re: "If You're A Terrorist Abroad, the Fact that You're an American is Only Incidental"

Rusty Shackleford, Ph.D at The Jawa Report ("Sand people, get it?") explained, as you would to a child, what you do to enemies in wartime.

Money quote(s):

"The way you word things matters and I've become more and more annoyed over the past few years as many on the Right have increasingly adopted the phraseology of ardent Leftists. People who only a few years ago were die hard supporters of the war on terrorism today use phrases to make it seem that the same policies carried out under Bush are now leading to jack-booted-thuggery.

....

The particular wording I'm annoyed at today is the description of drone strikes as the "targeted killing of American citizens"."

Read on, MacDuff.

"We're at war. In a war, you kill your enemies. The fact that your enemies who are members or leaders of a foreign terrorist organization operating overseas are American is only incidental to the fact that they are terrorists.

We didn't kill Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan because they were Americans. We killed them because they were terrorists.

This wasn't a case of the President of the United States killing a criminal in lieu of a trial. These were enemy combatants. You kill your enemies, you don't bring them to trial.

The fact that your enemy is an American citizen is irrelevant." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

Simple truths. It's troubling that they need to be stated, and re-stated (and re-stated yet again) but that's why they pay us bloggers the big (non-existent) bucks.

(After all, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it.)

"The idea that we are going to fly FBI agents to Yemen, read members of al Qaeda their rights, and then bring them to Virginia for a trial is sheer fantasy. It's completely and utterly disconnected to reality.

Yet that is what you are arguing for if you oppose targeted assassinations or military trials. Unless, of course, you are arguing that the US should do nothing about jihadi terrorism, even when that terrorism is directly targeted against the United States.

Before 9/11 the policy of the US was to treat terrorists as criminals. After the USS Cole and African embassy bombings, President Clinton sent in the FBI to investigate.

Yeah, that did a lot of good. 9/11 was an outgrowth of that policy position.

So, if you want to go back to that model then, by all means, keep advocating for an end to drone strikes and military commissions.

And when we're hit on a mass scale like we were on 9/11 again, I'll blame you and your legalistic ideology in regards to notions of civil liberties for the atrocity." (Emphasis in original text. - CAA.)

2/1

re: "In Lieu of Rough Handling"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") posed some questions of lawfulness and Constitutionality.

Money quote(s):

"(S)econd thoughts on the killing of an American citizen abroad by agents of the US government"

Naturally, as a consular officer the notion of killing an Amcit is so far outside the pale that it mega-boggles the mind.

From a more soldierly, laws of land warfare-minded, perspective it's certainly possible to envision such as thing in terms of inadvertently killing an Amcit in the course of combat operations, either as an adversarial combatant (i.e., the enemy) or as a collateral (unintended) casualty.

After all, stopping to examine one's opponents passports or citizenship status prior to engaging by fire and maneuver just doesn't come up in any standard format for an operations order that CAA has ever encountered.

Nonetheless, when standoff weapons (such as drone-launched missiles) are so accurate as to constitute sharpshooting and to (finally) give some semantic substance to the term "surgical strike," we must take a pause and consideration in cases where the U.S. citizenship status of an enemy belligerent is known (and, indeed, is a substantial component of the danger he presents to us).

"From a constitutional perspective, we’ve definitely crossed a line here. We sidestepped up to it over the years, little by little. And then vaulted over it in the dark, while no one was looking. It’d be nice if one of the aforementioned, named gentlemen explained to us where the new line has been drawn, if it has been. And if it has not, it would also be useful for a people of laws, governed by express consent, to know who will have a hand in drawing it."

10/11

re: "Not the Change They Were Looking For"

Lex at Neptunus Lex ("The unbearable lightness of Lex. Enjoy!") delineated his comfort, and discomfort, zones regarding the "Triple-A" killing.

Money quote(s):

"I am, in the main, comfortable with the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yemeni-born American citizen who coached Nidal Hasan through his killing spree in Fort Hood, amongst other crimes and misdemeanors. In an ideal world, he would have been isolated, seized, arrested, Mirandized and brought to justice. In the end, the result would very likely have been the same, apart from the vastly greater sums being expended in security, trial, appeals, not to mention care and feeding while on death row. (All of it spent for the opportunity to congratulate ourselves for our moral superiority and more refined social consciousness as contrasted to the terrorists we grapple with, if not the societies which gave them birth. Because that would require the ability to make distinctions between one thing and another, which many of us have lost the ability to do, sing kumbaya.)

But we don’t live in an ideal world." (Bold typeface added for emphasis. - CAA.)

You lie down with with terrorists at war with the U.S., and you get up with a Hellfire missile. Or don't get up, as the case may be.

"All that said, I do find myself a little queasy with the process by which candidates are nominated for death by lethal explosion"

Yeah. I can see that. It's one thing to targeteer a bombing raid on an enemy military headquarters, and if there's an American traitor on the premises that just his bad luck.

It's a bit of another thing when the target itself is in fact a himself.

This is a logical consequence of our surgical strike capability achieving such fine granularity that it's now micro-surgery.

"So a “secret panel” of “senior government officials” using no process defined by law “informs the president of its decisions”. That president’s role in approving those decisions is “fuzzy”, but at the output end people – American citizens – get got.

I don’t want to go all slippery slope here, but that just doesn’t quite seem to be in concert with the Constitution that I swore an oath to support and defend."

I wouldn't describe this targeteering scheme as being unConstitutional so much as being perhaps extra-Constitutional, and even that may be a stretch. Presumably the JAG folks have been over this backwards and forwards; it'd be a good deed of some of their advice could be released to the public.

"Now unidentified “government officials” are not just spying on people, but morting them, with no controlling law, no judicial review and “fuzzy” oversight.

I just don’t know."

It seems to me that the president, as commander-in-chief has delegated this targeteering function to certain of his lawfully appointed subordinates. All well and good. After all, most warfighting and commanding is (or should be) delegated by the CinC.

They make a recommendation, and then president, this time in his role as "chief magistrate," gets a chance to over-rule it, or not. Makes a certain amount of sense, but my theoretizing is just CAA spitballing here; what did the in-house JAGs have to say about this? What's the process and who designed it?

10/6

re: "BREAKING: NATO Airstrike On Gaddafi Home Kills Son But Not Colonel Crazy"

DrewM. at Ace of Spades HQ questions the targeting.

Money quote(s):

"So, I'm still unclear if the purpose of the NATO mission is to topple the regime and/or kill Gaddafi or just protect civilians. I'm not a military expert but I'm not clear on how bombing someone's home protects civilians hundreds of miles away. Actually, I do (no Gaddafi, no danger) but I was told by the President that killing Gaddafi wasn't part of our military strategy. It's almost like Obama and the rest of the NATO leaders are saying one thing but acting very differently."

&

"Now suddenly talking out of your ass about policy and military goals is a good thing, Smart Diplomacy one might say.

Let's just be honest...we want this guy dead and we're going to kill him. Is that so hard?"

_____

Interestingly, the casualty list from this attack needs an update:

"Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi revealed that Col. Muammar Qaddafi’s son was not really killed by a NATO attack on the Gheddafi family compound. He says that intelligence information indicates that Khadafi fils was not even in Libya at the time of the attack, and that the Colonel’s grandchildren were also unharmed."

_____

Hat tip to Baron Bodissey at Gates of Vienna ("At the siege of Vienna in 1683 Islam seemed poised to overrun Christian Europe.We are in a new phase of a very old war.").

re: "You mean, now?"

Richard Fernandez at Belmont Club shared some observations on the disconnect between policy and practice.

Money quote(s):

"President Obama has failed to lay the legal groundwork for acts of targeted killing of “non-state enemies of the United States” and thereby risks impaling itself on the horns of a dilemma of his own making. By relying on “international humanitarian law” instead of asserting its own legal doctrine, the Obama administration will eventually find that it cannot defend the United States without condemning itself by the legal standard it has embraced."

Ouch.

"The really interesting thing about the administration’s increase in the use of targeted hits, its unwillingness to take custody of prisoners and indeed to hand them over to people like the Pakistani military; and indeed its declining ability to take any enemy combatant alive at all is that it is rooted not in what Anderson called Dick Cheney’s “brutish, simplistic” determination to defend America, but in President Obama’s desire to live up to the highest standards of International Humanitarian Law (IHL)."

That would the the Law of Unintended Consequences in operation.

Remember: you can't do just one thing.

&

"The problem goes back to the inability of political leadership to declare war and name an enemy. America is at war yet not at war. It is fighting an enemy, but none are named. It is fighting a something which respects no rules by applying the full protection of the Constitution to enemy combatants. And the predictable result of these contradictions is that it is tying itself into philosophical knots."