Comment by ferdo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ferdo | Hacker News Reader

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> in what sense does this executive branch have secret rules or norms that apply to the criminal justice system?

It considers itself above the law to the point of being able to kill Americans without trial.

That aside, 40 years ago the NSA stated that it was above the law because it was created by Executive decree and tus not bound by statutory law:

"NSA does not have a statutory charter; its operational responsibilities are set forth exclusively in executive directives first issued in the 1950s. One of the questions which the Senate asked the Committee to consider was the "need for specific legislative authority to govern the operations of...the National Security Agency."

According to NSA's General Counsel, no existing statutes control, limit, or define the signals intelligence activities of NSA. Further, the General Counsel asserts that the Fourth Amendment does not apply to NSA's interception of Americans' international communications for foreign intelligence purposes." [1]

[1] Church Committee Report on NSA Surveillance Affecting Americans (1975)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920793

That's a grotesque oversimplification and decontextualization of the administration's position. Every administration has considered itself able to "kill Americans without trial" (a) on foreign soil, (b) during hostilities, (c) when the target has allied itself with an adversary. American citizens fought along the Nazis and could not expect due process from Allied machine guns. Similarly, every American police force considers itself able to kill American citizens without trial, when those Americans are threatening deadly force in such a way that killing them is the most certain way to save lives.

Your quote about the NSA has nothing to do with criminal evidence.

You over simplify too. Shooting someone in a war zone with confusion explosions and well, a war happening is a bit different to assassinating someone with a drone. Calculated and controlled targeted killing of an individual is nothing like the front lines in WW2. It is an awful lot closer to murder in my opinion. But human rights haven't been a strong suit in US policy, particularly when off US soil, for some time.

Edit: badly worded.

It's interesting to observe that targeted airstrikes have been generating similar moral responses since the time they involved people dropping grenades out of the open cockpits of propeller planes.

Those were not really tattered in the same sense though were they? I am aware of the response early air strikes caused, but even then there were usually (always?) between countries that were at war. The number of drone strike that occur in countries that there is no war with is disturbingly high, and the civilian death rate is classified. How can anyone justify the program when the so called collateral damage isn't allowed to be discussed? Its hard to call the program moral when we don't understand the damage it is doing.

If what we're talking about here is the extreme danger of declaring war on an ill-defined organization rather than a nation state, you and I are on the same page. The 2001 AUMF against "Al Qaeda" will probably go down in history as a world-historical foreign policy blunder.

But if what we're talking about is the idea that a clearly-defined Al Qaeda target operating in a territory that is self-evidently fertile ground for the operation of paramilitary death squads should somehow have been served with some kind of due process notification rather than being sniped from orbit, I'm less sure I'm on the same page with you.

For one thing, drone strikes kill far fewer people than ground operations do. Read any story about soldiers operating in middle eastern theaters (or Vietnam, for that matter) --- hell, read accounts of Army Ranger squads operating in theater --- and I think you'll see where I'm coming from. Somebody's old grandfather sticks his head out a window looking to see what the commotion is at the wrong time, and blam, he's a target. Ground combat (at least as long as it's conducted by humans on the ground) is necessarily horrific and anything that spares both sides those horrors is at least worth considering.

So that's a little shotgun blast of my thoughts about drone strikes.

> I am aware of the response early air strikes caused, but even then there were usually (always?) between countries that were at war.

As long as there have been states, there have been "non-state" actors that field real, no-shit militaries, with which to go to war.

The most famous example from history is the scourge of piracy on the high seas. You'll note that ships that would hoist the Jolly Roger would be treated with a military response, not a police one.

So, the legal framework for drone strikes against non-state belligerents is not nearly as nebulous as it's made out to be. In fact there's actually quite a bit of precedent within international law.

I realise you just picked an example, but shooting at some guys in a ship with a Jolly Roger is quite different to operating in an area full of civilians via camera. Civilians are hard to tell apart from combatants (although the US seems particularly blind to civilian/combatant difference judging by leaked videos). I don't think you could argue that the US is operating within international laws. It's striking countries that can't stop the incursions and don't want them . The country only protests feebly, as the US props the governments up. This increases the level of resentment. The US drone strikes a few of its so-called enemies (very little info is released, so no one really knows who's killed), whilst bumping off a few civilians that got in the way. Its not hard to see the vicious cycle.

Killing American citizen without a trial puts American citizens on the same footing as any peasant in history.

> Your quote about the NSA has nothing to do with criminal evidence.

It shows historical patterns of gross negligence in observing legalities by the Executive Branch that lead to things like killing your own citizens based on your own "evidence" without benefit of a trial.

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