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.

John Lewis, do we lose citizenship easily?

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.

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!

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?

Even if he is being frivolous?

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?

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