You forgot to mention black choppers.
FTFY: "Do not pick fights with people who can fly black choppers"
FTFY: "Do not pick fights with people who can fly black choppers"
If you read the papers you know that that option is neither a joke nor the fevered imaginings of a paranoid conspiracy theorist.
Honestly, "we" (the West) are best armed, best funded, most free peoples ever to walk the earth. If we cannot put aside assassination and torture, then the human race has no hope.
Here for an interesting review of legality of such assassinations:
http://www.kentlaw.edu/perritt/courses/seminar/jerry-bekkerm...
Assange / assassination http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Flanagan_%28political_scien...
edit: for clarity, before I become flamed as a woolly left winger, I think that there are many people in the world, that if they were hit by lightning today, the world would be much better off. but
a) I think the world is nett worse off if democracies 'arrange' that lightning, because it demeans the important point of a democracy - being a beacon of hope for the future generations.
b) the choice of targets, is not discussed in a democratic manner, and almost certainly would not be my choice. (Now thats a referendum I would love to see:-)
c) my guess is that, like crime, taking out the people committing the crime right now, magically someone else steps into their place. Sometimes someone who yesterday was not committing those crimes.
Hmm, still pretty left wing there...
If we cannot put aside assassination and torture,
then the human race has no hope.
important point of a democracy - being a beacon of hope
for the future generations
the choice of targets, is not discussed in a democratic manner,
and almost certainly would not be my choice.
This has been going on for far longer than we realize. (http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/unbound/bookauth/battle... -- excellent article on WWII linked on HN a couple of weeks back.)
Drone attacks, Apache missile strikes, and even dropping Navy SEALS on people with helicopters all seem to fall into some sort of "standard act of war" category when talked about in public. If you even merely refer to these things as assassinations you are written off as trying to use exaggerated or at least loaded language.
It's almost like people think "assassinations" are limited to snipers and James Bond figures breaking into your hotel room and making it look like a suicide.
Oh, you can't. They were assassinated by a western-backed democracy. (There have been many more, those were just the first two names that turned up of Iranian nuclear scientists who were assassinated by Israel.)
As much as you'd like to believe that assassination does not happen, it does. In the very same conflict that gave us Flame and Stuxnet. In fact I would not be surprised if information from Flame was used to target assassinations.
That said, I'm sure that if the US was involved there was some kind of backwards hoop jumping so as not to technically break the law. "I just had a chat with him on a park bench when we bumped into each other. He said he'd look into it."
The second paragraph and points a and c are non sequiturs.
In b it seems you are in favor of a lynch mob.
Just explaining why I down-modded your comment
lynch mob - no, but I was struck with concern and amusement by the idea of a quarterly referendum on which world figures we should target for assassination, plus maybe a limit of civilian children whose collateral death would be acceptable in the voting list. In fact its the opposite of a lynch mob. A lynch democracy perhaps.
don't quite understand the non-sequiteur part... could you expand?