Adam Gahan and hostages killed in US drone strike

[Tamara]

If we formally declared war on Al-qaeda and all supporters of it. I'd be happy and you could kill any asshole affiliated with them, with as many rockets and bombs as you wanted. You see what I'm getting at here? It's a subtle distinction. It's about following the law and principles of this country.

Anybody affiliated with an Al Qaeda franchisee is covered by the Congressional AUMF, which has not been rescinded, to the best of my knowledge.

You know I get what you're saying and that I generally agree with it, but per your earlier "Not without an official declaration/authorization by Congress, which would not make them extrajudicial" statement, there's a Congressional authorization in effect with Al Qaeda members.

(And I believe your reaction is generally the right one. Any American who mindlessly high-fives his buddy when the Executive branch uses flying killer robots to snuff out a US citizen just because he was told the guy was a baddie worries me. To paraphrase TGS, I don't just want to see the receipt, I want to look at as much of the books as pragmatically possible.)

[ranger]

I have concerns about the drone war too. However, the other techniques are 1) bombing from air with potential for even more collateral damage and chance a pilot might be captured/killed or 2) we insert warriors onto the ground to capture or kill (putting pilots, crews, warriors in jeopardy. A challenge of this whole "war on terror" is that it is not like the "good old days" when opposing countries outfitted their combatants in clearly defined uniforms etc and we duked it out under various international standards of warfare.

The terrorists could choose to stop being terrorists but unfortunately the only deterrent is a position of strength and we do not have the will as a nation to truly deal with this issue.

[TGS]

Rob,

As for the determination of the word "immediate," no, that's not my point. The opposite of it, actually. I simply mean that what is considered "immediate" for a fleeing murder suspect in the US is not a hard standard which can be applied as "immediate" to a different suspected felon in a different circumstance...i.e. a terrorist living abroad. I'm not aware of any flow-chart which breaks down the application of "immediate" either.....it's based on judgement.

Immediate is a whole lot different given the time-space considerations of a terrorist living abroad who practices professional level tradecraft in detection avoidance. If we have a fleeting chance to act and capture is not feasible, the immediacy is fulfilled by the fact that if we don't act we have every reasonable expectation that the next time he pops up on our radar will be when a terrorist attack happens, because he has an actionable plan.

Reasonable, in my mind.

It's the documentation afterwards part; I want it before. And you can solve that problem, by formally declaring war, and thus declaring terrorist enemy combatants and not subject to Constitutional protection, unless held as formal prisoners of war. Or by amending the constitution to allow certain kinds of due process to happen in absentia. But under the current practice, we exercise extrajudicial process to execute people, and trust the people in charge to do it correctly. If that doesn't scare you a little, then we really are in different places (and I honestly don't think we're that far apart).

Rob,

I absolutely agree with you on the oversight part.

I don't find fault with extrajudicial targeted killings of Americans involved in terrorism, itself. We'll just have to agree to disagree on this point.

I absolutely find fault with the oversight of the process. There are protections in place, but they are not transparent to the people.......which is what matters. Terrorism isn't a fad and is not going to go away. Extra-judicial targeted killings of Americans involved in terrorism while residing overseas is going to be around for a while. We're in a gray area right now, where we can articulate a lawfulness for such but that it hasn't been specifically hashed out by the SCOTUS. Until it does, we're going to feel uncomfortable about it.

As for having the justification before the act.....that simply isn't going to happen. It would completely endanger the operation, not to mention the time considerations. I'm just going to danger that with the immediacy that these things happen at some times, you wouldn't even be able to write up a press report before it happens.