Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tptacek | Hacker News Reader

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Arguably, al-Awlaki simply preached dissent. Granted, you can argue he was a traitor actively trying to harm the US.

This is a drastic oversimplification of what the USG believed about al-Awlaki. CT officials in the US believe al-Awlaki to have had direct roles in the "underwear bomber" passenger jet attack and an attempt to blow up two cargo jets with PETN. He was indisputably a counselor to Nidal Hasan, who murdered 13 people at Fort Hood.

In sum, the USG and UK believed al-Awlaki to have been Osama bin Laden without all the money, operating from a secure location in Yemen, recruiting random people from around the world to conduct horrible crimes in the name of AQAP.

It does a grave disservice to the tradition and, one supposed, the very concept of "dissent" to equate the coordination of murderous large-scale attacks on civilians with "dissent".

Sharing this belief with the USG does not require someone to believe that it was justifiable to assassinate him. But you can believe assassination to be wrong without glorifying its victims.

Many of us might well believe what you and the USG say about the late Mr Alwaki(1) if it were, you know, established with evidence in a court of law according to due process and all that quaint old fashioned stuff. Until then arguably he didn't do a lot wrong because of this other quaint, old-fashioned thing called the presumption of innocence.

Do we want to abandon such things as quaint and old fashioned when we're dealing with the death penalty? I really, really, really hope not.

(1) About whom I have no opinion whatsoever.

> Until then arguably he didn't do a lot wrong because of this other quaint, old-fashioned thing called the presumption of innocence. Do we want to abandon such things as quaint and old fashioned when we're dealing with the death penalty?

al-Awlaki wasn't a criminal and he wasn't given the death penalty. He put himself in a position of being a foreign military threat and was dealt with as a military threat. No country extends due process or the presumption of innocence to foreign military actions, and it's a tremendous conceit to suggest that the whole world's activities should be encompassed under U.S. criminal law.

>>He put himself in a position of being a foreign military threat and was dealt with as a military threat. No country extends due process...

First, he was not a foreign military. He was a US citizen and non-state actor. That is the crux of the US legal opinion on the matter, the US says it can use force against its own citizens anywhere in the world and international law does not apply because if it is a citizen, non-state actor, then it is a domestic issue no matter where the individual is located. So legally, the US makes the distinction between a US citizen joining a foreign military (state actor) and a foreign terrorist organization (non-state actor).

However, to your point if it was a foreign military while due process may not apply laws of war apply, for example, it would not be murder to kill a foreign military actor on the battlefield but it is murder if you killed a captured enemy (POW). This is applicable even in this case, because after the first botched drone strike, his father sued the US and was trying to negotiate the surrender of his son, but the US couldn't even entertain a surrender because then the US would have had to acknowledge the existence of the kill list and the fact this guy was on it. In any other context, under the law, an enemy combatant would be permitted to surrender and at least avail themselves to certain rights, like the right not to be killed while a prisoner of war. I am not suggesting or stating emphatically he would have surrendered, but I don't doubt the Father's sincerity in his desire and intent to negotiate the surrender of his son.

When he was killed, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was killed in the company of several high-level AQAP fighters. What's your best source for al-Awlaki's attempt to extract his son from Yemen?

As I am searching now for a legitimate source, I generally come up with Yemen's attempt to negotiate the surrender. [1] However, as far as the Father's attempt to negotiate, I can only come up with a CNN article. [2]

>"I will do my best to convince my son to do this (surrender), to come back but they are not giving me time, they want to kill my son. How can the American government kill one of their own citizens? This is a legal issue that needs to be answered," he said. "If they give me time I can have some contact with my son but the problem is they are not giving me time," he said.

I am sure the lawsuit would detail all attempts he made with the US to begin negotiations.

[1] https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&e... [2]http://www.cnn.com/2010/WORLD/meast/01/10/yemen.al.awlaki.fa...

I think you're a little confused. The "father" and "son" you're referencing in that CNN article are Nasser al-Awlaki and his son Anwar, Anwar being the adult AQAP target of the drone strike.

The "father" and "son" I'm referencing are Anwar and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. Abdulrahman was Anwar's juvenile son, killed in a drone strike against senior AQAP militants some time after Anwar was killed. Nasser is his grandfather.

There is no evidence in here that Anwar al-Awlaki was attempting to extricate his juvenile son from the war zone he had taken him into.

It wasn't just the USG; the United Nations listed al-Awlaki as a terrorist in 2010, one year before he was killed: http://www.un.org/sc/committees/1267/AQList.htm. The UN isn't exactly known for being a hawk...

Thomas has already covered this quite well, but I'll briefly summarize again. al-Awlaki was actively at war against the USG. Killing him is roughly equivalent to killing US citizens who fight for other foreign governments. The drone strike was not carrying out a legal sentence, it was simply the use of force in a global conflict.

The UN is exactly known for being a court of law whose jurisdiction compels the USA to mete out sentencing with no right of appeal either.

If he was, why was it too hard to run the case? Why all this apologist stuff about an accusation being good enough for a death sentence - also carried out on his son while he sat in a cafe a week later. This is Stalinist reasoning, what is it doing in the USA?

Trials in absentia are unconstitutional in the US, and al-Awlaki was embedded with AQAP, a paramilitary force far outside the reach of the Yemeni government, with which it is at war.

The logic of the strike was that waiting for that situation to resolve itself would have the effect of giving al-Awlaki many more opportunities to coordinate attacks, that the pattern of al-Awlaki's involvement in attacks was one of escalating intensity, and that the attacks plots themselves were becoming more ambitious. At some point, the logic goes, he'll figure out how to coordinate a strike that actually succeeds in creating mass casualties.

There are a lot of very valid reasons to oppose drone strikes. For one thing, you might believe Obama to be a fundamentally reasonable person, and then remember how awful Bush II's national security staff was, and think about what crazy things the next President will do with the capabilities. You might, like me, also categorically reject the death penalty. And you might also be concerned with the idea of a "declaration of war" on a terrorist brand name which any idiot in the world can revive and slap on a black flag any time they want, thus ensuring that the war is never brought to an end. I know that's what I think.

What I don't think you can say is that in the al-Awlaki case the USG struck al-Awlaki down simply because he was a "dissenter". That's all.

What I do say is that a public servant should not have the right to declare someone worthy of death without any legal process and without any verifiable evidence. There are legal proceedings in absentia all the time. The protection of not having a trial in absentia, making it illegal, is so that the punishment is just. It is not a loop hole to say, "to hell with it let's just kill because law."

Is the evidence for literally all the claims above still "leaked to a newspaper by a public servant but officially neither confirmed nor denied"? Or are some public servants "on the record making the claim"? Is there anything testable and verifiable?

The claims may be entirely correct, I don't know and I don't actually care much. A claim is not evidence. I claim there are war criminals in the US government right now who should be extradited to the Hague, but so what if I claim that? It's of mild interest to some but has no baring on whether shooting them is legal, justified or something I should do anything but oppose.

Your closing comment:

"What I don't think you can say is that in the al-Awlaki case the USG struck al-Awlaki down simply because he was a "dissenter". That's all"

Strawman. Nobody claimed that in this conversation.

Does this mean you would have supported the right of Iraq to use drone strikes against the pentagon before Iraq capitulated? It certainly is a military target, so presumably that would be ok, after the invasion started? (I'm not asking if you'd be happy about it, but asking if you think it would be reasonable and fair according to international law).

Of course they had the right to do so. There's no law of war that I'm aware of that says you cannot attack command centers of the enemy.

Whether it was a case of dissent was exactly why it was controversial and why it sparked debate over free speech and due process rights. Sure, if you assume the government's official account to be true, it's a disservice to equate his actions with dissent. A trial would have determined whether he was merely advocating violence or whether he was plotting it. Since when does the presumption of innocence glorify anyone?

It doesn't. What's misleading is the suggestion that al-Awlaki was targeted as a "dissenter", as if the USG merely didn't like what he had to say.

The government's argument in court was that liability for his assassination is not an issue the court can decide. They specifically avoided countering the argument that you find to be misleading, the same argument made by the estate of al-Awlaki in court. The court agreed that it didn't need to address that issue and dismissed the case for other reasons.

You think we're debating something that we're not debating. I don't have a position on drone assassinations and am not arguing that they're legitimate. All I'm arguing is that in al-Awlaki's case, the USG didn't assassinate someone merely for "dissenting".

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