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Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

theguardian.com

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Re: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

#161

Post by baltcode »

yapcguy wrote: post #61
grey-area wrote: post #47

Let's consider a specific example: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/18/opinion/the-drone-that-kil... The missile killed him, his teenage cousin and at least five other civilians on Oct. 14, 2011, while the boys were eating dinner at an open-air restaurant in southern Yemen...The attorney general, Eric H. Holder Jr., said only that Abdulrahman was not “specifically targeted,” raising more questions than he answered. The…

Good points except for... > an undefined and secret enemy Just this month alone... - Islamic terrorists gun down over 60 people in a shopping mall in Kenya. - Islamic terrorists blow up over 70 people in a church in Pakistan. - Islamic terrorists massacre over 160 travelers in Nigeria. - Islamic terrorists take hundreds hostage in a coastal city in the Philippines.

And this justifies assassinations and executions without open and fair trials?

Re: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

#162

Post by baltcode »

ams6110 wrote: post #114
Retric wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Over it's 200+ year history the US has killed more civilians than that in the average week. Does that make us 4x as bad as Islamic terrorists?

No, because even if that were true you need to look at motivations and intent.

Thank you for the perfect excuse for any crime. We kill out of love, while they do it out of hate.

Re: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

#163

Post by joshuaellinger »

yapcguy wrote: post #137
joshuaellinger wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replace the word "Islamic" with "Poor and Black/Brown" and you've selected the same group of people. Imagine being in Northern Ireland 20 years ago and stating the fact that all of the terrorist attackers were performed by "Catholics". Or in the Deep South 40 years ago (or today) and saying that all of the people charged with stealing are "Black". Or that most of the people with AIDS are "Gay". Unfortunately, the bla…

> Pretending that it is tied to religion is just weakly hidden fear-of-the-other. The killers are quoting from religious text and openly declare they are fighting a religious war. If there were only one or two people doing this, you could claim they were mentally ill, but you have thousands of people doing this, all over the world. You can't tar everybody with the same brush, but it's obvious that religion is part of…

In order to be motivated enough to kill other people, you have to get your head into a pretty weird place. Religion is one path there. The religion that happens to dominate countries full of desperate people is... Islam.

I think Christians have a bigger body count than Muslims over the course of human history, primarily because the Europeans happen to be Christian. Hard to think of any religion that hasn't been used to justify a bunch of violence and murder. The violence by people quoting Islam today is mice nuts compared to (a) the crusades, (b) the protestant reformation, (c) the colonization of the new world.

You should really read Guns, Germs, and Steel before claiming that there is something special about this particular religion. Get a little sense of history. Islam in the 600s was amazingly progressive. Look at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamic_inheritance_jurispruden....

Re: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

#164

Post by grey-area »

jasonlotito wrote: post #91
grey-area wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If those people were plotting to kill hundreds/thousands of your more innocent citizens And if they weren't?

I don't know of any case where they specifically targeted people they thought were innocent. Can you provide anything to support that claim?

Almost every drone strike kills several people - usually only one of those people is the intended target. In many cases (including the one linked) they have admitted that the people killed were not the target. Not as an apology (those are rare, they don't feel the need to admit mistakes because of course the missions and targets are secret), but simply to say that those people were not the intended target, just collateral damage. Here's another well-known example of firing on a crowd:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2002/jul/03/afghanistan.luk...

By the time you're firing missiles at a restaurant, you have accepted that as long as your target is killed, some innocents will die with them. Any civilians, waiters, passers by etc who are caught in the blast are clearly just the cost of doing business. The attacks don't happen in a war zone or under cover of war, except the eternal and ill-specified 'war on terror'. If you want to argue that is not specifically targeting innocent people I'd respond that they are indiscriminately targeting innocent people in the hope of hitting their targets, which is worse.

It's remarkable to me that people still try to defend these attacks - if missiles were used on targets in a town on the US, killing several bystanders, there would be outrage, and rightly so. For the civilians on the ground, it is equivalent to suicide bombers taking out a crowd, some of whom are off-duty troops - the two acts have very similar consequences.

Re: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

#165

Post by cac04 »

singlecomment17 wrote: post #127
cac04 wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the first suicide bomb attacks were committed by Tamil Tigers.

... who were Hindus. As an aside, they also carried out attacks against Tamil Muslims in areas they claimed as theirs (Tigers').

Erm, no. The Tamil Tigers were avowed atheists.

Here's one citation, you can probably find many others: http://preview.tinyurl.com/p6s9n9k

Re: Chilling legal memo from Obama DOJ justifies assassination of US citizens

#166

Post by Andrew_Quentin »

chii wrote: post #97
corin_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That still doesn't define who they are. Are you one of these terrorists? Am I? It maybe helps justify the US' actions, but as far as "undefined and secret enemy" it is only one step further than saying "Who are we targeting? The... bad guys!"

"No matter how hard he digs at his memory, Winston is uncertain whether a time existed when Oceania was not at war with someone." --1894

1984
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