A Citizen Is Suing the US for Putting Him on the 'Kill List'

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-features/how-to-survive-americas-kill-list-699334/

by matt4077 • 8 years ago

204 176 8 years ago

vowelless• 8 years ago

This has happened before, and it was unprecedented when the US citizen [1] was assassinated by the US President with explicit targeting (putting the name on a 'kill list'). As I understand, Awlaki was an Al Qaeda member, mostly concerned himself with writing for 'Inspire' and giving YouTube lectures.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anwar_al-Awlaki#Death

he became the first United States citizen to be assassinated by a U.S. drone strike without the rights of due process being afforded.[15][16] President Barack Obama ordered the strike.[17] His son, Abdulrahman al-Awlaki (a 16-year-old U.S. citizen), was killed in a U.S. drone strike two weeks later.[18] On January 29, 2017, al-Awlaki's 8-year-old daughter, Nawar Al-Awlaki, was killed in a U.S. commando attack in Yemen which was ordered by President Donald Trump.[19][20][21][22]

[1] Please note: I am not justifying Awlaki's work. He was an Al Qaeda member. But also a natural born American citizen.

nerdponx7• 8 years ago

Since he was a US citizen, was he entitled to some kind of due process, maybe via extradition?

Edit: it was in the OP article.

There was some outcry about the president now having authority to kill even Americans without due process – “I think it’s sad,” said U.S. Congressman Ron Paul – but the uproar soon faded, and America’s assassination program accelerated still more. By late 2011, we’d killed more than 2,000 “militants.”

danesparza2• 8 years ago

I think the idea is that as long as you can make the case for classifying them as an 'enemy combatant in an active war zone' it doesn't matter that they were a US citizen.

I'm not saying I agree with this -- I'm just trying to respond to your question.

megous2• 8 years ago

This guy is not openly anti U.S. though. So it's not really comparable.

He just grown an outward facing (meaning outside of Syria, english language) news/commentary website/following on twitter/youtube from northwest of Syria. He interviews various people, including members of various militias (leaders and non-leaders), civilians, etc. I think he also interviewed some ex-shabaab (Somalia) disillusioned members. He doesn't seem radical.

OGN is mildly interesting, as in it shows what some people deal with in the region, how militia leaders present themselves to the outside world, etc. But most of the news content can be obtained from elsewhere too. It was more unique when he was in besieged Eastern Aleppo.

Bombing this guy would be like bombing The Young Turks, or whatever. It's ridiculous. He's not even in a war zone. He's in Idlib de-escalation zone.

mieseratte3• 8 years ago

Would it be a bit too crass to say "Thanks, Obama!" for this one?

It's a bit more shocking when you realize a Constitutional Law professor is the one who opened up this can of worms.

nerdponx7• 8 years ago

Not at all. He was no saint.

boomboomsubban3• 8 years ago

Obama's "Disposition Matrix" was a furthering of Bush era policies. It's not really fair to say he opened this can of worms, though that doesn't make his actions any less terrible.

mieseratte3• 8 years ago

It's not really fair to say he opened this can of worms

He was the sitting President and personally authorized the first extrajudicial assassination of an American Citizen in the GWOT.

As the Executive Chief, "The buck stops (t)here."

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

He didn't open it but once the lid was off he didn't take long to dump it out.

samsa• 8 years ago

Awlaki’s assassination (really the underlying hit list and lack of due process) is why I did not vote for Obama in 2012. I remain amazed that more people weren’t up in arms about it. I remember Ron Paul being vocal in his opposition at the time but few others that got headlines at least.

whack• 8 years ago

"We kill suspects whose names we know, and whose names we don’t; we kill the guilty and the not guilty; we kill men, but also women and children; we kill by day and by night; we fire missiles at confirmed visual targets, but also at cellphone numbers we hope belong to targets."

That is just chilling.

dannyw• 8 years ago

This is unfortunately the sort of action you are enabling, when you’re building a ML system for drone imagery.

rangibaby• 8 years ago

I'm proud of my invention, but I'm sad that it is used by terrorists... I would prefer to have invented a machine that people could use and that would help farmers with their work — for example a lawnmower.

Mikhail Kalashnikov

The release of atom power has changed everything except our way of thinking... the solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only I had known, I should have become a watchmaker.

Albert Einstein

to_bpr• 8 years ago

I got about 3 paragraphs into the article and tired of the "white folks be like... but black folks be like" narrative.

Do better.

anentropic• 8 years ago

I read the whole thing without noticing that

try harder

titzer• 8 years ago

Your comment is incredibly insensitive and flippant.

We can do better when we try to understand someone else's perspective--get into their narrative instead of 5 second superficial scanning and immediately turn off.

jstanley5• 8 years ago

This is not an accurate representation of the article.

vinceguidry• 8 years ago

Well, you missed a gripping account of the struggles of the judicial system to bring rule-of-law accountability to a secret executive war fighting department.

matt40774• 8 years ago

Plus a really good joke, actually.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

So to clarify - this sort of political story is okay, but increased white nationalist group activity, Russian interference in 2016 election, and forced separation of migrant families seeking asylum are not? It's a bit hard to figure out the editorial stance on HN lately.

edit: this seems off the front page, which answers my (not hypothetical or sarcastically intended) question.

nerdponx7• 8 years ago

It's at least partly a commentary on black box machine learning, so I can see the additional relevance. But really that's a stretch, and I think all of the above are relevant for "hackers" as long as they don't flood the front page.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

The Russian campaign is a hacker goldmine. AI/human force multiplication for mass social media influence campaigns, hacking social systems, data sovereignty and use of social media metadata...

beaconstudios3• 8 years ago

My understanding is its based on how much it will divide the HN community, causing flame wars and unproductive conversation. Pretty much everyone agrees that US citizens shouldn't be hit by drone strikes.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

Really? Because in the case of Anwar al-Awlaki I think it's much more of a gray area.

edit: agree entirely that the case in the article (Bilal Abdul Kareem) is no gray area. The difficulties interleaving points about the generality of a topic and specific cases.

freehunter• 8 years ago

I don't think it's an editorial stance any more than deleting articles about Microsoft and keeping the ones about Apple and Google is an editorial stance: HN has a long-standing policy that if a thread becomes hostile and devolves into a flamewar, it's removed from the front page.

Unfortunately, any thread about Microsoft quickly devolves into a flamewar. Similarly, any thread about politics, especially one that can be brigaded from other places, will quickly turn into a flamewar.

It's not that dang (et al) remove just because they want to, they remove because it becomes toxic. They stay up and in place long enough to know that.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

Perhaps. It is a shame because it prevents topics of interest from being discussed here when a vocal minority of accounts objects loudly. Someone mentioned the Overton window elsewhere, and this is such a clear example of gaming it.

dsfyu404ed2• 8 years ago

Yes because dropping bombs based on metadata and AI inferences is at least tangentially connected to tech.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

Sure. But but those other topics get flagged immediately, and I could make a case they are equally connected. Migrant family separation could be solved by quick genetic testing/facial recognition. The Russian 2016 election story is a tech story. And the current research on the nature of extremism is an addiction story, and the nature of the coordination of those groups (cryptocurrency, tor) and some work against them (NLP, AI driven social campaigns) is just as related.

edit: I'm 100% opposed to migrant family separation and think it's vile. I'm talking about how to reunite those families.

matt40774• 8 years ago

I always enjoy HN discussions on non-technical topics, because the community here is far better (and slightly different) than others. Which isn't that difficult considering the state of online comments in general, but still...

HN (and the tech community) has a libertarian streak, in addition to being somewhat left-of-center. Stories like this tend to unite these fundamentally opposing constituencies, resulting in more substantive discussions than other political topics. It also helps that the story is fundamentally non-partisan, in that both major US parties can be blamed for the situation.

I still consider it a blemish on HN's conscience, and a failure of HN leadership's responsibility to the community, that topics where this community is in a prime position to actually affect change tend to bring out the worst in (some) people and have in effect been banned to keep the peace. I'm not just speaking of "diversity in tech", where I can somewhat see how it has the potential of instilling fear in those traditionally profiting from discrimination. There, I can at least understand the mechanism at work, even though I consider it logically flawed.

But even summoning all my powers to understand opposing viewpoints I cannot fathom why this community reacts as dismissive as it does to, for example, stories (and projects / algorithms / ...) of algorithmic discrimination in machine learning. It would seem to be a topic that's both interesting from a technological and scientific standpoint, as well as welcome to everyone working in the space and presumably preferring not to do harm vs the opposite.

My best explanation is that there is a fundamental disgust in the tech community now of everything coming from, or even associated with, the social sciences. My second-best explanation is that tech has taken a sharp right turn at some point in the last 15 years, which would also explain why I remember only united opposition against software patents, and support for open source, from the first slashdot discussions I read. Whereas today, I see lots of sympathy for software patents in HN threats, and Open Source (and especially the GPL) are often spoken of with disgust.

pandasun• 8 years ago

migrant families seeking asylum.

If you're referring to the current news headlines: those do not involve asylum seekers, that's not what asylum means.

https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/asylum

fsloth• 8 years ago

I would say how interesting this topic is from the point of view how much it resembles literary classics like Catch-22 and Kafka's writings, overrides the 'no politics' rule.

I.e. first rule is to submit something interesting, the second is to avoid politics, but, apparently if the topic is interesting enough politics can be included.

The examples you list are the regular kind of political turmoil. This drone thing, given how far spread it is, on the other hand chips away at the fundamentals of why western societies managed to generate so much added value in the past centuries.

Consistent rule of law and functioning judicial system were one of them.

Having some black ops teams on ground violating basic human rights is not as bad as having an automated kill system that picks of targets based on metadata and then forwards that to drone targeting team as a daily standard policy.

To add to that, there is the generic humanistic cry for basic human rights.

After this auto-kill thing with the drones the ground on which to argument for any sort of generic human rights quickly becomes really fragile, getting all sorts of exceptions like, well, geneva convention was written when thinking about white people only and besides, the old school democratic process gave equal rights only if you were a male and ranked among the landed gentry or higher.

To be blunt: it appears as if brown people in far away countries still in 21st century are not considered as important as people of... other complexion... so it's ok to kill them every which way is more convenient.

dzdt2• 8 years ago

Who remembers in 2002 when an American citizen was arrested on American soil and transferred to a military prison, where he was held for three and a half years with no trial while the government claimed he had no rights or recourse because they had determined him to be a terrorist? [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/José_Padilla_(prisoner)

kimdotcom• 8 years ago

I remember he was working at Taco Bell.

dayofthedaleks• 8 years ago

I do! As I recall, he sort of was a terrorist though? Something about the planning or discussion of apartment house gasline bombings? They didn't even need an agent provocateur to produce evidence for this one.

On a semi-related note, I hope John Walker Lindh gets a hell of a party upon his release next May.

jonathanstrange3• 8 years ago

The idea behind due process is that everyone has a right to it, not just a select class of people your government is sympathetic with.

StavrosK3• 8 years ago

As I recall, he sort of was a terrorist though?

Does that matter a single iota? Does the US legal system say somewhere you can hold people in prison with no rights because "they sort of are a terrorist, though"?

dzdt2• 8 years ago

I am less concerned with whether Padilla was actually a bad guy than whether the process was actually a bad process. If we allow a precedent that the government can remove someone's rights by saying the word "terrorist" then those rights are not worth much anymore.

detaro• 8 years ago

So they held him from a fair trial despite having good evidence on which to win such a trial, and that somehow makes it better?

cmiles74• 8 years ago

In my opinion, the "maybe a terrorist" angle 100% doesn't matter. If you are a citizen then you have the right to a fair trial, due process, etc.

If it was such a slam dunk, why not arrest and prosecute under existing laws? That the federal government felt they needed to take unconstitutional steps undermines their credibility in my eyes.

DanBC• 8 years ago

he sort of was a terrorist though?

So what? Even terrorists have a right to a fair trial, and protection from arbitrary detention.

NietTim• 8 years ago

Oh that's only one guy, there are many many more that have been held in Guantanamo without trial or chance at recourse. Quite a few innocent ones too.

mtgx2• 8 years ago

Chelsea Manning was also arrested without charge for 18 months. And there have been reports of other "black sites" in the US, too, even ones managed by local police departments.

flexie3• 8 years ago

As a non-US citizen, I find it a terrible thought that somehow it should be morally better (or more legal) to kill non-US citizens than US citizens.

The only concern should be whether they are proven to be dangerous terrorists, not what their nationality is. If it's okay to kill a dangerous Afghan terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan, then it's also okay to kill a dangerous American terrorist in a war zone in Afghanistan. Outside of war zones, I don't see any excuse for killing anyone, unless in self defense.

I am still not sure about what to think of the whole drone war. I see how it saves hundreds of thousands of lives, compared to bringing in ground troops, but it sure feels wrong and dystopian.

nerdponx7• 8 years ago

It's more legal because they're not US citizens. There's no normative logic to it.

beobab• 8 years ago

I humbly suggest that that law has lost it's moral compass and needs to be addressed.

Once you reject the principle that "all people are created equally human", then you run the risk of being on the "wrong side", and treated in a sub-human manner.

jstanley5• 8 years ago

How many lives does it save compared to not bringing in any troops?

Why does killing have to be the answer?

flexie3• 8 years ago

In the best of worlds, we could catch the bad guys in a net, put pink, fluffy handcuffs on them while we talk with them gently, get to know them and understand why they did what they did. Then we could hug, and we would become friends, and one day after a not too long stay in our beautiful, green and lounge-like prison resort, we would let them out in society again and they would become productive citizens.

In our world, we sometimes have to fight. Sometimes, it's better to kill the terrorists than to risk that they attack us or to risk our soldiers getting killed in an attempt of bringing them in.

jacquesm9• 8 years ago

Even (suspected!) terrorists have rights. It's easy to think about the drone war: It's plain wrong. Sending guided missiles into other people's airspace is an act of war, and killing people without even so much as a sham trial is murder.

The more of this stuff we collectively condone the more the Bin Laden's of this world are winning. That's the real tragedy, that after 9/11 the West lost its moral compass.

nerdponx7• 8 years ago

It's hard because we don't know the counterfactual scenario.

I, for one, am OK with the fact that [almost] all terrorist attacks on US soil in the last 10 years have been domestic.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

Okay, but let's examine the other side. I am not directly supporting this, but I'd imagine the case is

"This is asymmetric warfare in which the adversary is not a hypothetical threat, but has killed many thousands of people globally (not just 9/11). By joining a hostile armed force they can be legally killed in combat operations against that force. By operating asymmetrically, they are relinquishing more rights under the Geneva convention. Because of the nature of this, trial by jury could put humint allies at risk"

Parts of the way this "war" is being prosecuted is wrong, but I don't think this an utter abdication of a moral compass. There really are people planning and executing plans to kill other people, and they should be stopped.

Obviously this story shows that are some disgraceful flaws in the the way the process is set up and executed.

flexie3• 8 years ago

I like your point, but terrorism and war is conflating. I wouldn't want to ignore a terrorist that we know hides in Syria, and that we believe to be dangerous. That could be our moment of hesitating to kill Bin Laden. And unlike Bill Clinton, who had no drones back in 1998 and would have had to use a cruise missile strike, today it can often be done with no civilian casualties.

Sending in troops in this godforsaken places means losing more lives.

Say we have proof that a target is a known terrorist and that no civilians are around. Would you still risk the lives of 10 soldiers to catch him. Or of 2,996 and just let him go?

I do agree that the Americans probably don't have much proof of terrorism or other wrongdoing for many of the targets, and that so far they have stricken several times where civilians were around.

beaconstudios3• 8 years ago

I think the ideal situation in all cases would be taking a suspect, bringing them to trial and awarding an appropriate sentence if they are found guilty. The difference between a US national and a foreign national is a US national has a real chance of actually being seen in court. Though it would be infinitely preferable to do so, I can't imagine the logistical complexity of trying to defeat a terror organisation by individually capturing and trying each suspected member. It's a new kind of war, and not one with a set of engagement rules like those that governed more "traditional" inter-state warfare.

baursak• 8 years ago

The only concern should be whether they are proven to be dangerous terrorists

The only way to do it is via a fair due process and trial.

0xBA5ED• 8 years ago

I don't know that it's about being less moral or legal. Rather an uneasiness with the military being used against citizens because it is a clearly understood line which is difficult to cross in "boiling frog" fashion like in other areas (privacy, for example), so it's easy to point out and condemn in concrete terms. Like a rallying landmark against overreach.

mimimihaha• 8 years ago

That's the problem. They believe it's self defense seeking out and killing these terrorists randomly. I'm sure the way they determine whether they are legitimate threats to us is extremely lengthy, but some slip through the cracks like Bilal Kareem.

phyller5• 8 years ago

I recommend the movie "Eye in the Sky" as a great encapsulation of one aspect of the moral struggles in this area. I wonder if the people who made that movie know that it is being shown at the US Air Force Academy by many of the instructors as part of the required ethics course for cadets.

avar• 8 years ago

Most of the comments here, and even the article itself shows just how far the Overton window has moved when it comes to these discussions.

The article makes a few mentions of how perhaps killing non-Americans isn't fine either:

We wiped out the Geneva Convention by creating the unlawful enemy combatant, a term that simply means a person not protected by the Geneva Convention.

But even for the Rolling Stone the discussion has mostly moved on. The post-9/11 world of killing people in "warzones" (war was never declared) without any regard for the Geneva Convention is taken as a given.

throwaway575212• 8 years ago

Okay.. what do we do, declare war on Pakistan in order to prosecute a conflict in Waziristan? War with Afghanistan to go after violent Taliban factions in northern provinces? There is not a nation state entity to declare war against, and for example in Afghanistan you have a national population on the order of the city of Beijing, and hundreds of the police die there per year in this internal conflict. The national governments are probably complicit/cooperative for their own reasons. Also, the Geneva convention has obligations for both sides of a conflict, and - even though conduct shouldn't be dictated by the lowest common denominator - it's just not intended for this situation. I think it's possible to distinguish targeted (however flawed) drone campaigns from mass casualty bio/chem attacks like are done in Syria (with Russian support) or other cases.

pjc507• 8 years ago

I think it's worth stepping back and asking the question of why the US is involved in the conflict there in the first place? And to what extent the US is really threatened by people on the other side of the planet?

black_puppydog3• 8 years ago

so you're saying because the current legal framework doesn't allow you to randomly start military actions in other countries' territory without their consent, that the legal framework is wrong?

Maybe as a thought experiment, try applying similar logic the other way around: should any other country have gotten involved in e.g. the Ferguson situation? If so, would that be considered an act of war by the US?

sorokod2• 8 years ago

Okay... there is no internationally ( or perhaps even nationally) accepted concensus on legalized killing for the reasons you enumerated.

Now what?

_bxg1• 8 years ago

The author had to pick their battlefield. Focusing narrowly on this case and the new class of violations it represents made the article more impactful. I don't think the author was excusing or even accepting the other things, but when you're trying to make a strong point and inspire action, you have to be as succinct and directed as possible.

dragonwriter11• 8 years ago

The post-9/11 world of killing people in "warzones" (war was never declared)

Only if you adhere to the false belief that a declaration of war requires particular magic words and that the 9/11-motivated AUMF is not an open-ended conditional (on Presidential determination) declaration of war.

without any regard for the Geneva Convention

Which of the Geneva Conventions is being ignored, and how?

moorhosj3• 8 years ago

Please elaborate on why we should consider that belief false? Plenty of Senators disagree with you.

dbatten• 8 years ago

Unfortunately, I think this is a thornier issue than most of these articles give it credit for.

Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen, but he was serving as a uniformed combatant in the Canadian army. Under such circumstances, I can't imagine anyone would have a problem with the United States military killing John Doe in battle without trial.

Obviously, the circumstances around the kill list are murkier... The "war on terror" isn't a war in the traditional sense, terrorists or suspected terrorists are not uniformed combatants, the CIA is not necessarily the military, and it's not really certain that dropping a bomb on somebody's "cafe experience" is equivalent to killing them in a pitched battle in a declared war.

Still, I have a hard time imagining what rights a US citizen is supposed to be entitled to when they are effectively a foreign terrorist working to attack the US. Are we supposed to have a trial for them without them present? (We all know how that would go.) Ask for their home country to extradite them? (Country will almost certainly either be unwilling or incapable.) Send the Navy Seals to kidnap them and force them to stand trial? (Dangerous and wildly impractical, not to mention boots on the ground increasing the risk of creating a larger conflict with a foreign nation.)

Personally, I have two take-aways on the issue:

1) I wouldn't want to be the judge that has to sort this stuff out, and I hope they do it well. It's not easy.

2) I think the bigger problem is drone killings in other nations FULL STOP. Regardless of who the targets are, it's completely unacceptable for any country to think they can just fly into another nation's airspace and start dropping bombs on anybody they please without a declaration of war, some sort of cooperative MOU, or a join military exercise...

sitkack• 8 years ago

Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen

You are in table-top-gaming territory. Constructing arbitrary hypotheticals as your base condition doesn't make your arguments stronger, it makes them apply to a non-existent universe.

jstanley5• 8 years ago

they are effectively a foreign terrorist

Part of the problem is that if you haven't given them a fair trial, you haven't proved they're a terrorist rather than an ordinary member of the public.

alexandercrohde• 8 years ago

So the "murkiness" apparently comes from:

A. America tries to have a high standard of justice and the value of a life

B. Countries at war usually will summarily kill enemies, defectors, and often innocents for convenience sake with 0 recourse or oversight.

---

I think the questions we need to ask are whether these looser moral standards we apply to actual wars should still apply to the situations overseas that are not declared wars by congress and have been going on for over a decade and involve targets who are not armed combatants on the battlefield.

We also need to ask at what point is a justification owed to the american people on this.

sseveran• 8 years ago

Its almost two decades now, although one could argue that this has been going on for almost three decades depending on when one thinks this conflict started. The thing I find the most insane is that at the end of next year young men and women will begin to deploy to Afghanistan and other bases around the world that were not even born when 9/11 happened. And that is something that we should not accept.

dragonwriter11• 8 years ago

Suppose for a second that the US was at war with Canada and John Doe was an American citizen, but he was serving as a uniformed combatant in the Canadian army. Under such circumstances, I can't imagine anyone would have a problem with the United States military killing John Doe in battle without trial.

Or, for a concrete circumstance that actually occurred, substitute “Canada” for “Nazi Germany”; Americans fighting for the Nazis, in uniform or not, did not get special protection different from other Nazi combatants, either on the battlefield or when detained as prisoners (see, e.g., Ex Parte Quirin, in which two of the eight saboteurs detained and eventually sentenced by military tribunal to death as unlawful combatants were US citizens.)

christophilus• 8 years ago

I just started reading "Society and Sanity"[0]. It's an interesting read so far, and opens with a prediction that if society forgets what a human is, that society will tend towards this sort of behavior-- arbitrary treatment of fellow humans, with the only argument against such treatment being, "I don't like it, and I wish you'd be kinder to people." And the counter argument being, "I like it, and I don't want to be kinder to people." If we're to solve this problem, we have to get back to the essential foundational idea that human beings have intrinsic rights which exist and are not simply concessions of the state.

[0] https://www.amazon.com/Society-Sanity-Understanding-Live-Tog...

jtbayly• 8 years ago

Yes. All sorts of things like this that ignore human intrinsic value and rights.

Abortion is a prime example.

ionised• 8 years ago

How?

AdmiralAsshat• 8 years ago

So, hypothetical law question here: if the US government has deemed you worthy of being killed, are you legally obligated to die?

I asked this question once before in the context of whether you are "breaking the law" if you flee from a cop that is shooting at you, but it seems apt here as well.

matt40774• 8 years ago

It's a somewhat silly question (what punishment would you propose for noncompliance). The obvious legal answer is "no", because you are not obligated to do something unless there's a law to that effect, and there's no law creating such an obligation because it would be silly.

As an approximation, it might make sense to look as some analogues: the fifth amendment right not to incriminate yourself in a criminal trial, for example, speaks to a recognition of every humans' (even criminals') right to protect themselves. If you can't be forced to provide information against your interests, you can certainly not be obligated to inflict the ultimate punishment onto yourself.

A very similar train of thought finds expression in German law, where it is not a crime to break out of prison, a fact often justified by reference to a fundamental human urge to seek freedom (any property damage, or injury inflicted on others is, however, criminal).

sschueller• 8 years ago

Is the kill list available online? Can we get it via FOIA request?

pjc507• 8 years ago

The most likely resolution to this is that the US finds some way of stripping him of his citizenship, thereby making it legal to murder him.

ggm• 8 years ago

Which is what the US did to many members of the ACP after WWI deporting them en masse to Russia (not killing them, Stalin did that for the US government distrusting the foreign communists)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Palmer_Raids

[the article implies the deportees were 'aliens' but I think the legalism here is wafer thin. I think they held themselves to be Americans, internationalists maybe, but not aliens]

I was very surprised when I read that the US state and federal authorities were calmly happy to deploy machine guns against strikers, and even more bemused when they chose to deport people and remove citizenship. I really didn't think states like "us" did that, but apparently I was wrong.

Australia reneges on the AU-NZ treaty all the time, deporting Kiwi's for trivial offences. Green card holders can be stripped and dumped for offences which citizens would walk away from with a finger wag.

dorfsmay• 8 years ago

When I listen to Noam Chomsky I often think he exaggerates, and then this! And like the article points to, this is not specific to Trump or Bush, but also Clinton and Obama.

I would love to know what U.S. citizens who have put thought into and truly believe that their second amendment protects them from their government abuse think of this.

turc1656• 8 years ago

IANAL but it seems to me the mental workflow of determining the legality of all this is definitely not what I think it should be.

For the non-citizen, it seems clear to me the judge's determining that there is no standing to even raise the issue in a US court is sound. If I was theoretically plotting against some other (non-US) nation - say, Canada for argument's sake - I have no relationship, obligation, or anything really with Canada. And they have none with me. So the idea that Canada should be forced to explain itself to me or prove anything to me is absurd. They owe me nothing and I owe them nothing (unless perhaps I am within their borders, then a few obligations are there for both sides).

For the US citizen, the court definitely has jurisdiction as this is a federal court and we're talking about the actions of the federal branch of the US government taking action against a citizen. Also, this is a civil case, so the question then becomes whether or not there is presiding law on this and whether the claims have merit. There is very little law for this specific type of case (drone strikes). The lawsuit didn't actually claim a rights violation (which seriously surprised me). But before all of that, the heart of this drone strike murder issue against a US citizen has it's roots in due process. The big question is whether or not due process still applies to actions against a citizen when not on US soil. That answer is most definitely not clear and to my knowledge has never been answered by a court. Clearly, the constitutional and the law in general apply within US borders. However, in most cases the law ends at the border. But there are things that citizens can do overseas and face charges for at home. So is the reverse true? Is there anything that the US government can do to us while we are not on US soil that violates the law? Does the obligation to protect (or at least not violate) my constitutional rights still exist once I cross the border? Until this question is answered, I don't think anything else in this case can be answered with certainty.

This also excludes the entire examination of potential criminal (not civil) violations or violations of international law, war crimes, violations of conventions like Geneva, Hague, etc.

A Citizen Is Suing the US for Putting Him on the 'Kill List'

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