Conor Friedersdorf asks about the president’s kill list, drones, and Abdulrahman al-Awlaki, 16 years old and an American citizen, who was the son of the late Anwar al-Awlaki, who was also born in America, who was also an American citizen, and who was also killed by drone. There is a justification on video by Robert Gibbs that is tough as tough. What do we think about this?
Maybe in a war with an enemy who is dispersed and covert all of this is justified. I think Friedersdorf asks the right questions when disputing the justification. The president is killing American citizens by fiat. He is killing all sorts of people by drone, but we will focus here as even traitors deserve due process, don’t they? In this case, of the son, surely the sons of traitors are not automatic targets of civilized people. If the story Friedersdorf references, by Tom Junod, is true, then this appalling and, yes, impeachable.
October 25th, 2012 | 9:12 am
1. Obama and his allies pretty much made capturing these guys utterly impractical, which means they have to video-game-kill them.
2. Under President Romney there will actually be major media and public pushback against this stuff, you can be sure of that.
3. Congress needs to man up and seriously talk about what the WOT actually means. Unfortunately, Congress is not a serious place.
4. Regarding WOT tactics, I’ll wager drone warfare is far more popular among the public than the TSA is, and since the TSA clearly is here to stay forever, we can be sure drone warfare is as well.
October 25th, 2012 | 9:17 am
Drones definitely make a mockery of the recent Gitmo cases involving John Walker Lind, et al, because they stress what Friedsdorf does about traitors needing due process.
October 25th, 2012 | 9:49 am
I’m about as far from an Obama fan as possible…but impeachment for this? The deaths of non-combatants is unfortunate, but a part of war. Precision weapons in use now kill far fewer “innocents” than in any prior war. Demanding perfection in such things is unreasonable – even local police hit and kill non-targets during legitimate law enforcement use of force.
October 25th, 2012 | 12:24 pm
I’ll say it again, if the Tom Junod story is true, then this is a serious offense, because it was no accidental killing of non-combatants. Accidents of war are one thing. What did this kid do to be targeted by the president, other than be his father’s son? He was with Al Qaeda, but is that all the reason the president needs to target someone and have him killed? This reminds me of students who say, “Just shoot them all and let God sort them out.” Then let’s declare a war on Al Qaeda or even go back to talking about a War on Terror. If this is a police action, then targeting the sons of terrorists seems out of line.
I don’t know that this story is true, but no one in the administration is refuting or denying it. A little why and wherefore might make this easier to swallow. Maybe the boy was not an innocent? If he was and was targeted, never mind the citizenship aspect for the moment, explain the morality? Parse it for me, please.
October 25th, 2012 | 12:47 pm
Kate, interesting differentiation albeit a bit of hair splitting. If the One is impeached it’ll be over Benghazi and selling arms to our enemies, or running guns to our enemies, or trying to destroy the country economically? Hey, who knows.
You should blog on whether we are at war with Islam, Islamic Terrorists, or what? BTW, Ohio’s internals are really, really interesting.
October 25th, 2012 | 1:50 pm
Brian, you’re chillingly right. And while I salute Conor F-dorf for making a go of being consistent even when the rest of the media is silent, in truth, his derangedly hyperbolic condemnations of various Bush admin actions in the GWOT, and his unseemly love of the rhetorical power of the word “Torture,” essentially put him in the camp of 1), one of those anti-Gitmo, anti-combatant-status, anti-coercive-interrogation Obama allies who took all other options off the table.
BTW, this is perhaps reason #698 not to vote for Obama. Not simply on this issue, but on a host of others, given his lose-with the-Constitution-ways, Congress will likely have to at least consider arguments for impeachment. The U.S. does not need that.
October 25th, 2012 | 2:25 pm
Due process is just bureaucracy once you are captured/arrested by american forces.
War is sort of “arbitrary and capricious”. In terms of who is actually being targeted…that is classified.
In terms of Tom Junod’s back story being true… that dovetails/isn’t far off from Ron Paul’s theory for why they hate us.
In a sort of bureaucratic perversity… there is a fear that folks who were wrongly accused in Gitmo, became hardened terrorists.
There is always the old Chineese proverb: He who seeks vengence should dig two graves: one for his enemy, and one for himself.
Robert Gibbs answer is not that Hard, but it does show a preference for the Old Testament way. He who seeks land should dig two graves: one for his enemy, and one for the son of his enemies. (leave fewer witnesses with grounds for recrimination.)
In the end it is only the “magic” of due process, which cuts off chains of causation, gets a blank slate and focuses on the individual.
“What did this kid do to be targeted by the president, other than be his father’s son?”
Maybe nothing. but add another factor: with Al Qaeda.
Individualism is just a facet of bureaucratic libertarianism. In dealing with terrorism the president doesn’t have to package your terrorism interest in that fashion. Maybe the sins of the father are the inheritance of the son.
October 25th, 2012 | 3:15 pm
I also agree with Brian’s points and yes, this is just one more reason not to vote for Obama. I hope Mr. Friedersdorf persuades some folks not already persuaded.
Polling in Ohio seems to me to confirm what I saw along the Lincoln Highway a couple of weeks ago. No?
October 25th, 2012 | 7:19 pm
Brian is right about everything.
Friedersdorf deserves credit for intellectual consistency.
I’m ambivalent about critiques of the drone “targeted” assassination program. If this program is an impeachable offense, then what are we to make of the mass bombing conducted by FDR, Truman, LBJ, and Nixon (and maybe Eisenhower – I don’t know about the extent of the bombing of North Korea conducted in his few months of office prior to the armistice)? If targeting specific enemies is illegal, how was the mass bombing of urban areas legal?
I found this article interesting. http://hlr.rubystudio.com/media/pdf/bradley_goldsmith.pdf
October 25th, 2012 | 8:20 pm
Little Lord Haw Haw was a British subject.
He is killing all sorts of people by drone, but we will focus here as the Even traitors deserve due process, don’t they?
Under what circumstances, Kate, are you willing to give the enemy ‘due process’? During the ‘Tet Offensive?
October 25th, 2012 | 8:21 pm
Friedersdorf deserves credit for intellectual consistency.
Even if he is being frivolous?
October 25th, 2012 | 9:46 pm
I just got an invitation to travel to New Philedelphia, Ohio Saturday to meet Mr. Ryan and sit in the VIP section. Alas, can’t make it. If the super secret info I’ve heard is true, it’ll be either a landslide or close to it? But, who knows?
October 25th, 2012 | 10:15 pm
Super secret?
AD, Lord Haw-Haw was overtly traitorous, as in he did traitorous things. He was tried in court, then he was hanged and he deserved to hang. Note that no one is particularly complaining about the death of the father, Anwar al-Awlaki, who was overtly traitorous and a very nasty character. Peter Lawler calls that war by murder, but maybe that new kind of war is inevitable in this quasi-war we have with Al Qaeda. And maybe the story of the boy that I link to above is a fantasy or embroidered reality. Perhaps the kid was actually a nasty a punk, but was he any more so than any murderous young thug in any major American city? Was that kid really a threat? Sure, we are relieved when someone who does awful things is killed, but where is the evidence of that beyond that the kid had a nasty father?
October 26th, 2012 | 6:00 am
Just to be clear, I think even traitors deserve due process, and all who turn themselves in will/should get it. But due process is bureaucratic. Due process just isn’t something you get as a fugitive/outlaw. Due process is something you get when you turn yourself over to the custody of the law.
You want due process, turn yourself in/negotiate with the state departement or contact the ACLU. Basically the ACLU is the best brand for due process in the entire world.
Basically Al Queda is a bad brand. So I am tempted to say that association with Al Queda is all the president needs to target someone and have them killed. Exactly what sort of additional evidence he needs is classified, but I would suspect it is only a question of cost/bennefit analysis, and the capacity to pull off the hit while minimizing collateral dammage.
Best advice for seeking due process, contact the ACLU, or the state departement. Due process in this context is more of a plea bargain or a negotiation in the context of surrender. After all only in a legal environment will anyone really parse your property interests/association/responsibility in terrorist activities.
The president I think is more than happy to negotiate with terrorist(which is just a brand anyways). This negotiation involves due process and parsing your property interest/liability in terrorist activitities. Hint: “I didn’t build that!”
Also echoing in a fashion Robert Gibbs. I think the world is on constructive notice that Al Queda is a bad brand were US foreign policy is concerned.
Best advice for avoiding drones don’t associate with Al Queda or other known terrorist brands.
Best advice for getting due process…stick with the best brand: the ACLU.
The president is I suppose killing american citizens by fiat. But is he killing “authentic” american citizens by fiat?
Consider that all human beings can be a range of identifiers: Christian, American, doctor, et al.
Anwar al-Awlaki meets the threshold for being an american citizen in the land of bureaucratic indicia…but that is about it. No one even hires a plumber on such a filmsy brand.
Essentially it boils down to the fact that he wasn’t behaving as an american, or as a person concerned with facing false allegations and clearing his name. (What due process is all about)
So essentially you could say that given classification/op-sec requirements the president of the united states appears to be delegating to bureaucrats at the DOD the capacity to determine who is and is not an “authentic” threat. In some sense it is a top secret certification program for terrorists. My guess is that it looks something like a credit report(in order to scale it to do CBA), and like the three credit agencies, you might have a combined terror rating from multiple agencies (including perhaps the state department…who would know if there was a misunderstanding as to the association with Al Queda…and who you would probably go to if you had due process concerns/wanted to clear your name). (maybe the kid in anguish ranted too much to the state department…and this artificially inflated his hypothetical terrorism score(from one of the three agencies hypothetically responsible for hypothetically tracking it?)
Since all the mechanics are classified, and potentially beyond FOIA.(a relatively reasonable layer of due process itself)..I don’t actually know that there is a numeric terrorism score. But there could be.
Interestingly enough I have ideas on how to lower your terrorism score…and ideas on how to increase your terrorism score. It isn’t quite a parody on academics…but if you are interested in due process there are a lot of schools that teach it. UVA founded by Thomas Jefferson, seems good. Despite what folks say about Obama and Romney, Harvard is supposedly ok, but one would think that Tulane or Georgetown would do in a pinch. On the other hand if you are interested in terrorism, there just aren’t that many big name schools that can teach you to build I.E.D’s (Harvard? Unabomber?) while inculcating the right kind of true grit hate. If your school wasn’t founded by Osama Bin Ladin, you are nobody! If you killed folks for being good engineers…(which isn’t far off what the Isreali’s do to the Iranians). You might target MIT or Stanford. Truth be told I bet graduating with certain engineering degrees increases one aspect of your terrorism score.
So basically technical knowledge+actual planning+a desire for revenge, collected from various government agencies…that is going to boost your terrorism score.
Now lets be serious… you want to bring in some long lost american citizenship as a key factor?
What presumptions of technical knowledge and actual planning come packaged with the Al Queda brand? Is this a case of “grade inflation” and some sort of orientation level fluff about the founder?
Maybe the kid was innocent:
But here is an academic excercise: what the grade card looks like.
American Citizenship: F
Technical knowledge: A (top of his class at Al Queda)
Actual Planning: A (It is classified)
Respect of Classmates: A. Father was a famous terrorist, Abdul’s father (second most popular) simply raised goats and dreamed of 72 virgins.
Motive: A Top tier ideological Education (Al Queda), plus his father was killed.
Just poking fun. Albeit it gives me an idea for a book about fictional bureacrats. Deadly Indicia: A’s that kill!
October 26th, 2012 | 11:17 am
What does all this have to do with the fact that such killings are done with drones? Drones don’t make them either more just or unjust. To focus on them is to adopt the creed of the pagan warrior who makes a fetish of his castes favorite military technique, is indifferent to the rightness or wrongness of it’s use but is horrified when a means of making war that he considers unaesthetic is introduced.
Condemn or condone Obama as you will. But the fact that it is done by drones is a red herring. Morally it is as meaningless as if it was done with bullets.
October 26th, 2012 | 2:47 pm
Mr. taylor, tell it to the president. The drones are not my focus, but I’ll bet they do make the killings easier. I don’t mean simply physically easier, because no man has to walk into Yemen to perform the assassination, for example. Distance and the use of the machine might make the “kill list” easier to tolerate, which makes it seem somehow more inhumane. As noted, killing becomes like a video game.
John Lewis, do we lose citizenship easily?
October 28th, 2012 | 3:32 pm
[...] EVENING GOD & CAESAR EDITION Published October 28, 2012 Anno Domini Death by Presidential Order – Kate Pitrone, [...]
October 29th, 2012 | 10:59 am
I find it interesting that a nation that considers itself civilized would resort to this kind of murder. We in the US have sunk far lower than even I thought possible.
Fighting unjust (yes…unjust) wars of aggression against people and countries which have done us no harm, using these “star wars” weapons is about as sickening an enterprise as I can think of.
But the citizens keep cheering the government on as they commit these war crimes and will presumably continue to cheer them on as we slide into despotism.
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