth that we're fighting an "undeclared" war against al Qaeda, but unfortunately, that's all it is. We really did declare war against al Qaeda, by name, in 2001, and because al Qaeda is a brand name and not a nation state, at war we will remain until Congress repeals the AUMF.
The comparison to WW2 is simple: during WW2, scores of German-Americans traveled to Europe to fight on behalf of the Nazis. We didn't read them their rights before we killed them. American citizenship did not shield them from the consequences of armed conflict. If al-Awlaki wanted to prosecute his cause using the mechanisms of due process, it was a decidedly stupid idea for him to take up residence in territory controlled by AQAP, where the only reasonable mechanism the US had available to it to stop him from killing innocent civilians was an airstrike.
Also, you're wrong about the President's authorization to kill whomever he labels a "terrorist". The President does not have a blanket authorization to use the military against "terrorists". He has authorization only to strike against al Qaeda and those persons and organizations who assisted in the attacks on 9/11. The President cannot authorize airstrikes against, say, Basque separatists, or the Tamil Tigers.
So, yes, the POTUS can, and does, decide who JSOC will be going after next.
I'm not really disputing that. I'm saying that using the AUMF to draw comparisons to WW2 is not helpful.
>"The comparison to WW2 is simple: during WW2, scores of German-Americans traveled to Europe to fight on behalf of the Nazis."
Yes, in uniforms, on the battlefield. We didn't, as far as I know, bomb a dude writing anti-american propaganda in a city far from the battlefield. This whole WW2 analogy of yours is really tortured, and I feel foolish even arguing about it.
>"The President does not have a blanket authorization to use the military against "terrorists". He has authorization only to strike against al Qaeda and those persons and organizations who assisted in the attacks on 9/11."
Not according to the current president. I'll let Eric Holder speak here:
It is entirely lawful – under both United States law and applicable law of war principles – to target specific senior operational leaders of al Qaeda and associated forces.
This is from his speech at Northwestern, wherein he uses the phrase "al Qaeda and associated forces" five times.
Guess who gets to decide what "associated" and "operational leader" mean.
I'm frustrated that I have to spell it out like this. This administration has made it perfectly clear that if you're an American citizen abroad, the president can have you killed based on an evaluation that he alone can make. The customary checks of the judicial branch can be waved at will if the president can link you to AQ in some way. Apparently, moving to Yemen and claiming to be a leader in AQ in some shitty youtube videos counts. The bar will possibly be lower in future administrations. Or not. The point is that the process is completely opaque and unchecked.
In reality, the guy in Shabwa is far, far more dangerous than the random lunatic fighting with the Nazis was in Holland. The lunatic wasn't about to coordinate the bombing of a commercial airliner filled with innocent people. But that's exactly what al-Awlaki was doing.
Meanwhile, your Holder quote doesn't rebut my argument. Holder is saying the administration can launch strikes against al Qaeda. You made a broader claim, the administration can designate people "terrorists" and kill them. You were incorrect. They cannot do that.
You also drastically oversimplify the charges against al-Awlaki. He wasn't designated a leader of al Qaeda because of "shitty Youtube videos", nor was he killed simply because he wrote articles advocating for al Qaeda. Similarly, Osama bin Laden wasn't targeted because he himself bombed an embassy in Tanzania, blew a giant hole in the USS Cole, or stabbed someone on an airplane with a box cutter.
He actually took great care not to say that. He is carefully not limiting the president to action only against AQ. The phrase "al Qaeda and associated forces" is deliberate. He is expressly reserving the power to decide who is "associated" to AQ and in a "leadership" position, and to take lethal action based on those decisions. All of these decisions are completely opaque and unchecked by any power outside of the executive.
The 2001 AUMF is a sideshow. Holder doesn't think he needs it. He has opined that congress has no authority over the president in this area anyway, and that includes military action on U.S. soil:
http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/does_eric_holder_know_the_la...
I consider this a dangerous concentration of power that the president should reject. This appears to be the crux of our disagreement, yes?
No, we didn't. There are no named persons or organizations in the 2001 AUMF, it is literally a blank-check declaration of war that authorizes the President to write in names. Which is one of the many reasons that people (including Barack Obama -- as President -- have said it needs to be sunsetted.)
The 2001 AUMF authorized force against people and organizations "he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons". Which is al Qaeda and the Taliban, but yes, not by name!
And yes, of course, the 2001 AUMF is awful.
But to 'nate_meurer's point: the President does not have the authority to kill people simply because he has determined that they are terrorists. Nor does he consistently have the authority to kill people that are determined to be in al Qaeda; for instance, if they're on American soil and not actively engaging in violence, Holder has testified under oath that their killing would be unconstitutional.
If you have a citation for this I like to see it. Overall he doesn't seem too committed to this idea. Furthermore, he seems to think that the president is the only legitimate arbiter of the constitutionality of these actions. From http://www.salon.com/2013/03/06/does_eric_holder_know_the_la...:
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing today, Sen. Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, asked Holder whether Congress could prohibit the targeted killing of Americans in America. “Do you believe Congress can pass a law prohibiting POTUS to use lethal force on U.S. soil?” he asked directly, explaining he meant the prohibition would apply only where a person did not present an imminent threat.
“I’m not sure that such a bill would be constitutional,” the attorney general responded. “It might run contrary to the Article II powers that the president has.” Article II is the section of the Constitution that lays out the president’s authority as commander in chief of the military.
I think I'm done with this argument now.
The time when the US declare peace will not be because of dead terrorists. It won't be because somewhere its more safer. It won't be because some goals has been achieved. It will be because sooner or later, people will get tired of war.
I can say this with 100% certainty based on a concept made two thousand years ago:
The pinnacle of military deployment approaches the
formless: if it is formless, then even the deepest spy
cannot discern it nor the wise make plans against it."
-- Sun Tzu, "The Art of War", Datalinks
*The conflict is formless*
Thus the conflict itself can not be won, it can only be fought perpetually. The deepest spy cannot discern what is needed to be destroyed for victory, and the wise can not device a plan for it.
Note the case of Nidal Malik Hasan, who was in contact with Al Awlaki before he killed 13 people at Fort Hood. The Department of Defense classified it as "workplace violence" rather than an act of terrorism, and it was absolutely the right call. The evidence showed that Hasan acted alone, and not at the direction of some external organization.
Legally, there are essentially two regimes: the domestic criminal regime, and the military regime. If you fall into the former bucket, there are lots of protections. Trials in abstentia, for example, are illegal and invalid: a defendant has a Constitutional right to appear at his trial. If you fall into the latter bucket, there aren't really any protections. When the U.S. fought Germany in WWII, German soldiers couldn't claim legal protections under U.S. laws.
Putting Al Awlaki into the "military aggressor" bucket is problematic, because of his citizenship, but not totally unprecedented. In World War II, it is almost certain that American citizens were killed by American forces while fighting for Hitler. Indeed, at least a dozen American POWs were killed in the Hiroshima bombing. It's morally troubling, but at least its encapsulated: you're in a war zone, a place without functioning rule of law, and pose a military threat, you're fair game.
Putting Al Awlaki into the domestic criminal regime, then trying him in abstentia, is REALLY problematic. If a terrorist is just a "really bad criminal," instead of a foreign soldier, then in what other cases of "really bad criminals" do Constitutional protections go out the window? It's not encapsulated, it's hard to cabin to the specific facts, and it amounts to an even bigger erosion of rights.
>"at least its encapsulated: you're in a war zone..."
Yemen is not a war zone in any sense of the word. There is no declared war on Yemeni soil. You could call it a "conflict zone", a term that could be applied to the vast majority of the developing world.
>"...a place without functioning rule of law, and pose a military threat, you're fair game."
According to John Yoo and Eric Holder maybe. There is plenty of dissent over this particular doctrine.
>"If a terrorist is just a "really bad criminal..."
Terrorists are really bad criminals. Are you able to draw a bright line between the two? If not, then what's the use of the distinction?
>"...instead of a foreign soldier..."
Al Awlaki was unambigously NOT a foreign soldier. He was never uniformed, he was not in a declared war zone, and he was not a citizen of a foreign nation. Unless I'm an idiot (always possible) there has never been any debate about this.
>"in what other cases of "really bad criminals" do Constitutional protections go out the window?"
None? A trial in absentia does not forcibly deprive the defendant of any rights if he is free to attend the trial, which Al Awlaki was. It would have been his choice whether to attend, and thus whether to take full advantage of his rights as a citizen.
Am I mistaken?
I don't understand this preoccupation with "declared wars." Who cares what you call it? The government simply does not have control over vast swaths of Yemen, and militant groups unaligned with the government are using it as a base of operations for attacks on people outside of Yemen. No, this does not characterize the vast majority of the developing world. Places like Yemen, Pakistan, and Somalia are in a totally different situation.
> Terrorists are really bad criminals. Are you able to draw a bright line between the two? If not, then what's the use of the distinction?
The line doesn't have to be bright, but it's crucial to draw the line. There is crime, and there is war, and the two are not the same thing. The regime applicable to external threats versus internal threats is very different. Maintaining this distinction allows you to better preserve the protections applicable to domestic criminal prosecution. If you try to shoe-horn well-financed international terrorists armed with military grade weapons into the framework of domestic criminal law, you end up distorting that framework and militarizing the domestic law enforcement apparatus. That's bad.
> He was never uniformed, he was not in a declared war zone, and he was not a citizen of a foreign nation.
You're elevating formality over reality. Al Awlaki wasn't unambiguously a foreign soldier, but aside from his U.S. citizenship he essentially acted like one. If a state affiliated actor had done the same thing, it would be considered an act of war.
> Am I mistaken?
Some procedural rights cannot be waived, and a constitutionally valid trial cannot be conducted without meeting that requirement. The historical understanding in the U.S. has been that trials in abstentia are unconstitutional, at least for capital cases. To date, the Supreme Court hasn't directly addressed the Constitutional issue (though it strongly implied it in Diaz v. U.S. in 1912), but has held that a trial in which a defendant is not present in the beginning of trial is defective for violation of Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 43 (Crosby v. U.S.)
From a practical viewpoint, trials in abstentia are a far more dangerous precedent than drone strikes. Sovereign countries already reserve the right to kill foreigners if they feel attacked by external threats. You can sugar-coat it with international agreements and treaties and whatnot, but fundamentally, every nation, as against external threats, embraces the sovereign right to kill people in other countries. That's the foundational basis for war.
The precedent for trials in abstentia in the context of domestic criminal prosecutions, however, is novel and scary in the U.S. and it's a stone better left unturned. It's better, for people back at home, to just say that people like Al Awlaki, through their long absence and actions abroad, simply relinquish their rights as U.S. citizens and can be treated as foreign enemies. Because you don't want the ramifications of the government figuring out how to deal with guys like him within the framework of domestic criminal enforcement.
I actually like John Yoo. I disagree with him, but I find no fault with those who don't. But I think it would be intellectually honest for you to admit that you've aligned yourself with a very contentious neo-conservative strain of political philosophy.
To be clear, I don't pretend to have any good answers here. I think I agree with you about trials in absentia. I don't agree that handing all the keys to whomever occupies the oval office is the best solution.
Of course, what you're actually doing here is invoking a bugbear (John Yoo is also notorious for conjuring quasi-legal justifications for abhorrent interrogation policies, including torture) to avoid engaging with what 'rayiner is actually saying.
As I say in my comment above, it seems that our fundamental disagreement is that I perceive a dangerous concentration of power in the executive, and you don't. If that's the case then we're likely at an impasse.
You're mixing up two related but distinct issues. Neo-conservatives believe that the authority to engage the military abroad is primarily invested in the President, and he can act to a great degree without interference from Congress. That is a controversial viewpoint. What is much less controversial is that, whatever the division of power may be between the President and Congress when it comes to exercising the sovereign powers of the United States abroad, there is no seat at that table for the judiciary. The idea that the courts are fundamentally domestic institutions, and may not infringe on the exercise of military power abroad except in the narrowest of cases is very broadly embraced.
That is an enormously presumptive statement that you're not qualified to assert. It's so big I'm fairly sure it's wrong; the probability is very much against it. Tens of thousands of innocent civilians have been killed in "preemptive" wars the US started post 9/11.
Even taking US air strikes alone, the kind of operations that the US has been engaged in radicalizes people, and they'll be motivated for decades to come.
The only way your statement approaches truth could be if you assume that only US civilians matter, but even then I don't think it'll be true in the long term.
(1) Leave al-Awlaki alone, situated in the middle of AQAP home territory, and hope that he doesn't succeed in his evident ambitions to coordinate attacks against Europe, America, India, Russia, and Indonesia. This is the strategy Clinton employed against Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri. You and I might debate it, but a realistic analysis of the circumstances of al-Awlaki has to acknowledge that the strategy was discredited. Consider carefully what the real differences between al-Awlaki and al-Zawahiri actually were.
(2) Kill al-Awlaki with an air strike. Here, we have the benefit of seeing the result of this strategy, since it's the option the US actually took. Result: 14 people dead: al-Zawahiri, his son, the editor of al Qaeda's English-language magazine, the day-to-day operational leader of AQAP, and 10 other people. Assume only al-Zawahiri, the editor, and al-Banna were actually meaningfully hostile to the US: that's a death toll of 11 innocent people.
(3) Invade Yemen. Hundreds or thousands of truly innocent people, people with no connection to AQAP or al-Zawahiri at all, would have been killed. Nothing the USG does is more damaging than sending ground troops.
Options (1) and (3) had potential death tolls in the thousands. Option (2) had a death toll in the low teens.
I think reasonable people can obviously disagree about which of these options was the most prudent. But I don't think it's reasonable to suggest that there wasn't a difficult decision here; that the President, whose foremost duty is to protect the people of the US, could casually have chosen to leave al-Awlaki to his own devices. I look at the situation and thank God I'm not the President, and can instead retain my humanity.
Citizenship can be revoked, but I'm pretty sure that matter needs to be decided by a judge, not the President. Am I incorrect?
The US cannot unilaterally revoke citizenship.
*uneducated guess, informed by video games, with no bearing on real life whatsoever
Would it be okay for another country to conduct such drone strikes on US soil? If not, which countries are allowed do do such things, and where, and why?
How can you prove that lives were saved by the drone strike?
The point of military action is that all other viable diplomatic options have been exhausted, and something must be done to stop an avowed enemy. We're not going to sit around waiting for known terrorists to carry out successful attacks on innocents before doing something to stop them. "Reflective contemplation is not required in the presence of an upraised knife." Once such military action is deemed necessary, the question then is whether a single drone destroying a few rooms and their occupants with zero direct risk to US troops is (or isn't) preferable to destroying several city blocks (at minimum) and their occupants with significant risk to our personnel. You demand proof, but only from a position of prejudiciously rejecting any given.
That vs.
Walking down the road, boom, a lot of me is missing, shock, I'm gonna die, ouch, ouch, dead.
I know which way I'd prefer to go if it was down to these two choices.
More like, hide out in Yemen for 10 years organizing violent jihad against the United States and protecting Al Qaeda members from the Yemeni government, then walking down the road...
It's tremendously demeaning to political protestors in Ukraine to compare their situation to people like Al Awlaki.
An estimated 286 to 890 civilians have been killed, including 168 to 197 children.
I'm not saying that it's done on purpose, and intent does matter when considering responsibility. But unfortunately, intent makes little difference to the dead.
Similarly, I was going to write my congress-critters to oppose NSA surveillance and drone strikes, but you've taught me wonderful logical insights: see, demonstrators are kidnapped and tortured in Ukraine, so that makes my point invalid and refutes any arguments I had against drone strikes and NSA surveillance.
I'd use the term "citizen" pretty loosely here. Considering his passport was revoked six month before he was assassinated and the fact he had taken up arms against the US by fighting in another country's army, I'd say he wasn't exactly a "citizen".
It's only murky because the US government didn't officially revoke his citizenship.
In other words, it's not simply not a valid argument.
The first US position on the attack was: "We were targeting some Al Quaeda members, this guy was nearby and got himself killed for mingling with terrorists".
Recently there has been some conflicting positions about this (including admitting that the person was targeted, or claiming the person was hit by accident while another guy nearby was targeted, or that the whole thing was a accident).
Anyway, US should not be bombing countries it is not officially in war against, specially not in urban areas (like a crowded cafe), and killing its own citizens (does not matter if they might be terrorists or not) without trial also should not be done.
It's somewhat disgusting to see the distinction between Americans and Others keep being made, as if spying on non-Americans was somehow less evil than spying on Americans, and so on. They're leveraging the nationalism they've programmed into your heads, to make the all-encompassing surveillance seem less ominous.
But if you believe they don't spy the fuck out of you Americans too, you're being naive. Controlling you specifically is the US government's primary objective because they're becoming a totalitarian regime. I can't imagine it being any more obvious than what's happening over there. Get out while you can.