> Judge Patricia Millett characterized the DOJ’s argument as giving the government the ability to “unilaterally decide to kill U.S. citizens,” according to coverage of the argument by Courthouse News Service. “Do you appreciate how extraordinary that proposition is?”
“DOJ” in this case is the defense attorney. What a shit job. Regardless, the DOJ is not giving the USG the ability to kill US Persons with no judicial review. Judge Millett’s exasperation should be an example of how preposterous this is.
The way this post is titled is misleading and is intended to flame.
The article’s title is “US can kill its own citizens without review when state secrets are involved, DOJ lawyer argues” which clearly includes the “this is just one lawyer”.
The submitter squeezed this into “DOJ Argues: US can kill own citizens without review when state secrets involved”. I’d probably update that to “DOJ Lawyer: ...” which would reduce the confusion.
I think it's actually more accurate to say that is the plaintiff's lawyer's counterargument. The DOJ lawyer didn't say it at all. He is merely fighting a request to reveal classified information at the behest of a complainant with a pretty thin justification.
Yeah, AFAICT, none of the linked pages have a direct quote from the DOJ lawyer himself. Instead, they’re all reactions to what his argument is presumed to imply.
This other article [1] has what is purportedly a related, direct quote: “In all of these circumstances, he [Kareem] is not even the only person present, much less is there anything to suggest that he’s actually the target of any of those specific attacks.”.
So yeah, I’d agree that even the original sources are likely flamebait for what a real headline should be “DOJ Lawyer: national security precludes disclosing who is on kill list, including Americans” (at trial).
It’s not clear to me that this argument holds (it’s close enough to “we are going to imprison you, but we can’t tell you why”, violating habeus corpus), but at least it’s clear that this is the argument they’re making.
However, as the grandparent post notes, “DOJ Argues” makes it sound like the Attorney General / the entire DOJ argues such a thing. “DOJ Lawyer” makes it clear “some lawyer at the DOJ said”.
I would certainly agree that winning a case with this argument would establish such a precedent. But again, it’s not clear that “the DOJ” stated this, nor is it (seemingly) an argument that worked.
Serious question -- at the point that it becomes precedential and can be done, effectively willy nilly, what difference does it make if the AG said it? This isn't as if the lawyer just said it in passing, and the lawyer knows full-well that this may become case law. If the DOJ starts using the precedent (which can be argued that they'd be arguing for such a thing), is that when we should be worried? It sounds very much like you're okay with the fact that a DOJ lawyer went in front of a judge and argued this because, "hey, what's the harm?".
Just because the judge thinks something is appalling doesn't necessarily mean that they won't rule in favor of the appalling statements/argument.
They are in effect, because they're saying he doesn't have standing because he can't prove he's on the list, but he also can't find out if he's on the list because state secrets. Pretty convinent.
I don't understand how you came to that conclusion. Here is the first paragraph of the OP (ABA Journal) article:
> A U.S. Department of Justice lawyer argued Monday that the United States can kill its own citizens without judicial review when litigation would reveal state secrets.
Here is the first paragraph on the CNS article on which the ABA article is based:
> Drawing alarm at the D.C. Circuit, a lawyer for the United States argued Monday that the government has the power to kill its citizens without judicial oversight when state secrets are involved.
Neither of these suggest that this is the defense attorney's claim. If you want to challenge the Judge's characterization of DOJ's position, feel free to read through their brief and come back with a legitimate argument.
Also, a sibling comment suggests that this should be dismissed as the decision of a single DOJ attorney, rather than the DOJ as an institution. There's not a chance in hell that this case isn't being strategized, coordinated and monitored from the highest levels of the DOJ. The idea that this would be the argument of a single, possibly rogue, prosecutor is ludicrous.
Nah, it almost definitely shouldn't. The lawyer is representing the DOJ. Period, end of story. The enormous impact of the lawyer's representation on case law is non-trivial to say the least, even it's just one person. This lawyer almost certainly works with DOJ staff who were okay with this argumentation. At what point should we get worked up? Once it becomes case law?
Not really because the title is claiming the lawyer said that - which he didn't. The underlying articles merely claim that is what he is implying with his legal argument.
Of course none of that is explained, and the reader is left to believe that the DOJ is actually making this argument in court - which they are not.
Can someone explain to me how the headline matches up with the content?
>The government sought to dismiss the case, invoking the state secrets privilege because Kareem sought discovery on whether he had been targeted, the process the government used to target him, and whether the United States had attempted to kill him. A federal judge agreed with the government.
The involvement of state secrets is what is preventing discovery of whether or you were targeted by the government, not whether or not they are allowed to kill you. This seems very different from the government
provably killing someone, and then claiming "state secrets" as a defense for being allowed to do it.
True, it may not be provable that you were targeted if "state secrets" prevents evidence from coming to light, but this is orthogonal to whether or not killing you is legally allowed, which is what the headline is suggesting.
If the government makes secret kills lists to murder US citizens, and the courts dismiss any lawsuits about this because the secret kill lists are secret, then it means the government can add anyone they want to the kill list with no repercussions or oversight.
If it was legally allowed, there would be no reason to hide the lists and cover up the process. If there existed other evidence, outside of states secrets, that proved the actions, then there absolutely would be a valid case.
The parent did not comment on the legality of the action but on whether the Government could execute on that action “without consequences or repercussions”. Arguing about the legality is a straw man argument, when the discussion is about what actions the Government can get away with (regardless of legality).
The government "can" do a lot of things. They "can" drone your home right now if they wanted to. The only thing that matters is if it is legal or not. Enumerating all of the things within the capabilities of the government is a meaningless exercise.
And there's a reason why, in your example, the end result of the public being unhappy is to change the laws: because at the end of the day, the only thing that holds any real weight in society are the laws. If the public disagreeing was enough, then there would be no need to have laws.
> because at the end of the day, the only thing that holds any real weight in society are the laws
The world has a long sad history of showing this isn’t the case. The slow creep of authoritarianism usually happens by pushing the boundaries of what is acceptable and goes beyond the previous norms of legal interpretation.
Sometimes officials choose not to do things "at their digression" based on public opinion, without the need to change laws. Also, the argument about changing laws is moot if we are discussion the suppression of information, from becoming public, and therefore motivating the law.
Basically, "if it is legal or not" is not the only important factor, because laws can change.
>It would be hard to imagine the Government getting away with bombing downtown San Francisco without any consequences.
I didn't say "downtown San Francisco", I said "your home." How would you prove that blew up your home? If you can't prove it, then they got away with it. My point is that when we open up the definition of "can" in this headline to mean "things the government can do and get away with", then it becomes meaningless if it's not bounded by the legality of those things. There are a boundless number of things, including assassinations, framings, etc etc, that the government "can" do and get away with.
So the only definition of "can" worth discussing, since the headline is intentionally vague about what "can" means, is whether or not it is legal to do the things described.
Wikipedia disagrees. Example: "In 1996, a federal jury ordered the city to pay a $1.5 million civil suit judgment to survivor Ramona Africa and relatives of two people killed in the bombing." The police commissioner was also forced to resign.
If the US Federal Government decided to bomb San Francisco, I'm not sure who exactly would be able to render the consequences.
Parent is right, the law is abstract. Violence is absolute. If the largest dispenser of violence in human history decides to bomb San Francisco, they're going to do it, and it will be legal.
> If the US Federal Government decided to bomb San Francisco, I'm not sure who exactly would be able to render the consequences.
true, but only vacuously so. the "US Federal Government" is not some monolithic entity with a single will. it is made up of many organizations, factions, and individuals with their own motivations. if a military official ordered the bombing of san francisco, their subordinates may simply disobey them. if the orders were actually carried out, there would likely be other parts of the government that would find it politically expedient to hold those responsible to account. they may or may not be able to direct the use of force to do so.
the government can only take extreme actions when some level of internal consensus (or at least apathy) exists, as in the case of the MOVE bombing.
The military is responsible for killing the people in the list, but from what we know they do not control who the targets are. That is a process that goes on in DC and ultimately just a few (perhaps one) civilians control the database, who is in it, and their "disposition".
There were a few claims that as a court they could not rule on and dismissed (like whether he was a proper target on the battlefield), but a few big questions remain. Is there due process around the kill/capture database, and does it violate free speech and press if someone can land in it for interviewing enemy soldiers?
These questions (which might not even have difficult answers) remain open because the government wouldn't turn over evidence.
Even with the parts about "targeting decisions in a warzone" and the like settled, the open issues here are pretty important.
The military takes orders from the civilian government. But it’s a military operation at the end of the day, involving targeting decisions in a theater of war. Just because civilian officials dictate that targeting doesn’t change its military nature.
The requested discovery sought information about how targeting decisions were made for military strikes overseas. I see the argument for why, when a US citizen is involved, there might be a due process issue. But there is undeniably a huge state military interest in secrecy.
As practiced in the developed world, the rule of law does not encompass courts second-guessing military decisions overseas. Courts are primarily domestic and civilian by their nature. The Supreme Court has found that certain due process issues are implicated where US citizens are involved even with respect to conduct overseas. But there is a tension there with the legitimate prerogatives of the executive with respect to military action.
I’m curious whether any other developed country releases that sort of targeting information. To me knowledge, US courts are already more willing to intrude into military action abroad than courts in other countries.
You're equivocating now between the executive's power to conduct warfare, and an evidentiary rule that allows them to escape discovery. The nonjudiciable issues in this case were already dismissed.
No other developed country has a kill/kidnap database as large as ours. The US also has a bill of rights which does not depend on the rights respected in other countries across the world.
I'm not "equivocating" I'm pointing out the two things are necessarily related. The executive's primacy in making decisions about military strikes on a foreign battlefield may involve civilian decisions made in the U.S. But evidentiary privileges exist to protect those civilian decisions, because disclosure could undermine the military effort. The plaintiff is asking the government to disclose how it selects the people it chooses to attack on the battlefield. There is a clear military interest in not disclosing that. It may be the case that the military interest doesn't outweigh the interest in allowing civilian litigation to proceed. But it's an entirely legitimate think for the government to try and protect that decision making process from public scrutiny.
The Constitution describes a separation of powers. The executive has primacy when it comes to waging war. Courts have primacy in protecting the rights of individuals domestically. The Supreme Court has held that U.S. citizens outside the territorial jurisdiction of the U.S. have certain constitutional protections, which can be adjudicated by U.S. courts. That puts those spheres of power into conflict. On one hand, courts generally don't get to second-guess the military's targeting decisions. On the other hand, if a U.S. citizen alleges that the military is targeting strikes in a battlefield in an effort to kill him, that's exactly what the court has to do.
Other developed countries also distinguish executive from judicial power, and domestic from foreign theaters. How they address this tension is illuminating, I think.
The privilege is based on it being in the public interest for information to be withheld -- that its disclosure would threaten the nation's security, not that it would threaten the executive branch's authority or ability to do its job. It being none of the courts' business, and the exposure threatening national security, are two different arguments.
Other forms of executive privilege that protect autonomy are easier to invoke, and easier to challenge. State secrets privilege cannot be used lightly. It's used all the time now, and there is reason to be suspicious that it is used fraudulently.
The courts really need to figure out a way to in principal allow US citizens bring a case in situations like this. You have to prove now, in essence, that your name is on an invisible piece of paper. I agree that the nomination procedure is extremely sensitive, but I think there is some room on the yes/no presence of someone on the kill list, given other supporting evidence. The danger is that we reveal to someone that we're trying to kill them -- but again, we're talking about a citizen, and if they have supporting evidence and are in court then they already suspect that.
It's not actually a declared war, so no, not a warzone. In any case, the argument isn't reliant on that, it's sufficient that the name is on a secret kill list, no matter the reason for the argument to follow logically.
I think the issue is that the government is arguing that you don’t have standing if you can’t prove you’re on the list and state secrets prevents you from knowing if you’re on the list. It would be interesting to see when and where you think judicial review should arise in such a case?
> this is orthogonal to whether or not killing you is legally allowed, which is what the headline is suggesting.
The US has been killing US citizens this way for over a decade. It's pretty darn clear that the DOJ considers this legally allowable. Now the DOJ is arguing that once the goverment decides it is allowed to kill you, you can be prevented from challenging that decision in court if state secrets are involved.
> The US has been killing US citizens this way for over a decade
I'm pretty sure that targeted killings of US citizens believed to be engaged in war against the US by the federal government started not later than the 1860s (if you ignore those conducted under the auspices of the USA prior to the Constitution in a war in which whether a “US citizen” was even a legitimate concept was fundamentally in dispute.)
It also seems like a fishing expedition. The plaintiff doesn't have any evidence they were targeted at all. It's speculation because bombs landed near him in a war zone. It's not impossible but I understand the gov not wanting to hand over such sensitive information without a very strong justification.
The incidents described occurred in Idlib, Syria between June 2016 to August 2016. This was contemporaneous with the US effort to support the Syrian Kurds around Raqqa. But Idlib is quite far away.
Secondly, Airwars.org does not show US strikes in that area and the US insists coalition forces in general did not have any air strikes at Idlib during the time in question.
Finally, I do not find the title to be a fair summary of their argument for dismissal:
>Plaintiff lacks standing to pursue this suit. Plaintiff alleges that he was in the vicinity of five near-misses in Syria—a nation with an ongoing civil war. But he alleges no facts specifically linking the United States to those attacks. The most he offers is an unsupported assertion that one attack involved a type of missile used by the United States, among other countries. And he likewise fails to plausibly allege that any of these attacks, even if attributable to the United States, actually targeted him.
My understanding is that Idlib is mostly where the Russian and Syrian Air Forces were bombing the Turkish-backed jihadis. I wonder if the Turkish Air Force (largely equipped with US ordnance on US-made F-16s) was flying sorties in the region as well?
> The government sought to dismiss the case, invoking the state secrets privilege because Kareem sought discovery on whether he had been targeted, the process the government used to target him, and whether the United States had attempted to kill him.
Seems like a circular argument. Is that to say, he discovered the 'state secret' that he was on a hit list (for no specified reason), and any action taken to kill him is retrospectively justified?
Without fail, one way or another, the shit US dishes to non-US citizens will eventually find its way back to US citizens.
If US citizens shrug when their government does bad things to other people, they better be prepared to also shrug when their government decides to do the same to them. Murder-without-trial and all.
I know this is an unpopular opinion and I'm willing to sacrifice karma for saying this, but I see it the same way to with pro-choice people too. If they're willing to kill off their unborn because they're unwanted, how far do you really think they'll go for you? But it goes beyond that. It's not like pro-lifers are complete angels either. All humanity in general just kind of sucks, tbh. And I know that includes me.
> If they're willing to kill off their unborn because they're unwanted
Who’s they?
Has been happening since the beginning of time - and here we are. Happens in the most populous nations on earth, and in the richest countries. It happens naturally every day.
Honestly, “these are not the droids you are looking for”
> In its appellate brief, the government argued that Kareem lacked standing because he makes an unsupported assertion about being targeted in a war zone.
This is odd to me. I guess in my mind it goes without saying that the government should be required to name all individuals it's trying to kill, presumably to allow them to surrender themselves for trial. I get in combat this may not be practical, but it sounds like this individual identifies as a journalist (and the fact that he's appealing to the court system).
Perhaps stating the obvious again, I think the idea that the individual should have to prove to the government that he's on a kill list, when the government has access to the kill list, is a bothersome mentality.
If they can kill a class of people without review, then it doesn't actually matter if state secrets are involved. The government can claim that there are state secrets whenever they feel like it if there isn't review.
So really, this says that the US can kill its own citizens without review full stop.
Obama started putting US citizens on the kill list in 2010 and once they started killing them barely anyone complained so it doesn't surprise me they just assume they can keep doing it.
The Nobel Peace Prize does have it's share of madmen, dictators and terrorists on the list of nominees and holders. Obama is by far not the worst on that list.
Doing something for peace is not dependent on being a universally good person. You can still save more lifes than you have butchered.
> To be fair, that was before he ordered the execution of an American citizen without trial.
He'd became president January 20 and was awarded the prize on October 9 - he hadn't really had time to do anything meaningful for international relations.
The only way to interpret the prize was as a rebuke on former president George Bush for gleefully upping the ante from a localised tragedy in America into annihilating two countries, countless deaths and destabilising half a continent. It was a passive aggressive "well we can't stop you America, but we saw what you did".
There was a lot more to those invasions history-wise, but the basic message was clear.
Not sure why you’re getting downvoted, except that perhaps there’s a lot of younger folks here who don’t remember just how utterly despised GWB was. He was Trump before Trump — both “literally Hitler” and the dumbest man on the planet at the same time. Obama’s Nobel prize was most certainly a “congratulations on not being Bush” prize. I honestly wouldn’t be surprised if Biden picks up one this year.
> Obama’s Nobel prize was most certainly a “congratulations on not being Bush” prize.
Except his legacy is arguably worse. Extrajudicial assassinations, the return of open-air slave markets, the deliberate overthrow of middle east governments that created the power vaccuum filled by ISIL, the inadvertant arming of ISIL through the deliberate arming of Jihadists in Syria (which is an ongoing civil war today)...
Edit: Just to add. Bush (really Dick Cheyney) expanded the power of the Executive with the approval of Congress. Cheyney is a monster who saw 9/11 as a chance to consolidate executive power to the detriment of his rivals and enemies.
Obama extended the power of the Executive largely through legal scheming of the DOJ, the courts abdicating their responsibility, labelling everything under the sun as "state secrets", and ruthlessly destroying the lives of whistleblowers. In fact, when using the secret courts set up by the Bush administration, Obama's still violated and exceeded its authority 5% of the time.
There's clearly one of these that looks more dictatorial than the other and it's not the answer most people want.
Obama's pattern does not "clearly" look more dictatorial. Hitler was given absolute power via legislative processes. The prototypical dictator for life, Caesar, was granted that title by the Roman Senate.
I could say well Bush lost the popular vote, so clearly anything he did looks more intrinsically dictatorial. Or because he raised private armies. It would be misleading. It doesn't matter how power is consolidated.
> the deliberate overthrow of middle east governments that created the power vaccuum filled by ISIL
I assume you mean in countries outside of Iraq? "Deliberate overthrow", citation please?
I remember a friend in 2003 saying Bush's Iraq misadventure is going to fuck up a lot of things in the middle east... I can't believe how right he turned out to be.
As far as I understand it the Arab Spring came about due to social unrest due to food shortage brought about by climate change (a 2010 forest fire in Russia burned a lot of grain, Russia stopped exporting them, food prices shot up: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=russia+forest+fires+grain+prices+a... ).
Incredibly that has also lead to a lot of war-fleeing refugees, and the rise of right-wing populism in Europe. Also Brexit and Trump?
Or as the BBC referred to it, "the worst mistake of Obama's presidency".
It's already largely a settled question that US State Dept policy and actions during that administration massively contributed to the formation of ISIL.
The difference between the Bush and Obama administrations in the middle east is stark. Despite destabilizing Iraq, the US military stayed on the ground and at least attempted to create a stable transition of power (and over time largely succeeded, at least by comparison).
Obama's destabilizing actions were followed up by abandonment and power vaccuums filled up by extremists that we armed. This is no-brainer kind of shit that we stumbled our way into, Homer Simpson style.
His foreign policy disasters weren't limited to the Middle East either, considering our lack of intervention and abandonment of our southeast asian strategic allies during the Scarborough Shoal incident.
Ah well, I can clearly see you've got the "I hate Obama, he's responsible for everything bad" goggles on. But I guess I say that through my "He was trying his best" goggles.
> Or as the BBC referred to it, "the worst mistake of Obama's presidency".
Is that in this article where Obama admitted that himself? https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-36013703 . Unlike Bush/Cheney who never admitted anything? (But we're not judging these men for their honesty at the moment, are we).
> Despite destabilizing Iraq, the US military stayed on the ground and at least attempted to create a stable transition of power (and over time largely succeeded, at least by comparison).
Huh.. and you're asserting that Obama didn't continue that policy? Sorry but Iraq didn't turn to a peaceful and solved problem in 2008.
Seems like you're just throwing sweeping generalizations and one word answers to complex problems ("Libya"), and sadly I don't know the whole issue in depth either.
I'm not really all that partisan. I'm mostly center left. For the most part I'm convinced that all politicians are self-serving idiots.
All of these criticisms I'm levelling have come at this administration from both sides.
If there's any blinders, its the fawning treatment he received form the press for largely doing nothing or worse than nothing. Notice how much more criticism has come at him from the left since leaving office.
He's an adored president with an abysmal legacy. I voted for him, by the way. I'm vocal with the criticism because I feel I share in the responsibility for what happened.
> Huh.. and you're asserting that Obama didn't continue that policy? Sorry but Iraq didn't turn to a peaceful and solved problem in 2008.
I'm not saying that it was, but we and our allies already had troops committed in the region. If we'd left, we would have been leaving our allies holding the bag.
I was comparing Iraq to Libya, where after we removed Gaddafi, we didn't do shit. That situation created all of those other things that I mentioned.
Heh, to defend Obama on Gaddafi, it's not like he's got crystal balls. And if he had done an Iraq War II deployment into Libya, the American public (presumably you too) would've screamed for his head, after suffering 8 years of the clusterfuck that is Iraq (and 10 of Afghanistan), which was started and kept in "fucked" state for 5 (7 for AF) years by people like Rumsfeld and Cheney.
Even at the time most people thought his removal was a bit odd and unneccessary.
Later on with the leaked cables, we found out that it was largely because he was trying to create a gold-backed pan-African currency that would have harmed French central banking interests in the region.
One of the first things the "revolutionaries" that ousted Gaddafi did was create a central bank. While they were still fighting for territory.
Not sure why this is downvoted either. GWB was viewed the same way as Trump by social media (I agree the mass media was more muted than under Trump). He was regarded as “dumb” much more than Trump with every minor gaff amplified as evidence “our president is mentally handicapped”.
Rinse and repeat with Trump, who arguably has a better track record at least in terms of starting wars.
If you take a step back from how US politics works in the media (mass media and social media) you realize it’s just a complete clown show. Any one who gets their “news” from those sources is just along for the ride.
Being good at acquiring power seems at this point fully a function of intelligent PR which divorced from the myriad skills required to govern effectively. Neither Bush nor Trump did much good with the great power offered them.
Obama did not modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. He promised to modernize it in exchange for Republican support in the Senate to pass the New START arms control deal. But he let the nuclear enterprise fall into such disrepair that a major scandal emerged in 2013, leading to a major DOD effort to repair the enterprise after a review in 2014: https://www.gao.gov/products/GAO-19-29. He kicked the can down the road on modernization of the arsenal itself until the very tail end of his administration, so that it was up to Trump in 2017 to follow through on the promise Obama made back in 2010. All of this occurred after Obama had won the Nobel Peace Prize.
There are generally accepted rules about what constitutes the differences between extrajudicial assassination by the state ("it's not illegal if the president does it"), judiciary-based civilian execution ("capital punishment"), wartime combat that results in death, and plain ol' cold blooded murder between parties not state-sanctioned in any way.
I personally don't distinguish much between these (I'm basically in agreement with Einstein's stated views on the matter) but to pretend that our global human society doesn't believe in these distinctions is somewhat silly.
The US president can mass murder hundreds of children (Obama did just this) and not be seen as a criminal, even by that group, provided it falls into the correct category listed above.
Calling Obama a mass murderer is not a fair take on the matter. Obama didn't murder hundreds of children in one go. It was a few here, a dozen there, and so on. So he is more aptly called a mass serial murderer than a plain mass murderer.
Obama was also a shameless mass surveillance-er. He grew the NSA/CIA snooping like crazy because he was uncomfortable with the very public wars Bush was running. So he (and many others who still have positive images or direct power in the US) massively expanded the scale of the intelligence community and significantly moved it to secret courts.
Of course it all started with the Patriot Act. But even looking at who keeps voting for that and keeping it alive and you can't just blame Bush either.
It's like there's no options for Americans politically which doesn't involve massive "black budgets" and secret courts doing who knows what. It's bipartisan and even plenty of the worst Iraq war supporters all have had career revivals in recent years because the media + social media decided that only one thing was bad, the current president. All bad deeds in the past were forgotten for the old set.
Endless "Secret Wars" seem terribly undemocratic and dangerous to me - for the obvious complete lack of public courts, true due process, or war crimes laws that normally are adhered to.
And I also see no proper reckoning in the relevant future either as long as these same "good guys" are back in power.
Check out the Wikipedia definition of "mass murder" [1] and then compare that list to [2]. Many of his approved drone strikes' civilian deaths exceed the "mass murders" on the wikipedia list of mass murders.
Quote from Obama [3]: "Turns out I’m really good at killing people. Didn’t know that was gonna be a strong suit of mine."
Yes. A certain group of people chat amongst themselves and decide what will give themselves and the award the most prestige. If you want the right kind of people to show up at your cool awards party, you have to give the right kind of person the award. That's not sarcasm, that is literally the process. There's no objective measures or anything.
After reading Obama's recent biography, it comes to be that Obama saw that as a push for him to be able to achieve results that merits the medal.
Then after a series of complicated political decision making, he started more. And there are always perfect legitimate reasons, as judging from Obama's perspective and described in the book, that make those things happen.
After a while reading the book, I started to see how futile it has been for US to truly behave as the nation aspires to. Without a equal counter weight, there seems no possibility for the nation's political machine to follow common sense, it's always enemy or ally, and dealing with enemy always involves military power.
Some will say it was just to spite George Bush, but I remember the atmosphere at the time and that wasn’t it. Back then, being the first black president was a big deal, and Obama’s campaign inspired a lot of hope for the future in many Americans and the world. Hopium levels were still high when he was awarded the prize and the doomsday clock I believe even went backward a bit, remember that when Obama was a senator he worked to secure loose nuclear weapons around the globe.
Unfortunately, things started taking a more sinister turn as the years went on, so it seemed the prize had been given too prematurely.
Obama was a good speaker but his actions were quite a bit different... maybe that's why. At least with Trump, you know what you're getting because he appears to be brutally honest.
I'll never get used to people reading more into what I said than what I said. No, they're both horrible, but one is slightly more horrible than the other.
Human rights including freedom of press should really be a non-partisan issue. I don't think any political party in the US has made this a strong part of their policy platform in recent times.
It's a structural failure. Whoever is currently in power only violates the human rights of the people they don't care about, and the party out of power at a given time may care about them but isn't contemporaneously in power to stop it.
The next time they play musical chairs the people being violated may change but the incentives don't.
You might imagine someone having the forethought to consider that someone else might be in power at some future point and put mechanisms in place to constrain their abuses. Modern politicians appear resistant to this logic.
The upholding and expansion of human rights becomes a serious part of any policy platform if voters make it a priority for whom they choose as their elected officials. In this space I would argue there is room for independents to steal votes from incumbents. As long as everyone sticks to red and blue teams, there's no way to fight entrenched conflicts of interest.
That's an interesting idea but "freedom of press" is a relatively new right by historical standards and is not widely accepted even now because it's counter to many governments' interests. The very concept is based in "Natural Law" (stemming from Aristotle, Roman tradition, etc) so not universal.
Therefore, the argument would be that it's not a "human right" but mostly a "Western right"
> That's an interesting idea but "freedom of press" is a relatively new right by historical standards
Literally the first amendment (1789):
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
I have no clue why this would be downvoted. The Supreme Court upheld the decision to jail someone for ten years for making an anti-war speech, based on the Espionage Act, which is the ancestor of the act that prevents Snowden from receiving a fair trial.
According to the article, Debs' sentence was upheld because it was found that the intent of his message was prevent the war.
By the way, the activist that was sentenced to ten years in jail for arguing against war also got a million votes for the presidency, so this is a case of supression of political candidates because of their speech and political activity.
If you disagree, instead of just downvoting factual statements you disagree with, you should comment to correct them or state why they are in bad form.
Presumably the lack of any contextualizing verbage. Like zero effort to connect the evidence presented with the assertion.
Notably the evidence presented has plain gaps. Consider the second link: "Goldstein's attorneys were unable to argue for protection under the First Amendment because the Supreme Court had ruled in 1915 that movies lacked such protection. (That ruling was overturned in 1952.)" That final parenthetical is critical because it suggests that a modern court would not rule the same way the court did in 1915 given similar facts.
To be clear, I don't have enough context to evaluate the merits of the statement in full just noting why it may have come across as glib and hence downvoted.
Human rights is a bi-partisan issue.
Bringing human rights, democracy and freedom to Iraq (insert any other non-white country) has always been a bi-partisan issue. Ask the Vietnamese or Filipinos or Native Americans or anywhere else liberated....
> Ask the Vietnamese or Filipinos or Native Americans or anywhere else liberated....
The Filipinos were actually quite happy the first (Spanish-American War) and third time (World War II). The second time (Filipino-American War), not so much.
I'll ask the Bosnians, or the Koreans what they think....
We do ourselves a disservice to pretend that every intervention has been a massive failure or worse. It abdicates the specific responsibility of those waging specific wars and invites us to ignore international tragedy.
Citing any WWII action is dubious at best. And South Korea was a dictatorship in the time afterwards so not exactly a paragon of freedom. If your argument hinges on the Kosovo air war as proof that the US war intervention isn't a default failure, then you've already lost the argument.
If your standard is perfection you’ll always be disappointed.
Suffice to say that both Taiwan and South Korea would not be leading democracies in Asia without US intervention. Yes, both were dictatorships initially.
Are you arguing it would be better if North Korea were running the whole peninsula? And China controlled Taiwan?
So currently the "logic" is that CIA can kill anyone (even a US citizen) using drones as long as it happens somewhere far away like in Yemen or Pakistan? Am I getting this right?
I wonder if POTUS has to at least sign all the kill orders.
EDIT FOLLOWS:
The problem is (independently) verifying that the targeted person was a combatant and in a war against USA. If anybody can be a combatant, CIA can kill anybody. See the following, regarding the Obama presidency:
> It is also because Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent.
The obvious questions are:
* Does belonging to Al-Qaeda or similar make you eligible for a drone strike? I don't really think of (potential) terrorists as combatants.
> So currently the "logic" is that CIA can kill anyone (even a US citizen) using drones as long as it happens somewhere far away like in Yemen or Pakistan?
No, the logic is that the US government may target enemies in war by all the means lawful against enemies inwar, even if those enemies are US citizens, anywhere in the world, including within the US.
And there's plenty of precedent for that.
There may be good reasons given the nature and mechanisms of modern warfare to establish some additional limits on that now, but we can't have the discussion effectively if we start with a false premise about the rationale and the false idea that prosecuting war without special limitations when some of the individual enemy combatants are citizens is novel.
> I wonder if POTUS has to at least sign all the kill orders.
In general, no, the President is not required to personally sign orders to kill enemies in war, regardless of their citizenship.
> No, the logic is that the US government may target enemies in war by all the means lawful against enemies inwar, even if those enemies are US citizens, anywhere in the world, including within the US.
> And there's plenty of precedent for that.
There is clearly precedent for criminally charging US citizens for such things, or in the case where they're either subject to the UCMJ or otherwise acting as a lawful uniformed combatant, maybe a court martial.
But what is the precedent for allowing unilateral lethal military targeting of known US citizens outside the US, or anyone within the US, outside of moments when the accused is actively engaging in physical violent warfare? I'm not aware of any before 9/11.
one would think that a formal declaration of war (at least minimally specifying who the US is at war with) would be needed otherwise anybody can be killed just under umbrella of "War on Terror" or "War on Drugs" or "War on Littering and Jaywalking"...
> one would think that a formal declaration of war would be needed
The legal existence of a war has established rules in US law, and a Congressional declaration is one way they happen (though not exclusive what you probably mean by a “formal declaration of war”, which suggests magic words).
> otherwise anybody can be killed just under umbrella of "War on Terror" or "War on Drugs" or "War on Littering and Jaywalking"...
The War on Terror has a legal declaration, which is expressly conditioned only on Presidential determinations, so requiring declarations doesn't actually meaningfully prevent that scenario when Congress is feeling lazy.
We never stopped declaring war; declarations of war don't require particular magic words; the Afghanistan and Iraq AUMFs, for instance, were each valid conditional (and, in the former case, broadly open-ended) declarations of war.
> When in the last 30 years did the US Congress declare an act of war?
The grandparent post is a single sentence and identifies two instances that answer that question (they aren't a full answer because there are more examples in that timeframe.)
> Isn't there a process of removing citizenship from someone who has committed treason?
No.
> Why not at least go that route, vs blatantly killing citizens?
Because it doesn't exist, and if it did exist it would almost certainly be a contested judicial process which would bring in the same problem as criminal prosecution of enemy combatants that happen to be US citizens but are physically located in territory not practically subject to US or cooperative jurisdiction.
I’m not super familiar with this area of law, but according to our government you may lose your citizenship if you commit an act of treason. See: https://www.usa.gov/renounce-lose-citizenship
Treason is defined in the Constitution (and in statute law) in a way that precludes conviction for treason except upon confession in open court, or on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act. Treason can't be proved merely by the executive branch deciding you've committed it. The loss of citizenship would only happen upon conviction by a court martial or by a court of competent jurisdiction, according to the statute.
Additionally, technically there are two other requirements before committing treason causes a loss of citizenship, just as with all the other potentially expatriating acts: the treason must be committed voluntarily and with the intent to relinquish citizenship, as judged on a preponderance of the evidence standard (i.e. more likely than not). This is a court proceeding and the claimed loss of citizenship can be challenged, though of course those requirements are more likely to be satisfied in treason cases than in some of the other potentially expatriating acts.
None of this is consistent with a unilateral military strike.
You'd need to be convicted of an act of reason with due process, which would require a court, which would imperil state secrets.
It's much easier to kill you and then say that you and your estate have no standing to challenge the official story to see if you were on a list because only people who know they are in the list can see if they're on the list.
> but according to our government you may lose your citizenship if you commit an act of treason
If you read the applicable provision of law—8 USC Sec. 1481(a)(7)—you have to not only commit an act of treason, but do so “with the intention of relinquishing United States nationality” in order to lose citizenship.
As long as you still want to be an American, albeit a traitorous one, you don't lose your citizenship just for being a traitor.
(And, it also requires conviction of the treason by a court martial or competent court, so if the government wants to give effect to this, it literally not only have to get a hold of the person, try and convict them of treason, and then prove additionally the intent to relinquish citizenship. At which point the last bit is quite likely to be moot.)
The issue raised from the article and this overall discussion isn't necessarily concerned with one individual case, it is about what processes should be followed to make such a determination regardless of who that individual is.
Even if an individual appears to be obviously guilty, shouldn't some form of process be followed in all cases to prevent wrongful convictions and/or executions?
And not just "some process", because the DoJ argues that they do follow a process. It's just not a process that involves the judiciary, or trials, or what have you.
Or, if it's so incredibly obvious, why can't he be tried and sentenced by the normal process of law? "Oh he was on foreign soil so we couldn't get to him" doesn't hold a lot of water when children in the region are known for having clear skies as a PTSD trigger from the number of drone strikes we've done in the area.
> "Oh he was on foreign soil so we couldn't get to him" doesn't hold a lot of water when children in the region are known for having clear skies as a PTSD trigger from the number of drone strikes we've done in the area.
That only would seem to follow if the argument was that we couldn't get him by a drone strike, which obviously is not the argument, as drone strikes don't really do a good job of hauling people before a court.
No, the whole reasons for a drone war is that drones work very well in conditions where you can't safely land people on the ground to do things, or even operate manned aircraft without unreasonable risk of losses.
The requirement in the statute isn't just that he committed treason, actually. The loss of citizenship from committing treason doesn't actually occur until the conviction for treason. And conviction for treason is both statutorily and constitutionally impossible unless you have two witnesses testify to the commission of the same overt act, or unlesss you have a confession in open court. This was a very intentional protection by the founding fathers based on prior abuses of treason laws in England.
So, even if he absolutely did commit treason, he is a citizen unless the prosecution both occurs and achieves all of that. Citizens deserve due process, period, since government conclusions and criminal charges can both be wrong, and loss of life is a very severe thing to make a mistake about.
If you can't legally blow up citizens you cannot assert after the fact that in theory they could have lost their citizenship if you had actually bothered to collect evidence, go to court and present it.
If you CAN legally murder your citizens then a lot of things cease to matter because you are no longer governed by the rule of law in the first place.
Legally, since the US didn't declare war, he has an argument for this not to be treason. It's part of the issue when you start doing things outside of the law, it becomes difficult or impossible for administrations in the future to do things legally, and it tends to get worse from there.
Reading his Wikipedia, it seems he was guilty of hate speech against the country, and his connection with committers of violence was through writing and "inspiring".
If that's treason, then I suppose a future leftist Castro-esque president should be free to drone-murder hate speech mongers like Rush Limbaugh and many in the Fox News commentary department.
America likes to talk about respecting democracy and the rule of law, but the way it acts is nowhere near that.
"Treason against the United States, shall consist only in levying war against them, or in adhering to their enemies, giving them aid and comfort. No person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court."
So a) terrorists aren't levying war, because they're not part of a state, and b) good luck ever fulfilling the 2 witness or confession requirement.
As far as I am aware, America hasn't had a legally declared war since WWII, and hasn't convicted anybody of treason since then either. Even the Rosenbergs, executed for espionage, weren't convicted of treason. It sure seems to me like in practice, it's not possible for an American to commit treason if there isn't a proper war on. Am I missing something?
> As far as I am aware, America hasn't had a legally declared war since WWII,
This is true under the “magic words” understanding of the power to declare war; but that more limited authorizations than those that simply and expressly “declare war” are nevertheless exercises of the Constitutional power to declare war and create a legal state of war is, however, well-established law, see, Bas v. Tingy, 4 U.S. 37 (1800).
> Then why has nobody been charged with treason since WWII?
Why would they be?
> Is it just not cool to do anymore or something?
Mostly. It's not like you can give someone a super-death penalty, and when progressive criminalization has made it so that everything that qualifies as treason is also covered by other crimes that carry similar sentences but don't require two witnesses to the same over act or a confession on top of the standard criminal “beyond a reasonable doubt” burden of proof, why would a prosecutor ever bother with treason charges except as a political stunt?
Have the accuser face the accused in court and prove to a jury of 12 people beyond a reasonable doubt that a crime has occured. After which, if the jury finds the accused guilty, a judge will determine what the sentence should be based upon guidlines provided by the law (which is written by congress).
We used to have a system like this. I thought it worked pretty well. Sure it wasn't perfect, but I liked the transparency.
For US citizens who are accused of doing that? It absolutely has been, historically. This is especially important in those cases where the accusation is not well-founded, or where the jury would find that the circumstance warrants a lesser penalty than death.
Not in combat. We can debate what “in combat” means, but that is a different issue. If an American picks up a gun, in a war zone, and starts attacking American forces, they can be killed. Full Stop
Oh yes, I agree in the case of your hypothetical scenario - and lethal force would be allowed as well to law enforcement in any domestic gunfight where they start shooting the cops. But the citizen in the article we're all discussing is a journalist, not a gunman. The other famous example of a US citizen targeted for a lethal military strike, Anwar Al-Awlaki, was also in a role that did not personally involve direct engagement in physical violence.
Nothing I'm saying is defending the actions of the citizens in question, only criticizing the propriety of the executive branch unilaterally killing a US citizen without due process outside of situations like your hypothetical where dangerous direct physical violence against American forces is involved. If the government had instead forcibly arrested them and kept them in custody while putting them through the criminal justice system, I'd have no criticism, assuming they had adequate evidence. I'd also want them to release the accused in the unlikely event of an acquittal (since government accusations can be wrong), but the regular courts are very good at convicting people who actually do stuff like this and federal prosecutors are very good at their role.
Right, and we quickly get into the grey area. If the US military has strong evidence that someone overseas is planning terrorist attacks on the US, or US forces, can they attack him first, or is a trial required? This quickly gets very nuanced, but it certainly isn’t black and white.
It certainly can get into grey areas. None of those grey areas pertain to roles like the US citizen journalist which this article is about.
One helpful analogy is to imagine what would happen if we entirely removed the foreign flavor, since after all we're discussing the attempted killing of a US citizen by the US government. Suppose instead that the US military had strong evidence that entirely domestic groups, unlinked to any global extremist Islamist movements, were doing communications or logistics in support of a planned attack a domestic US military base. Maybe this hypothetical attack is due to dissatisfaction with, or skepticism of the legitimacy of, the government in power.
My guess as to what would happen in that scenario: law enforcement would be directed to arrest the people involved and hold them without bail for criminal trial, and would be authorized to use whatever force is necessary if there is physical resistance, including lethal force if necessary. The goal would just be to arrest, however, with killing simply accepted as a possible accidental result.
Something similar would likely have been appropriate here, albeit with the involvement of the military due to the location outside the US and the high likelihood of violent resistance.
If engaged in a situation where your citizens are acting lawfully if someone is shooting at you or about to shoot at you while you are engaged in your lawful action you can shoot them. This is only complicated if you want a reason to go after people for vague reasons.
As horrible as this sounds, there will always be fewer complaints about the government killing American citizens when those citizens come from certain demographic groups. Until those groups complain, you will probably hear very few objections to the practice.
Hey, can that be made circular? The state killing someone randomly without any cause or reason will necessarily have to be a state secret so ... state secret is always involved!
The strikes in question were in June to August 2016. In Idlib. The US government insists there were no US airstrikes in Idlib during that time period, which was the key to their argument for the case's dismissal. The case was dismissed but the DOJ also put forward some awful argument which the judge rightly called out for being ridiculous.
The world have witnessed the decline of the American hegemony over the last few years, and especially during 2020. The 'gap' between American life and say, Chinese life, for the average citizen has narrowed significantly. Assuming the current trend continues, I'm not sure that at some time in the future it would be a toss-up whether the one or the other provides a better or worse life for the average Joe or Bao.
You're technically right, but the comparison isn't completely far fetched considering:
* Chinese surnames are monosyllabic, and given names are disyllabic. It'd be more awkward to say "average Joe or Xiùyīng".
* Both Chinese given names and surnames are usually "real words". Just like how "Joe" is a descendant of the Hebrew "Yohanan" meaning "Graced by God", or even the many English given names that are real words: Carol, Eve, Jade, etc. It's just more common in Chinese names.
* Given names are rarely used by themselves (much less than in Latin languages).
Same thing it's always been: a tool you can deploy when you want your cause to appear righteous. Both parties believe they are supporting the constitution full throatedly and both ignore it when it is inconvenient. (Or they argue, "what it really says it's...")
None of the presidential administrations I've been alive for have particularly cared about upholding it.
Not only Alwaki himself was killed, but his wife, son, daughter, brother in law, nephew, and few other certainly non-involved relatives over a period of many years.
Strikes, and raids made when US was hunting down his family member killed few dozens more people falsely believed to be his relatives.
Obama was very open about killing US citizens so of course it has https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki is probably the most famous since two weeks after he had him droned we droned his son (also a US citizen).
“DOJ” in this case is the defense attorney. What a shit job. Regardless, the DOJ is not giving the USG the ability to kill US Persons with no judicial review. Judge Millett’s exasperation should be an example of how preposterous this is.
The way this post is titled is misleading and is intended to flame.