Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Comment by InclinedPlane | Hacker News Reader

Isn't that nice. This isn't the most concerning aspect about the use of drones though. The concerning part is the extension of the definition of "battlefield".

Currently the definition of what is a battlefield is little different than "wherever we decide to put a drone". However, this leaves a lot to be desired from a rules-of-war and civil liberties perspective. The thought that merely visiting some city in the developing world and hanging around with the wrong folks could result in you dying in a battlefield via remote drone attack is more than a little disturbing, especially when compared against all of the normal heuristics a sensible human with good-intentions would typically use to avoid being involved in a war and especially being killed in battle.

Certainly there are risks and downsides to operating under rules-of-war which are too limiting or too strict but the solution is not to throw everything out and create effectively unlimited power with almost no safeguards, limitations, or accountability. And that is the road we seem to be heading down. As history has shown, power without accountability and limitations is never a good idea and will inevitably lead to intentional abuse.

> hanging around with the wrong folks could result in you dying in a battlefield via remote drone attack is more than a little disturbing

Being a minor (16 years old) and a US citizen (born in Denver) won't protect you from "having the wrong father", as Abdulrahman_al-Aulaqi can tell you[1].

It's not reassuring at all to me to know that a human, rather than a robot, is making the decision, as long as I don't know (or trust) the criteria that that human is using.

[1] (Except he can't, because he was assassinated last year, far from any "battlefield" - or even any country that the US is at war with, for that matter.)

"and a US citizen (born in Denver) "

I've never understood the emphasis on this point.

You're either for or against drone attacks on presumed terrorists, I can't understand how US citizenship plays any role in it. If his father was involved in terrorism and you think drone strikes are OK, why would you have extra sympathy for him because he's a US citizen?

I don't think the US citizen aspect is worth mentioning, in fact I think it just makes people who are against drones seem a little unhinged. By the way I am against the use of drones (on Americans or otherwise).

> If his father was involved in terrorism and you think drone strikes are OK, why would you have extra sympathy for him because he's a US citizen?

As of April 2010, the open, stated objective of the CIA was to kill Aulaqi's father (and others on President Obama's "hit list") and, if and only if he could not be killed, to arrest him, charge him formally, and bring him to trial.

In other words, "if we can kill him, we don't have to prove he was actually guilty."

I don't support the drone strikes against non-US citizens, but the idea that a single executive can issue capital punishment on a US citizen[1] without a trial is downright unnerving. Imagine if police officers wielded that same level of power - it's no different.

[1] The US Constitution does not provide the same levels of protection to non-Citizens, which is why drone-strikes on foreigners is still disgusting but not as terrifying (from the perspective of a US citizen).

> Imagine if police officers wielded that same level of power - it's no different.

Seems to me that there are plenty of police officers who try through the claim of self defense.

  >[1] The US Constitution does not provide the same levels of 
  > protection to non-Citizens, which is why drone-strikes on 
  > foreigners is still disgusting but not as terrifying (from 
  > the perspective of a US citizen).

I hear this asserted frequently but it is simply not the case. There are a very few places where the citizenship requirement is explicitly stated (e.g. voting or holding public office), but generically the US Constitution refers to "persons" not citizens.

For a scholarly article on this topic, see: http://scholarship.law.georgetown.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar...

Citizens are entitled to due process. There are probably a bunch of other reasons i'm overlooking, but I get kind of uptight about the government ignoring the bill of rights.

Because US citizens have rights under the US Constitution?

> I've never understood the emphasis on this point.

All human lives are equally important from a moral perspective [1].

But from the perspective of a country's government -- any country, not just the US -- their own citizens' lives are the most important.

Imagine a man kills a woman -- a random stranger he met on the street. It's a terrible crime.

Now imagine a man kills a woman -- his daughter. Most people's gut reaction is that this is a worse crime than the previous example, because a parent he has a moral duty to protect his child.

Likewise, a country is supposed to protect its citizens -- so killing its own requires a stronger justification than killing non-citizens.

I'm not going to take the discussion off-topic by taking a position on the circumstances under which it's justifiable for a country to kill its own citizens or non-citizens. I'm just saying that a country's justification for killing its own citizens needs to be at least as strong -- and usually stronger -- than its justification for killing non-citizens.

[1] This paragraph is completely off-topic. "All human lives are equally important" sounds like a good and simple axiom for a value system. But it's interesting to try to think of situations where any of several people could be sacrificed to prevent some great evil, and the group figures out reasons to sacrifice some person or people with certain characteristics in preference to others. For example, "save the women and children first" is often said in disaster movies -- which implies their lives are somehow more valuable. Based on this anecdotal evidence, it appears that real human value systems often don't follow this axiom.

> "All human lives are equally important" sounds like a good and simple axiom for a value system.

Sounds like a useful simplification at most.

> a useful simplification at most.

As I footnoted, that's really what it is. But I used it to start my comment, because the parent's viewpoint may implicitly rely on it.

The reason it's important is that regardless of whatever else the purpose of the laws of the US are to protect US citizens and maintain their rights. That's a fundamental, founding aspect of our country and heavily embedded within the constitution.

Here we have a situation where, to put it in the least glamorous light, a US citizen may be summarily executed for little more than being outside of US soil. That's a bit harsh but it's compatible with the track record so far. And if a US citizen has no protections outside of US territory then that implies non-US citizens have even less protections. To say that such a scenario is distressing is to put it mildly.

What happens when, not if, other countries build up their drone fleets and engage in similar low-level warfare throughout the world? Will the developing world become a de facto 24/7 battlefield contested over by the developed countries? Will the lives of most of the world's citizens be subject to nothing more than the whims of some bureaucrat or soldier in a richer, more powerful country?

That is a good ethical point but it's normally brought up because it's a legal issue. It's (even more) illegal for the US government to be assassinating their own citizens. Only international law would have anything to say about assassinating non-US citizen civilians.

When you go to another country and openly wage war upon the US, you make yourself a military target. You don't get to wrap yourself in the constitution and enjoy all the procedural protections of the criminal justice system under such circumstances. If Anwar al -Awlaki had felt his life was in danger, he could have just turned himself in to a US consulate and asked for his legal rights.

As for his son, I blame the father for taking him with him to live in an Al-Qaeda stronghold, and effectively using him as a human shield.

> When you go to another country and openly wage war upon the US, you make yourself a military target.

His main activity was recording videos in which he expressed his ideas. If he was thought to have committed other crimes, he had the right to be tried for them.

> As for his son, I blame the father for taking him with him to live in an Al-Qaeda stronghold

That didn't happen. IIRC, he was killed at a dinner party. We're not even certain who it was the US was trying to kill during that strike.

The drone strike that killed the kid was targeting Ibrahim al-Banna (and it succeeded in killing him). They almost certainly did not expect that the kid would be there, considering that he lived over 100 miles away far from where that drone struck.

But you don't have to openly do anything. Military aged males in specific areas are presumed militants. Where those areas are is classified.

> If Anwar al -Awlaki had felt his life was in danger, he could have just turned himself in to a US consulate and asked for his legal rights

Hahahahaha, that's a good one.

The guy made extensive use of the internet to broadcast his views. Not once did he say 'I reject these accusations and seek a trial/political asylum in some other country.' If you spend all your time glorifying violence and martyrdom, then you can have no complaints when people take you at your word.

There are also legal arguments in favor of this position, but past experiences suggests I'll do a lot of typing and linking to no particular end, so I'll confine myself to quoting Justice Holmes: the constitution is not a suicide pact.

What is the definition of a "human shield" there, being in the vicinity of people who shouldn't be killed?

>When you go to another country and openly wage war upon the US, you make yourself a military target.

This is understandable - if Americans are being attacked, their attackers should be killed. Figure out who they are later. But in this case there was no immediate danger. And to steal from Stalin, "how many divisions does al-Awlaki have?" I would love to hear the evidence against al-Awlaki, but sadly the trial was dispensed with, not to mention the subpoena.

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