Comment by dbatten | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dbatten | Hacker News Reader

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...

So the "murkiness" apparently comes from:

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

VS

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

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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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

> 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.)

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