Radical American Cleric Anwar al-Awlaki Killed

[Vympel]

Look, if you aren't going to bother reading the thread to get the answers, why should I bother responding to you?

I'm talking to you, not an old thread. If you're too dumb to clearly enunciate your position in an efficient and timely manner by yourself, then you're clearly too stupid to be talking about this at all.

"Sigh"

This is for people who aren't Vympel who wan't to learn how not to argue.

So you've got no response to what I just said? Good.

Anyway, the reason I brought up Glenn's second article was to show the man wasn't reliable and to see if Vympel was intellectually honest. It is not a refutal of the claim that the US staged the Iranian terror plot. Vympel responces have been... illuminating.

And you're tryng to teach me how to argue? This is just a fallacious poisoning of the well - the mere fact that you don't agree with Glenn Greenwald's views doesn't make everything he says automatically wrong and not credible.

Lets summarize the position's briefly.
I believe the killing of Bin Ladin and Anwar are legally different than the Iranian plot. Vympel does not and says that Glenn considered the differences. Lets go over it again since Vympel was to dense to get the hint.

There are several things logically flawed with this. Lets go over them one by one.

First paragraph

Glenn is trying to show that the Iran and American actions are comparable... so he compares the two American examples.

You nitwit, that's not Glenn Greenwald, thats the article he's quoting. And his noting the US reserves the right not to cooperate with other countries in assassinating people on their soil is obviously a relevant issue.

Additionally he claims that the rationale given in one case doesn't count because it wasn't given in the other case.

Which should be obvious to any idiot, because if it was viewed as essential, they would've done it.

This does not show that the American and Iranian actions are legally the same.

He never said they are "legally the same", you dumbshit. That's your personal standard.

In fact, the reason Vympel quoted this part eludes me.

To point out the entire thing Greenwald was talking about in his blog entry.

Glenn states there is a "big difference". Of course he doesn't say what that difference is. The reason of course is that would undermine his entire case of hypocricy.

Are you fucking illiterate? The "big difference" is right there in what you quoted.

For those who don't know, one action is legitimate under international law and the other isn't.

Excuse me? Justify this claim. What international law, specifically?

The reason this "big difference" that he brushes over is important is that for his case of hypocricy to be true, both would have to be in violation of international law OR both would have to be legitimate under international law.

Let's remind you once again that "legally the same" is something you made up.

Of course, since the man is completely intellectually dishonest he then claims that "nations should think hard about the example it gives". For those of you who are leftists don't do this. It comes of as being a santimonious prick who is making a position that is unfalsifiable and blames the US for anything that goes wrong.

ROFLMAO. Thank you, dumbfuck who can't understand an argument for shit. You've not shown any "intellectual dishonesty" in what was said, you've merely asserted it.

That you are such a drooling nitwit that you cannot conceive that other countries might appeal to the US' example and abrogate for themselves the right to carry out state-sponsored assassinations at will in any country, irrespective of whether consent is granted or not (as the Bin Laden assassination provides precedent for) is your own problem.

For those of you curious why this is wrong, Glenn is claiming that legal actions should not be under taken because they will inspire illegal actions... amoung people who are not in any way target by the previous legal actions. There is no connection between the US action and the Iranian one.

Luckily, this "oh, it was legal" is a completely unjustified claim and your imposing that strawman on Glenn Greenwald is transparently dishonest.

Glenn continues his intellectual dishonesty. What the US has conducted is legal under international law

Bullfuck.

so it isn't the US behaving as it wishes with no regard to the globe- in fact it gets even more hilarious when you realize he previously admits we were in Yemen at the behest of their government. It gets even more galling since he implied that our actions were legal in the second paragraph. The man has zero scruples.

There is also another fun weasel word "tricky moral questions". Because when you can't come up with a concrete claim, always cite moral questions. Why is abortion wrong? Tricky moral questions. Stem cell research? Tricky moral questions.

If you need the 'tricky moral question' of carrying out extra-judicial assassinations of your own citizens far away from any battlefield without a shred of due process spelt out to you, you really are beyond hope. Cretin.

Vympel brought up ideological blinders and for that I am grateful. After all, it is so nice for an opponent to explain to you why they are wrong.

So lets look at the origional claim by Vympel about Glenn's action. Did Glenn consider the legal differences between the Iranian and American actions. NO. The closest he got was saying there was "big differences"... but than he continued with the claim the US actions were examples of the US doing whatever it wants. This shows that he does not consider them legally different.

Vympel will of course not be swayed by this. He considers killing terrorists "state sponsered assassination", a deliberately loaded word he uses because he can't argue the merit. Ironically he has previously brought up "poisoning the well", but the thing about ideological blinders is you can't see them.

I like it how you bitch and moan about "state-sponsored assassination" when its an entirely accurate description for the USA's conduct. I'm sorry it doesn't sound Freedom Fries enough for you, but that's really not my problem. If you want to discuss it on the merits, I'm fine to have that conversation.

Of course, you're far too stupid to do so, since you can't read a single blog article to understand its full context, including the linkbacks to prior posts where he goes on at length about the very uncontroversial fact that the US abrogates for itself the right to kill anyone in any country anytime it wants purely on its own say-so, with or without anyone's consent.

Note, "having that conversation" is not the same as "read this thread".

[Thanas]

As to the topic at hand, a few relevations:

- the drone strike did not just kill Al Awlaki, but another american citizen as well.
- I reject the argument that the US acted in self defence here because no evidence has been posted that he represented a threat and no such evidence is forthcoming.
- Again, a lot of people seem to be missing the point, which is:

The central question in the death of American extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is not his innocence. That really misses the point. Awlaki was the only publicly known name on a covert list of American citizens the US government believes it can legally kill without charge or trial. Awlaki's killing can't be viewed as a one-off situation; what we're talking about is the establishment of a precedent by which a US president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process. Rules that get established on the basis that they only apply to the "bad guys" tend to be ripe for abuse, particularly when they're secret.

Terrorism, as compared to traditional warfare, naturally brings up different legal and moral issues. Chief among these is the fact that because terrorists don't wear uniforms, they're hard to identify as terrorists. Those kinds of questions become somewhat easier in a theater of active military combat. No one's questioning, for example, whether or not Awlaki could be legally killed if he were in Afghanistan holding a rifle and firing at a US soldier, simply because he happens to be a citizen. It gets much harder when you start talking about killing people in countries like Yemen where the US can't be said to be fighting anything resembling a traditional military conflict. Courts become much more important in this context precisely because they help credibly determine who is actually a combatant and who isn't.

Uncritically endorsing the administration's authority to kill Awlaki on the basis that he was likely guilty, or an obviously terrible human being, is short-sighted. Because what we're talking about here is not whether Awlaki in particular deserved to die. What we're talking about is trusting the president with the authority to decide, with the minor bureaucratic burden of asking "specific permission," whether an American citizen is or isn't a terrorist and then quietly rendering a lethal sanction against them.

The question is not whether or not you trust that President Obama made the right decision here. It's whether or not you trust him, and all future presidents, to do so—and to do so in complete secrecy.

So far, the only evidence I have seen are his own words, which are basically enemy propaganda. What chocula missed is the question how much propagandists now count as enemy combatants, especially in an organizations as diverse and bereft of an organizational structure as Al-Quida. That is why I made the Fox News analogy - they make propganda for the US, call for attacks on enemies etc. What is the differentiating criteria here?


Even further:

If Awlaki was in fact the architect of terrorism attacks inside the United States, as officials maintain he was, then perhaps his demise is to be welcomed. But we don't really know, do we? There was no transparent, legal, reviewable process by which he was placed on the list of those targeted for killing by the U.S. government. There was no judicial procedure, nor any public airing of the charges against him. He had no opportunity to respond to specific allegations.

Even in wartime, the killing of a U.S. citizen — or anyone else — who poses no immediate danger is morally obnoxious. It also is impossible to harmonize with the U.S. Constitution. The 5th Amendment says that no citizen should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. If Awlaki had been arrested in America, rather than assassinated in Yemen, he would have had an incontestable right to a trial.

The Obama administration's interest in Awlaki is understandable. The charismatic preacher, an American-born Muslim, is said to have incited the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and may have directed a plot to blow up a cargo plane bound for Chicago. He also was in touch with Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at the Ft. Hood Army base.

We understand the government's conundrum. In this dangerous new world, our enemies don't wear uniforms, threats cross national borders, and an order given abroad can quickly lead to devastation at home. The U.S. has struggled for a decade with how to safeguard people without crossing moral lines or violating individual rights.

But if the United States is going to continue down the troubling road of state-sponsored assassination, the government should, at the very least, provide a clear understanding of the criteria used to decide who should be placed on the target list. And there must be some form of judicial review of those decisions; why should a judge's approval be required to place a wiretap on a suspected terrorist but not to kill him? Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has detained many alleged terrorists, only for courts to discover that the evidence against them was unreliable or wrong.

Last year, Awlaki's father asked a federal judge to rule that the United States may not assassinate an American citizen outside a war zone "unless he is found to present a concrete, specific and imminent threat to life or physical safety, and there are no means other than lethal force" to neutralize the threat. The judge declined, saying the issue was a political question best left to the president. But President Obama should be pressed to abide by those guidelines.

The war on terror is not a free-for-all in which the United States may behave as it wishes without accountability or adherence to principle. We would have been pleased if Awlaki could have been captured and brought to this country for trial, because the promise of due process is a fundamental, bedrock American value.

Source is latimes.com.

[Thanas]

How's this for collateral damage, btw?

And this pretty much destroys the legal rationale put forward by some in this thread.

[MarshalPurnell]

How's this for collateral damage, btw?

From your other article:

The memorandum did assert that other limitations on the use of force under the laws of war — like avoiding the use of disproportionate force that would increase the possibility of civilian deaths — would constrain any operation against Mr. Awlaki.

That apparently constrained the attack when it finally came. Details about Mr. Awlaki’s location surfaced about a month ago, American officials have said, but his hunters delayed the strike until he left a village and was on a road away from populated areas.

The military is obligated to limit civilian casualties in the course of operations. Nothing in the memo you cited says that no civilian casualties could be sustained in the course of dealing with al-Awlaki, only that, as per the usual rules of war, efforts be taken to limit them. If al-Awlaki were with a group of Al Qaeda operatives and the only chance to hit him was with that group, then it would be perfectly legal to kill him as long as disproportionate civilian casualties were not registered. Which is what the drone operator did by waiting for him to leave the village he was hiding in. And as Samir Khan was yet another open member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula his status as a "civilian" is rather ambiguous.

And this pretty much destroys the legal rationale put forward by some in this thread.

"The legal analysis, in essence, concluded that Mr. Awlaki could be legally killed, if it was not feasible to capture him, because intelligence agencies said he was taking part in the war between the United States and Al Qaeda and posed a significant threat to Americans, as well as because Yemeni authorities were unable or unwilling to stop him."

Uh, no, it doesn't. It is conservative in its reasoning, but it reinforces the fundamental argument made all over this thread. Congress authorized military force against Al Qaeda, al-Awlaki was a self-declared member of Al Qaeda operating in a war zone where capturing outside of combat was impossible, ergo he was a legitimate military target. It limits the circumstances whereby al-Awlaki could be killed rather than captured, but for the record, the US doesn't shoot off Hellfire drones at Al Qaeda members operating in, say, Germany. No one in this thread has said that al-Awlaki being a member of Al Qaeda meant that he could be killed outright in all circumstances, only that the particular circumstances of his case made it possible. The tools of warfare can only be used in a war zone, so the memo certainly doesn't say anything original there.

Other than that the memo says exactly what has been argued in this thread the entire time; that the US Congress authorized military force against Al Qaeda, that al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda, that he was operating in a warzone, and therefore could be engaged with lethal military force. And the reliance of the legal reasoning on those particular, limited circumstances only makes it further clear that the slippery slope arguments and speculations crowding the thread have no basis in reality. The only room for debate is the part is whether or not al-Awlaki was a "significant threat," for which there is insufficient public data to assess- though even if he had no operational role, he certainly occupied a "leadership position" (as did say, Goebbels) in AQAP and his propaganda made it clear he was "pushing it to focus on trying to attack the United States again." That he was a force inside the organization that had already tried to commit several other terrorist attacks on the US influencing it to keep trying could probably meet the legal threshold of "ongoing threat" even if al-Awlaki did not take any overt role in planning at all.

[Alkaloid]

Like when? You mean like during the Civil War? Because that is literally the only time that leaps to mind in which the US has been involved in an ongoing armed conflict which was even arguably the product of civil unrest.

What will it look like in the future, if this thinking is applied to civil unrest in the US in the future?

Like when? You mean like in a redux version of the Civil War?

Or civil unrest, like what is happening on Wall street at the moment. Because that is the precedent that is being set, that the state, in this case the US, can declare itself to be at war with a private group, and is then legally allowed to attack and kill members of that group wherever found without trial. If tomorrow the occupy wall st movement protest site gets violent and police officers are injured, the US government could (not will, and I know it's unlikely) declare itself to be at war with OWS, and any member of that group can be killed without trial by a predator drone, as long as civilian casualties are minimised. That is the precedent that has been set.

[Samuel]

So Vympel, ever going to provide evidence for your claim the rest of the world knows this is clearly fake? You seem to have a bad habit of ignoring inconvient questions as so far you have provided two blogs... both of which are Americans!

I'm talking to you, not an old thread. If you're too dumb to clearly enunciate your position in an efficient and timely manner by yourself, then you're clearly too stupid to be talking about this at all.

Or, the position was repeatedly enunciated in the old thread and I don't like having to repeat myself. I looked at your worthless blog posts, but apparently it is too much effort for you to read something I provide.

[quote="Vympel]This is just a fallacious poisoning of the well - the mere fact that you don't agree with Glenn Greenwald's views doesn't make everything he says automatically wrong and not credible.[/quote]

Anyway, the reason I brought up Glenn's second article was to show the man wasn't reliable and to see if Vympel was intellectually honest. It is not a refutal of the claim that the US staged the Iranian terror plot. Vympel responces have been... illuminating.

The reason I bring this up is you are the one going on about trust. Another way to look at it is false positives. If someone has a history of finding false positives, then they aren't very relaible are they?

You still haven't provided a reason why I should take him with any more salt than Fox.

This is him saying the two are the same. I can get more from the article if you want, but I figured the opening paragraph was the way to go.

So much for your failed attempt to take Greenwald out of context by not quoting the whole thing.

Vympel posts paragraph.
Sam reposts paragraph.

You nitwit, that's not Glenn Greenwald, thats the article he's quoting.

He never said they are "legally the same", you dumbshit. That's your personal standard.

No, that is the requirement for hypocricy. If American actions are legal and Iranian actions are not, it is perfectly fine to be outraged by Iranian actions.

I'm not going to respond to the rest of your post. It isn't because it is a combination of lies and intentional distortions, but for a simpler reason- you don't seem to understand logic.

Lets me remind you:

This is him saying the two are the same. I can get more from the article if you want, but I figured the opening paragraph was the way to go.

So much for your failed attempt to take Greenwald out of context by not quoting the whole thing.

I proceded to take apart the paragraph you posted. The proper responce is not to attack my analysis, but to show how the article does in fact say the two are different.

This is why I said my responce wasn't directed to you. You don't understand logical argumentation. It isn't possible to have a discussion without someone who doesn't understand these basics.

I'd appreciate it if you could come up with something of actual substance instead of taking what I say out of context with snips and snipes. Of course, you aren't going to do that. You view all opposition as being under ideological blinders, so why should you extend them the barest of courtesys?

I believe there's a profound difference between "reactionary knee-jerk biased" assholes who immediately start shrieking about starting a war, and "reactionary knee-jerk biased" assholes who distrust their government and question the competence of the intelligence it's provided because, uh, the last time it ended up with thousands of their own soldiers dead in some shitty godforsaken war - which is something the latter loathes and wishes to avoid, but the former embraces tightly while touching their tralala?

Shit, if your people had more of the latter back in 2003...

Yes, but you have to admit there is a beautiful irony here. I was against the Iraq war on the grounds it would kill lots of innocent people. Now, when the government is deliberately targeting individuals so as not to kill lots of innocent people, you have people attacking it for that!

The US reaps what it sows. Anybody who thought that invading countries without consent and pumping people full of lead would have no consequences whatsoever is an idiot.

Of course other nations will go "but you gave us carte blanche to do whatever you want, because you do it yourself".

You do realize this is the Saudi ambassador to the US, right? This is not the US reaping what it sows anymore than China's oppression of its Muslim minorities is Al-Queda reaping what it sowed.

The intense doubt seems especially odd to me since we're not seeing much sign from the US government that there's any intention to use this as manufactured justification to war in order to get rid of Iranian weapons of mass assassination or whatever. Why would they make up a story and bring it to a public trial without having some important response in mind?

I conclude that they are being dishonest, and that this is Obama’s turn to wag the dog as he faces defeat at Romney’s well-manicured hands next year this time.

That's how badly US credibility is shot.

I don't get this. The US has repeatedly lied throughout its history. Why is now any different. Did the Gulf of Tonkin, Bay of Pigs and our UN appearence or Iran Contra all go down the memory hole?

[Count Chocula]

Thanas, you're full of shit. The fight of the US, and Yemen, and Uganda, and to an extent Pakistan, and others I've forgotten against Al-Quaeda is NOT nation state war. It is not a matter of civilian law enforcement, no matter how much Bill Clinton's staff tried to portray it back in the 1990s. It's a strange conflict against a transnational, terrorist group with military capability. US and international law rulings have decided that ANY and ALL Al-Quaeda personnel are legitimate targets. They don't have to be trigger-pullers, if they are AQ members they are dead men walking. Period dot, full stop. In Awlaki's case, the USG went to IMO extraordinary lengths to verify their target and minimize non-affiliated civilian casualties after an unsuccessful capture attempt by Yemeni forces! MarshallPurnell lays it out in terms even you can understand. The horse is dead; why do you keep beating it?

Or civil unrest, like what is happening on Wall street at the moment. Because that is the precedent that is being set, that the state, in this case the US, can declare itself to be at war with a private group, and is then legally allowed to attack and kill members of that group wherever found without trial. If tomorrow the occupy wall st movement protest site gets violent and police officers are injured, the US government could (not will, and I know it's unlikely) declare itself to be at war with OWS, and any member of that group can be killed without trial by a predator drone, as long as civilian casualties are minimised. That is the precedent that has been set.

You too are full of shit. Number one, these protestors are not dedicated to overthrowing America, but are pissed off at groups of people within it. While that MAY earn them a terrorist group sobriquet along the lines of the ELF, KKK or maybe Branch Davidians, that does NOT in any way, legally or morally, put them in the category of AQ. One of the Occupy Wall Street organizers is the Canadian company Adbusters. Does that mean the US will declare war on Canada if the protests turn lethal? Hell no. See, the OWS movement is happening on US soil, they're not a terrorist group, they can be arrested because (natch) they're IN the US, they can be charged with civilian offenses if desired, and oh yeah they haven't killed thousands of Americans!

If tomorrow the occupy wall st movement protest site gets violent and police officers are injured, the US government could (not will, and I know it's unlikely) declare itself to be at war with OWS, and any member of that group can be killed without trial by a predator drone, as long as civilian casualties are minimised.

Jesus Christ, Alkaloid, pull your head out of your ass.

[Alkaloid]

US will declare war on Canada if the protests turn lethal?

No, why would they. The US feels it can declare war on adbusters itself, why bother with Canada?

Hell no. See, the OWS movement is happening on US soil, they're not a terrorist group, they can be arrested because (natch) they're IN the US,

Movements aligned with OWS exist in other countries as well, much like the various aligned AQ's.

and oh yeah they haven't killed thousands of Americans!

Nothing about any precedents being set mean any number of Americans need to be killed for them to apply. Member of the organisation, yep, not necessarily a combatant? Still a legit target.

Jesus Christ, Alkaloid, pull your head out of your ass.

The precedent has been set, Chocula. Just because its unlikely doesn't mean people aren't right to be fucking concerned about it.

[Samuel]

Nothing about any precedents being set mean any number of Americans need to be killed for them to apply. Member of the organisation, yep, not necessarily a combatant? Still a legit target.

That is members of a groups. For Al-Queda it was designated a terrorist group by the UN in 1999 after they managed to kill 223 people in a wave of African embassy bombings.

[Count Chocula]

Just because its unlikely doesn't mean people aren't right to be fucking concerned about it.

Sorry Alkaloid and all, I know I'm spamming, but I just can't resist:

You might have a Hellfire dropping on you right now! TAKE COVER!1!1!1!1!

Concession accepted.

[Alkaloid]

That is members of a groups. For Al-Queda it was designated a terrorist group by the UN in 1999 after they managed to kill 223 people in a wave of African embassy bombings.

I'm not sure where you're coming from? I stated that yes, it would have to be a member of an organisation the US had declared itself at war with. UN and US lists of terrorist groups are not the same thing.

You might have a Hellfire dropping on you right now! TAKE COVER!1!1!1!1!

Or I might get hit by a meteorite tomorrow. Or be killed by an earthquake. Or be hit by a car. You may notice that all these things have something in common. None of them is legal under any ones law. If I'm a member of an organisation the US has declared itself at war with, in any position, I can, legally under US law, be killed at any time. Can you see the difference?

Concession accepted.

I'm sorry, what part of your bullshit argument led you to believe I would concede anything?

[MarshalPurnell]

If you read the memo, killing al-Awlaki sets a precedent that you can kill American citizens who are self-declared members of terrorist groups;

1. That the United States Congress has authorized the use of military force against.
2. That are operating in a war zone where capture entails so much risk as to be impossible.
3. That intelligence indicates pose a threat to the security of the United States.
4. And only if you act in such a way as to minimize the risk to civilian bystanders associated with the particular military action.

There is nothing in the precedent authorizing the use of military force outside of a war zone. Unless you have the second coming of the Confederacy, which legitimately imperils the authority and ability of legitimate domestic authorities to maintain basic order and national sovereignty, the US would not come close to meeting the circumstances of being a war zone where capture is functionally impossible. For that matter other countries with functioning law enforcement and control over their own territory do not meet that standard either, so we could not have killed al-Awlaki if he had decided to go to, say, Germany instead of Yemen, since the ability to have him extradited and brought to trial would have existed.

This was very much a limited, highly particular precedent that has no bearing on the operations of domestic law. Any potential scenario where it would matter, the US itself is a war zone or the slippery slope involved is more like a drop straight down.

[Count Chocula]

If I'm a member of an organisation the US has declared itself at war with, in any position, I can, legally under US law, be killed at any time. Can you see the difference?

OK, I'm upgrading my invective. You are a God damned idiot. Lest you forget, it was Al Quaeda, under OBL's imprimatur, that declared jihad or holy war on the US and the West. Everything we've done, including Awlaki's killing, has been in reaction to them. This was a carefully considered decision, as has been discussed and beaten into the ground ITT.

Do you not understand sarcasm or mockery? You're sounding like a CD that's skipping over the same track.

[Master of Ossus]

Thanas, do us all a favor and read the fucking thread.

As to the topic at hand, a few relevations:

- the drone strike did not just kill Al Awlaki, but another american citizen as well.

Yes. This was discussed at considerable length, earlier in the thread. Thanks for that "revelation."

- I reject the argument that the US acted in self defence here because no evidence has been posted that he represented a threat and no such evidence is forthcoming.

The self defense claim is much broader than you are implicitly claiming it to be. National self-defense requires that there be a group engaged in an ongoing armed struggle against that nation (here: Al Qaeda). Members of that group are legitimate military targets. Since the UNSC had declared al Awlaki to be a member of Al Qaeda, that is definitive insofar as national action is concerned.

- Again, a lot of people seem to be missing the point, which is:

The central question in the death of American extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is not his innocence. That really misses the point.

This part is true. Awlaki was never accused of having committed a crime.

Awlaki was the only publicly known name on a covert list of American citizens the US government believes it can legally kill without charge or trial. Awlaki's killing can't be viewed as a one-off situation; what we're talking about is the establishment of a precedent by which a US president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process. Rules that get established on the basis that they only apply to the "bad guys" tend to be ripe for abuse, particularly when they're secret.

This is absurd. It's not like the US is claiming some new power which is unprecedented in international law. Indeed, the US went to significant lengths in this particular case to conform its actions with international law. The US is not "establishing" some new rule--it is only operating within the clear bounds of existing rules.

Terrorism, as compared to traditional warfare, naturally brings up different legal and moral issues. Chief among these is the fact that because terrorists don't wear uniforms, they're hard to identify as terrorists. Those kinds of questions become somewhat easier in a theater of active military combat. No one's questioning, for example, whether or not Awlaki could be legally killed if he were in Afghanistan holding a rifle and firing at a US soldier, simply because he happens to be a citizen. It gets much harder when you start talking about killing people in countries like Yemen where the US can't be said to be fighting anything resembling a traditional military conflict. Courts become much more important in this context precisely because they help credibly determine who is actually a combatant and who isn't.

So... why isn't the UNSC's resolution on the matter conclusive, for the purposes of state action?

Uncritically endorsing the administration's authority to kill Awlaki on the basis that he was likely guilty, or an obviously terrible human being, is short-sighted. Because what we're talking about here is not whether Awlaki in particular deserved to die. What we're talking about is trusting the president with the authority to decide, with the minor bureaucratic burden of asking "specific permission," whether an American citizen is or isn't a terrorist and then quietly rendering a lethal sanction against them.

This totally misses the point: Awlaki was never accused of committing a crime. It's not an issue of criminal "guilt" or innocence. It's a matter of whether or not he was a legitimate military target.

The question is not whether or not you trust that President Obama made the right decision here. It's whether or not you trust him, and all future presidents, to do so—and to do so in complete secrecy.

That's not remotely what anyone is claiming, but I guess it's a decent enough strawman to fool the credulous.

So far, the only evidence I have seen are his own words, which are basically enemy propaganda.

What about the UN Security Council? Is that "enemy propaganda?"

What chocula missed is the question how much propagandists now count as enemy combatants, especially in an organizations as diverse and bereft of an organizational structure as Al-Quida. That is why I made the Fox News analogy - they make propganda for the US, call for attacks on enemies etc. What is the differentiating criteria here?

Uh... among others... Fox News is not engaged in an ongoing armed conflict?

Even further:

If Awlaki was in fact the architect of terrorism attacks inside the United States, as officials maintain he was, then perhaps his demise is to be welcomed. But we don't really know, do we? There was no transparent, legal, reviewable process by which he was placed on the list of those targeted for killing by the U.S. government. There was no judicial procedure, nor any public airing of the charges against him. He had no opportunity to respond to specific allegations.

Even in wartime, the killing of a U.S. citizen — or anyone else — who poses no immediate danger is morally obnoxious. It also is impossible to harmonize with the U.S. Constitution. The 5th Amendment says that no citizen should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. If Awlaki had been arrested in America, rather than assassinated in Yemen, he would have had an incontestable right to a trial.

Every single thing here is based on the false premise that there is some underlying requirement to grant due process to legitimate military targets. I have discussed this at length earlier in the thread, but this is a totally backwards way of examining the issue: a legitimate military target is not entitled to some sort of judicial review of his status. That's part of what it means to be a legitimate military target. The rules of what is a legitimate military target are designed to be applied quickly, in the field, by people with little or no legal training. They are meant to be easy, but they are also meant to be decisive. The US, under the IHL, is not required to warn a legitimate military target, to pause and give an opportunity to surrender, or to try to effect a capture. Legitimate military targets are legitimate military targets.

I agree that had he been arrested, he would have had the right to a trial. But he wasn't arrested--he was killed in a military operation that was directed against him. There is no way to analogize the two situations and to claim that what is right in one circumstance is also right in the other.

The Obama administration's interest in Awlaki is understandable. The charismatic preacher, an American-born Muslim, is said to have incited the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and may have directed a plot to blow up a cargo plane bound for Chicago. He also was in touch with Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at the Ft. Hood Army base.

We understand the government's conundrum. In this dangerous new world, our enemies don't wear uniforms, threats cross national borders, and an order given abroad can quickly lead to devastation at home. The U.S. has struggled for a decade with how to safeguard people without crossing moral lines or violating individual rights.

But if the United States is going to continue down the troubling road of state-sponsored assassination, the government should, at the very least, provide a clear understanding of the criteria used to decide who should be placed on the target list. And there must be some form of judicial review of those decisions; why should a judge's approval be required to place a wiretap on a suspected terrorist but not to kill him? Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has detained many alleged terrorists, only for courts to discover that the evidence against them was unreliable or wrong.

False analogy fallacy. Had Awlaki been captured then an entirely different process would have applied, just as POWs are treated differently than enemy soldiers in the field. Why does this article have so much trouble with simple distinctions?

Moreover, there cannot be judicial review for these decisions in the form that the article appears to demand. You cannot have a judge standing around, looking over a soldier's shoulder, telling him when he's entitled to fire or not. The soldier must be able to exercise his judgment in determining whether or not a target is a legitimate military one or not, just as a police officer must be entitled to decide when he has to use deadly force in defense of himself and others. The rules defining legitimate military targets are specifically designed by the ICRC to be useful for these circumstances.

As for the US not providing "a clear understanding of the criteria used to decide who should be placed on the target list," that would be International Humanitarian Law, and its definition of what is or is not a legitimate military target. In what possible way do these require even further clarification?

Last year, Awlaki's father asked a federal judge to rule that the United States may not assassinate an American citizen outside a war zone "unless he is found to present a concrete, specific and imminent threat to life or physical safety, and there are no means other than lethal force" to neutralize the threat. The judge declined, saying the issue was a political question best left to the president. But President Obama should be pressed to abide by those guidelines.

The war on terror is not a free-for-all in which the United States may behave as it wishes without accountability or adherence to principle. We would have been pleased if Awlaki could have been captured and brought to this country for trial, because the promise of due process is a fundamental, bedrock American value.

Source is latimes.com.

And here we see the even stupider contradiction in the article: after demanding some process of judicial review for such actions it suddenly turns around and concludes that there was a judicial examination of the case. And guess what? The judge agreed with the government! Awlaki was given due process, but the law applicable to him is very different from the criminal statutes on which the entire article rests its false analogy.

How's this for collateral damage, btw?

And this pretty much destroys the legal rationale put forward by some in this thread.

Both of these articles are based on the incredible claim that the principles of proportionality and distinction somehow require that no civilians be harmed in the making of your ongoing armed conflict.

To say that this is false, that this is not what the law compels, is an understatement. Let's look at the Geneva Convention's actual words in evaluating these claims.

Here's the Geneva Convention on distinction.

Article 51 -- Protection of the civilian population
1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.

4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:

(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;

(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or

(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate:

(a) an attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects; and

(b) an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

Here, the US has two compelling justifications for the action against al Awlaki in spite of the death of Samir Khan (which I discussed earlier in the thread that you failed to read). First, Khan is not a civilian: he is also a member of Al Qaeda. Second and perhaps more informatively, the attack was not indiscriminate and complied with international law standards of proportionality.

The attack was not indiscriminate because, it was directed specifically against him (with a precise and relatively small ordinance), and struck a single military objective. In fact, the attack was specifically delayed to prevent civilian deaths when it was postponed until Awlaki left the town in which he had been hiding.

The attack was also not disproportionate because, even if it was believed that it would cause incidental loss of civilian life it hardly seems "excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." Not only were only a very few civilians (if any) present (and, incidentally, it does seem reasonable to believe that a Hellfire missile would kill only a very limited number of people even if there were several in close proximity to the blast), but since the death of Awlaki and the destruction of AQAP leadership is considered an important objective in the War on Terror it doesn't seem "excessive" in relation to eliminating an AQAP leader.

[Master of Ossus]

Alkaloid: Same basic criticism as Thanas: READ THE FUCKING THREAD.

Or civil unrest, like what is happening on Wall street at the moment. Because that is the precedent that is being set, that the state, in this case the US, can declare itself to be at war with a private group, and is then legally allowed to attack and kill members of that group wherever found without trial.

Where's the ongoing armed conflict with "Wall street" [sic], exactly?

If tomorrow the occupy wall st movement protest site gets violent and police officers are injured, the US government could (not will, and I know it's unlikely) declare itself to be at war with OWS, and any member of that group can be killed without trial by a predator drone, as long as civilian casualties are minimised. That is the precedent that has been set.

Don't be ridiculous. Even if police officers were killed by protesters it wouldn't come close to meeting the requirements for an ongoing armed conflict. Here's what I wrote about this very subject in this very thread, quoting from the Third Geneva Convention. Let's see how these things apply to the situation you describe:

PARAGRAPH 1. -- APPLICABLE PROVISIONS

1. ' Introductory sentence -- Field of application of the Article '

A. ' Cases of armed conflict. ' What is meant by "armed conflict not of an international character"? The expression is so general, so vague, that many of the delegations feared that it might be taken to cover any act committed by force of arms -- any form of anarchy, rebellion, or even plain banditry. For example, if a handful of individuals were to rise in rebellion against the State and attack a police station, would that suffice to bring into being an armed conflict within the meaning of the Article? In order to reply to questions of this sort, it was suggested that the term "conflict" should be defined or -- and this would come to the same thing -- that a list should be given of a certain number of conditions on which the application of the Convention would depend. The idea was finally abandoned, and wisely so. Nevertheless, these different conditions, although in no way obligatory, constitute convenient criteria, and we therefore think it well to give a list drawn from the various amendments discussed; they are as follows (13):

[p.36] (1) That the Party in revolt against the de jure Government possesses an
organized military force, an authority responsible for its acts,
acting within a determinate territory and having the means of
respecting and ensuring respect for the Convention.

Both of these conditions are false: the Wall Street people seem to be too stupid to have any authority at all, let alone one which can be described as responsible for their acts. Moreover, they come nowhere close to having "an organized military force," and do not have a determinate territory nor the means of respecting and ensuring respect for the Geneva Convention.

(2) That the legal Government is obliged to have recourse to the regular
military forces against insurgents organized as military and in
possession of a part of the national territory.

This is totally false. Again, by the very nature of your hypothetical only police are involved in the injuries.

(3) (a) That the de jure Government has recognized the insurgents as
belligerents; or
(b) That it has claimed for itself the rights of a belligerent; or
(c) That it has accorded the insurgents recognition as belligerents
for the purposes only of the present Convention; or
(d) That the dispute has been admitted to the agenda of the Security
Council or the General Assembly of the United Nations as being a
threat to international peace, a breach of the peace, or an act
of aggression.

None of these apply to the circumstances you describe. The US Government would not recognize Occupy Wall Street as insurgents or belligerents, wouldn't claim the rights of a belligerent, would not accord them recognition and would not admit the matter to the UNSC or GA of the UN as a threat to peace.

(4) (a) That the insurgents have an organization purporting to have the
characteristics of a State.
(b) That the insurgent civil authority exercises de facto authority
over the population within a determinate portion of the national
territory.
(c) That the armed forces act under the direction of an organized
authority and are prepared to observe the ordinary laws of war.
(d) That the insurgent civil authority agrees to be bound by the
provisions of the Convention.

And these are false. In fact, the protesters seem to actively deny that they have these characteristics and to deliberately avoid having such characteristics. In short, your hypothetical meets none of the conditions suggested by the Geneva Convention as factors to be considered in determining whether or not there is an ongoing armed conflict. Similarly, it meets none of the conditions promulgated by the ICRC for a non-international armed conflict. There is absolutely no argument that it would even come close on any dimension.

[Alkaloid]

1. That the United States Congress has authorized the use of military force against.

Any private group the US has declared itself at war with, no argument.

3. That intelligence indicates pose a threat to the security of the United States.

Again, no argument, although US intelligence assessments of risk appear to be a bit flexible, I'm not claiming they would use the power just for kicks.

4. And only if you act in such a way as to minimize the risk to civilian bystanders associated with the particular military action.

See, this is where there needs to be a lot more specific language. What constitutes minimizing risk? Only firing 3 shells into a building as opposed to leveling a whole city block? Because I don't consider the risk from firing a missile 'minimal' to bystanders.

2. That are operating in a war zone where capture entails so much risk as to be impossible

OK. So what constitutes a war zone? I know there's unrest in Yemen, I didn't know it had gotten so bad it could be declared a civil war. A quick google indicates it hasn't, but I could be wrong. Ireland during the Troubles, would that be a war zone? Mexico City currently, is that a war zone? For that matter, if Yemen is fine with predator drone strikes on it's territory, then I would think it would be open to the idea of a small US team being sent in to extract him al la OBL, or even sending one to get him themselves in order to 'minimize risk to civilians.'

That's the real problem, that these rules that are being set in place are so loose that they could be used to justify the legality of a slew of actions that any government should not have the power to take. No, I don't expect them to be used to realistically be used to kill of protest movements tomorrow, but it leaves the door open for it to be lagally justified at any point in the future, which should be concerning.

OK, I'm upgrading my invective. You are a God damned idiot. Lest you forget, it was Al Quaeda, under OBL's imprimatur, that declared jihad or holy war on the US and the West. Everything we've done, including Awlaki's killing, has been in reaction to them. This was a carefully considered decision, as has been discussed and beaten into the ground ITT.

Where, in any of my posts did I imply that this was done for shits and giggles. Of course it was carefully considered, but the decisions that were made, starting with the US feeling it can declare war on an organisation in order to justify its actions, set some legal precedents that should not have been set.

Do you not understand sarcasm or mockery? You're sounding like a CD that's skipping over the same track.

Coming from someone whos only argument appears to be "BUT AL QUAEDA IS THE SCARY ONES"

[Block]

I know there's unrest in Yemen, I didn't know it had gotten so bad it could be declared a civil war.

It's been that bad for months. Al'Qaeda occupied several towns, supposedly at the behest of the President. The president was almost assassinated and had to flee to KSA. The two major tribal alliances are in armed conflict. It's relatively low intensity, but it's definitely a civil war.

[Samuel]

Lets get real here - if you were smart enough to come up with a coherent response, you would have done so already, instead of wasting my time with "but its in this other thread!"

You are right. International law and all the questions on its application can be summed up in a single post. Of course you think it is "blindly clear" what international law is. I was under the impression that at stardestroyer.net we believed that experts were more informed than laymen, but I guess you subscribe to the "if you believe really hard it becomes true" school of thought. There is also the fact that people bring up questions and then there are responces to them that probably follow your thought process that would be helpful in answering your objections.

Of course your immediate responce for trying to help you is to belittle me. Why should I bother helping someone who refuse to read? To give you idea, this is but one post in the thread that answers the question:

Thanas, do us all a favor and read the fucking thread.

As to the topic at hand, a few relevations:

- the drone strike did not just kill Al Awlaki, but another american citizen as well.

Yes. This was discussed at considerable length, earlier in the thread. Thanks for that "revelation."

- I reject the argument that the US acted in self defence here because no evidence has been posted that he represented a threat and no such evidence is forthcoming.

The self defense claim is much broader than you are implicitly claiming it to be. National self-defense requires that there be a group engaged in an ongoing armed struggle against that nation (here: Al Qaeda). Members of that group are legitimate military targets. Since the UNSC had declared al Awlaki to be a member of Al Qaeda, that is definitive insofar as national action is concerned.

- Again, a lot of people seem to be missing the point, which is:

The central question in the death of American extremist cleric Anwar al-Awlaki is not his innocence. That really misses the point.

This part is true. Awlaki was never accused of having committed a crime.

Awlaki was the only publicly known name on a covert list of American citizens the US government believes it can legally kill without charge or trial. Awlaki's killing can't be viewed as a one-off situation; what we're talking about is the establishment of a precedent by which a US president can secretly order the death of an American citizen unchecked by any outside process. Rules that get established on the basis that they only apply to the "bad guys" tend to be ripe for abuse, particularly when they're secret.

This is absurd. It's not like the US is claiming some new power which is unprecedented in international law. Indeed, the US went to significant lengths in this particular case to conform its actions with international law. The US is not "establishing" some new rule--it is only operating within the clear bounds of existing rules.

Terrorism, as compared to traditional warfare, naturally brings up different legal and moral issues. Chief among these is the fact that because terrorists don't wear uniforms, they're hard to identify as terrorists. Those kinds of questions become somewhat easier in a theater of active military combat. No one's questioning, for example, whether or not Awlaki could be legally killed if he were in Afghanistan holding a rifle and firing at a US soldier, simply because he happens to be a citizen. It gets much harder when you start talking about killing people in countries like Yemen where the US can't be said to be fighting anything resembling a traditional military conflict. Courts become much more important in this context precisely because they help credibly determine who is actually a combatant and who isn't.

So... why isn't the UNSC's resolution on the matter conclusive, for the purposes of state action?

Uncritically endorsing the administration's authority to kill Awlaki on the basis that he was likely guilty, or an obviously terrible human being, is short-sighted. Because what we're talking about here is not whether Awlaki in particular deserved to die. What we're talking about is trusting the president with the authority to decide, with the minor bureaucratic burden of asking "specific permission," whether an American citizen is or isn't a terrorist and then quietly rendering a lethal sanction against them.

This totally misses the point: Awlaki was never accused of committing a crime. It's not an issue of criminal "guilt" or innocence. It's a matter of whether or not he was a legitimate military target.

The question is not whether or not you trust that President Obama made the right decision here. It's whether or not you trust him, and all future presidents, to do so—and to do so in complete secrecy.

That's not remotely what anyone is claiming, but I guess it's a decent enough strawman to fool the credulous.

So far, the only evidence I have seen are his own words, which are basically enemy propaganda.

What about the UN Security Council? Is that "enemy propaganda?"

What chocula missed is the question how much propagandists now count as enemy combatants, especially in an organizations as diverse and bereft of an organizational structure as Al-Quida. That is why I made the Fox News analogy - they make propganda for the US, call for attacks on enemies etc. What is the differentiating criteria here?

Uh... among others... Fox News is not engaged in an ongoing armed conflict?

Even further:

If Awlaki was in fact the architect of terrorism attacks inside the United States, as officials maintain he was, then perhaps his demise is to be welcomed. But we don't really know, do we? There was no transparent, legal, reviewable process by which he was placed on the list of those targeted for killing by the U.S. government. There was no judicial procedure, nor any public airing of the charges against him. He had no opportunity to respond to specific allegations.

Even in wartime, the killing of a U.S. citizen — or anyone else — who poses no immediate danger is morally obnoxious. It also is impossible to harmonize with the U.S. Constitution. The 5th Amendment says that no citizen should be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law. If Awlaki had been arrested in America, rather than assassinated in Yemen, he would have had an incontestable right to a trial.

Every single thing here is based on the false premise that there is some underlying requirement to grant due process to legitimate military targets. I have discussed this at length earlier in the thread, but this is a totally backwards way of examining the issue: a legitimate military target is not entitled to some sort of judicial review of his status. That's part of what it means to be a legitimate military target. The rules of what is a legitimate military target are designed to be applied quickly, in the field, by people with little or no legal training. They are meant to be easy, but they are also meant to be decisive. The US, under the IHL, is not required to warn a legitimate military target, to pause and give an opportunity to surrender, or to try to effect a capture. Legitimate military targets are legitimate military targets.

I agree that had he been arrested, he would have had the right to a trial. But he wasn't arrested--he was killed in a military operation that was directed against him. There is no way to analogize the two situations and to claim that what is right in one circumstance is also right in the other.

The Obama administration's interest in Awlaki is understandable. The charismatic preacher, an American-born Muslim, is said to have incited the attempted Christmas Day bombing in 2009 and may have directed a plot to blow up a cargo plane bound for Chicago. He also was in touch with Nidal Hasan, the Army psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at the Ft. Hood Army base.

We understand the government's conundrum. In this dangerous new world, our enemies don't wear uniforms, threats cross national borders, and an order given abroad can quickly lead to devastation at home. The U.S. has struggled for a decade with how to safeguard people without crossing moral lines or violating individual rights.

But if the United States is going to continue down the troubling road of state-sponsored assassination, the government should, at the very least, provide a clear understanding of the criteria used to decide who should be placed on the target list. And there must be some form of judicial review of those decisions; why should a judge's approval be required to place a wiretap on a suspected terrorist but not to kill him? Since Sept. 11, 2001, the U.S. has detained many alleged terrorists, only for courts to discover that the evidence against them was unreliable or wrong.

False analogy fallacy. Had Awlaki been captured then an entirely different process would have applied, just as POWs are treated differently than enemy soldiers in the field. Why does this article have so much trouble with simple distinctions?

Moreover, there cannot be judicial review for these decisions in the form that the article appears to demand. You cannot have a judge standing around, looking over a soldier's shoulder, telling him when he's entitled to fire or not. The soldier must be able to exercise his judgment in determining whether or not a target is a legitimate military one or not, just as a police officer must be entitled to decide when he has to use deadly force in defense of himself and others. The rules defining legitimate military targets are specifically designed by the ICRC to be useful for these circumstances.

As for the US not providing "a clear understanding of the criteria used to decide who should be placed on the target list," that would be International Humanitarian Law, and its definition of what is or is not a legitimate military target. In what possible way do these require even further clarification?

Last year, Awlaki's father asked a federal judge to rule that the United States may not assassinate an American citizen outside a war zone "unless he is found to present a concrete, specific and imminent threat to life or physical safety, and there are no means other than lethal force" to neutralize the threat. The judge declined, saying the issue was a political question best left to the president. But President Obama should be pressed to abide by those guidelines.

The war on terror is not a free-for-all in which the United States may behave as it wishes without accountability or adherence to principle. We would have been pleased if Awlaki could have been captured and brought to this country for trial, because the promise of due process is a fundamental, bedrock American value.

Source is latimes.com.

And here we see the even stupider contradiction in the article: after demanding some process of judicial review for such actions it suddenly turns around and concludes that there was a judicial examination of the case. And guess what? The judge agreed with the government! Awlaki was given due process, but the law applicable to him is very different from the criminal statutes on which the entire article rests its false analogy.

How's this for collateral damage, btw?

And this pretty much destroys the legal rationale put forward by some in this thread.

Both of these articles are based on the incredible claim that the principles of proportionality and distinction somehow require that no civilians be harmed in the making of your ongoing armed conflict.

To say that this is false, that this is not what the law compels, is an understatement. Let's look at the Geneva Convention's actual words in evaluating these claims.

Here's the Geneva Convention on distinction.

Article 51 -- Protection of the civilian population
1. The civilian population and individual civilians shall enjoy general protection against dangers arising from military operations. To give effect to this protection, the following rules, which are additional to other applicable rules of international law, shall be observed in all circumstances.

2. The civilian population as such, as well as individual civilians, shall not be the object of attack. Acts or threats of violence the primary purpose of which is to spread terror among the civilian population are prohibited.

3. Civilians shall enjoy the protection afforded by this Section, unless and for such time as they take a direct part in hostilities.

4. Indiscriminate attacks are prohibited. Indiscriminate attacks are:

(a) those which are not directed at a specific military objective;

(b) those which employ a method or means of combat which cannot be directed at a specific military objective; or

(c) those which employ a method or means of combat the effects of which cannot be limited as required by this Protocol; and consequently, in each such case, are of a nature to strike military objectives and civilians or civilian objects without distinction.

5. Among others, the following types of attacks are to be considered as indiscriminate:

(a) an attack by bombardment by any methods or means which treats as a single military objective a number of clearly separated and distinct military objectives located in a city, town, village or other area containing a similar concentration of civilians or civilian objects; and

(b) an attack which may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated.

Here, the US has two compelling justifications for the action against al Awlaki in spite of the death of Samir Khan (which I discussed earlier in the thread that you failed to read). First, Khan is not a civilian: he is also a member of Al Qaeda. Second and perhaps more informatively, the attack was not indiscriminate and complied with international law standards of proportionality.

The attack was not indiscriminate because, it was directed specifically against him (with a precise and relatively small ordinance), and struck a single military objective. In fact, the attack was specifically delayed to prevent civilian deaths when it was postponed until Awlaki left the town in which he had been hiding.

The attack was also not disproportionate because, even if it was believed that it would cause incidental loss of civilian life it hardly seems "excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated." Not only were only a very few civilians (if any) present (and, incidentally, it does seem reasonable to believe that a Hellfire missile would kill only a very limited number of people even if there were several in close proximity to the blast), but since the death of Awlaki and the destruction of AQAP leadership is considered an important objective in the War on Terror it doesn't seem "excessive" in relation to eliminating an AQAP leader.

I'm going to use an example to illustrate why I'm not bother responding to the rest of Vympels post.

LOL, excuse me? I wasn't aware hypocrisy was a legal concept!

Glenn is making the claim that the American reaction to this plot is hypocritical. For that to be true the plot would have to be legal and American actions would have to be illegal. If in fact American actions were legal and Iranian action were illegal than the US condemning them would not be hypocritical.

Yes, I have been reduced to explaining what hypocricy is. I have argued with other people holding similar positions. But only you have been so infuriatingly stupid. I can talk to Thanas, Simon, Stas, even Bakustra. But your delibarate ignorance offends me and angers me to a degree that interferes with my thinking.

[Vympel]

You are right. International law and all the questions on its application can be summed up in a single post. Of course you think it is "blindly clear" what international law is. I was under the impression that at stardestroyer.net we believed that experts were more informed than laymen, but I guess you subscribe to the "if you believe really hard it becomes true" school of thought. There is also the fact that people bring up questions and then there are responces to them that probably follow your thought process that would be helpful in answering your objections.

Of course your immediate responce for trying to help you is to belittle me. Why should I bother helping someone who refuse to read? To give you idea, this is but one post in the thread that answers the question:

Oh wow - so let me get this straight, because Awlaki was declared part of al Qaeda by a UNSC resolution, this makes blowing him up in Yemen "legal" under international law - is that the argument?

And did you actually cite where in the relevant resolution it authorises the assassination which you assert is legal "under international law"?

I really missed some stunning arguments then, didn't I? Apparently being placed on a sanctioned list of al-qaida suspects is automatic authorisation for those suspects be assassinated, under international law!

The argument that Awlaki's assassination was in "accordance with international law" sounds a lot like the arguments put forward by amateurs who argued that the attack on Iraq in 2003 was in accordance with international law because of x or y UN resolution - nevermind that said resolutions said no such thing. In this case, UN Resolution 1267 (the resolution under which the list of suspects Awlaki was placed on exists) relates to an economic sanctions regime. Not state-sponsored assassination.

This argument fails.

Of course, if you are simply misrepresenting the arguments of someone else through omission, that's another matter.

I'm going to use an example to illustrate why I'm not bother responding to the rest of Vympels post.

Glenn is making the claim that the American reaction to this plot is hypocritical. For that to be true the plot would have to be legal and American actions would have to be illegal.

This is simply nonsense. If you had any idea about the facts of Awlaki's asssassination, you'd know that there simply has been no declaration, of any sort, by any international body, that Awlaki's killing was 'legal'. What there has been is a *secret* internal memo by the US government - which of course asserts it was legal. Because the US can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants. Naturally.

If in fact American actions were legal and Iranian action were illegal than the US condemning them would not be hypocritical.

First, the argument that American 'actions' were legal under international law have already been dismissed as the pure nonsense they are.

Second, you are an idiot - if you had actually read Greenwald as opposed to cherry-picking, you would know that he has not, and never has, solely referred to the assassination of Awlaki as being evidence of hypocrisy.

Yes, I have been reduced to explaining what hypocricy is. I have argued with other people holding similar positions. But only you have been so infuriatingly stupid. I can talk to Thanas, Simon, Stas, even Bakustra. But your delibarate ignorance offends me and angers me to a degree that interferes with my thinking.

The fact that you are a moron who can't even effectively summarize why you think an assassination is legal without quoting reams of other poster's words offends me too, don't worry.

[Samuel]

This is simply nonsense. If you had any idea about the facts of Awlaki's asssassination, you'd know that there simply has been no declaration, of any sort, by any international body, that Awlaki's killing was 'legal'.

And this is why I wanted you to read the thread. Because that objection is answered there. Instead of listening to my request you procede to ignore this.

The fact that you are a moron who can't even effectively summarize why you think an assassination is legal without quoting reams of other poster's words offends me too, don't worry.

I'm not a lawyer. I don't know international law backwards and fowards. Unlike you I don't pretend to and listen to people who know what they are talking about.

I'm going to quote the first 4 of MPs posts which answer your question. You could have actually looked at the thread and saved us time, but that would have required entertaining the possibility you were wrong. Instead you believe that everyone arguing against you is blinded by ideology.

He was actively fighting as a combatant for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. His presence on the drone strike list was a direct consequence of that fact. As a member of an armed paramilitary force engaging in open hostilities against an American ally, he was a legitimate military target. When you come across those in an active war zone, you are free to kill them. The fact that a drone did it has no more significance than if he had been bombed by aircraft, blown apart by artillery, shot by a rifleman, or stabbed to death with a bayonet. That al-Awlaki was primarily responsible for propaganda within the group does not mean he was a noncombatant, anymore than a logistics force is noncombatant, and there is certainly evidence he had command authority within the group as witnessed by his role in the attempted printer-bombings. He was still an armed member of a paramilitary force engaged in hostilities and therefore subject to being killed on the battlefield.

There was no "blanket assassination order." The use of the term "assassination" is itself a loaded word designed to trigger strong emotions and obscure al-Awlaki's actual circumstances as an armed fighter engaging in hostilities in a war zone. He was only subject to being killed by American forces while he was operating as a hostile fighter in a war zone against American or allied forces. Had he not gone to Yemen to join up with that paramilitary belligerent force and instead gone to some country that was not in the middle of an Islamist-backed civil war, the worst he could have faced would have been extradition back to the US and a trial in the same. If he had just stayed in the US and continued spouting violent incitement on youtube he would not have faced any sanctions whatsoever. The scope of this action is thus highly circumscribed by al-Awlaki's own actions, which were to raise arms against the United States government and to engage an allied government in battle. There is no slippery slope to extend this outside of Americans openly waging war against their own government, and his death can no more be classified as an "assassination" than can the killing of Taliban militia by airstrikes.

When and how?

He was acting as an officer of the paramilitary insurgent group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This is not at issue. His association with Al Qaeda was directly confirmed by al-Awlaki in various jihad propaganda and media. His role in operational planning has been the subject of considerable investigation by the US, and the evidence was sufficiently overwhelming that the UN Security Council placed him on the sanctions list of Al Qaeda operatives created under Resolution 1267. As Al Qaeda in Yemen is presently waging war against the Yemeni government, and has made efforts to strike against the US, it is clear that all members are combatants in the sense that all members of any military or paramilitary force waging war are combatants.

What open hostilities are there? BTW, you do realize that if you definition of "open hostilites" is "bombs being built and detonated" then nearly the entire world is a warzone.

Al Qaeda has been working with tribal insurgents in Yemen for years. The central government is not in control of large stretches of the desert where the tribal insurgents routinely conduct attacks on Yemeni military and police forces. "Nearly the entire world" is not even close to the level of violence and disorder that exists in Yemen. Somalia, Afghanistan, and the tribal frontier of Pakistan are pretty close, though.

Active war zone? Engaged in hostilities? Armed? A lot of assumptions here.

He was a member of a paramilitary insurgency, killed on the territory of the country the insurgency is fighting against, in a part of the world where there are more guns than people. Even if he was not, at the particular moment he was blown to pieces, armed and fighting, by virtue of his position with Al Qaeda he was a combatant. He was no more a noncombatant than logistics or signaling personnel of any army are, regardless of whether or not he used a Kalashnikov to take potshots at Yemeni soldiers. Indeed since he obviously had command authority within Al Qaeda as witnessed by his role in the attempted mail bombings, his functions were more important to Al Qaeda than any random tribal militia rifleman would have been.

And since when is Yemen defined as a warzone?

Are there active and ongoing hostilities in Yemen? There's been a state of insurgency in these areas practically as long as Yemen has existed. Al Qaeda was operating in the area as a military force. Al-Awlaki was a combatant in the Yemeni Civil War, where the United States is allied with the Yemeni government. In so far as there has been no declaration of war there have been no "warzones" since Korea in 1950, being the only post-war conflict recognized by the UN as such, but of course the US Congress has previously authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda. In terms of domestic legality that is all the authority the President needs to deal with Al Qaeda by military force, and al-Awlaki was indisputably a member of Al Qaeda.

Evidence for that? He has not even been indicted. How could he have been extradited then?

The "strike list" is explicitly predicated on members of the list being legitimate military targets, which is how it gets around the Executive Order barring assassination as a tool of policy. Al-Awlaki got on the list by going to Yemen, joining a paramilitary force fighting against an American ally, and openly advertising his allegiance and contributions. Had he not made himself into a legitimate target he would not be on the strike list. His presence in Yemen as an enemy combatant rendered an indictment pointless as there would be no means to deliver it or to have him detained by normal police processes.

Had he not gone to Yemen and made himself a legitimate military target then he would, you know, not be in Yemen. If he had instead gone off to Germany and tried his mail bomb scheme there then he could have been indicted and arrested and would never have been on the strike list. Had he restricted himself to incitement and inflammatory youtube he would not even have been committing any crimes and thus the attention of the US government would have been absent, or certainly less lethal.

Unless you believe, as a good deal of SDN does, that the US government goes around randomly killing completely innocent people for no conceivable reason.

That is quite unconvincing.

a) If Yemen is a warzone, then by definition any country where insurgencies against the local government happen is one where the US is in a state of war. Which is kinda funny since no war was ever declared there, nor did Obama widen the war against terror using any of the powers he had (as compared to the buildup to Iraq and Afghanistan, where congress explicitly gave approval). So how can you call this a warzone when there is no war in which the US is involved in?
b) Likewise, what is the actual evidence here? (And don't give me that "the US placed him on a list").
c) Disregarding the other stuff, please submit evidence for your claim that the US ever wanted to take him into custody or called upon him to surrender.
d) I find it chilling that you find nothing wrong with the president ordering somebody killed and then he is unwilling to give a court the case to review. Instead, "state secrets". THe reason for killing a citizen is...a state secret. Where are your papers, comrade?

Congress authorized the use of military force against Al Qaeda specifically on September 14, 2001, allowing the President to utilize his powers as Commander-in-Chief to deal with it wherever it sought sanctuary. Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is operating openly in parts of Yemen, an allied government. We are "at war" with Al Qaeda to the same degree we have been at war with anyone in the post-WWII timeframe, including North Korea, North Vietnam, and Iraq. The Yemeni government has in fact asked for American assistance in prosecuting their own campaign against Al Qaeda so our involvement there is as legal as involvement in Afghanistan.

The "proof" that al-Awlaki was a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian peninsula comes from his own videos available on youtube, as well as his interviews in Al Qaeda's media outlets like Inspire magazine. That Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula has been carrying out attacks on Yemeni government forces is likewise a matter of public record, and demanding "evidence" to that effect is as retarded as demanding "evidence" that the Taliban was sheltering Osama bin Laden after 9/11. A cursory google search turns up, to no surprise, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula claiming a wave of attacks in the south on the day al-Awlaki was blown up. They are as much of a combatant organization as the Taliban in Afghanistan, and as such members of the group are legitimate military targets.

As for "evidence the US ever called on him to surrender or take him into custody" that is, unsurprising from you, a hair-splitting and pedantic point. By the time al-Awlaki came to public attention it was for committing the acts that made him a legitimate military target. Did the US ever call on Osama bin Laden to surrender? Or Mullah Omar? Taking him into custody was precluded by his own actions in fleeing to a part of Yemen outside of any central control and surrounding himself with armed militia that he joined to wage war on the Yemeni and American governments. Had he not gone to Yemen and proclaimed his allegiance to Al Qaeda, though, there is no evidence that he would have been placed on a list made up of people considered to be legitimate military targets. The "strike list" is explicitly a list of people who will be targeted in Yemen by drone strikes because they are military enemies, ergo if Al-Awlaki had not been in Yemen he would not have been subject to being killed by drone strike.

And there is nothing "secret" about al-Awlaki's placement on the strike list. As reported at the time, al-Awlaki was placed on it because of his role in Al Qaeda, which has been more than adequately substantiated by his own statements and propaganda. This was all public, none of it can be seriously doubted, and no other American citizen has gone on the list, which strongly suggests that the reasoning for placing him on it was, as argued, because he had made himself a legitimate military target like everyone on said list.

EDIT: Specifically regarding the operational capabilities, the NYT:

Contrary to what the Obama administration would have you believe, he has always been a minor figure in Al Qaeda, and making a big deal of him now is backfiring.
[...]
He is far from the terrorist kingpin that the West has made him out to be. In fact, he isn’t even the head of his own organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. That would be Nasir al-Wuhayshi, who was Osama bin Laden’s personal secretary for four years in Afghanistan.

Nor is Mr. Awlaki the deputy commander, a position held by Said Ali al-Shihri, a former detainee at Guantánamo Bay who was repatriated to Saudi Arabia in 2007 and put in a “terrorist rehabilitation” program. (The treatment, clearly, did not take.)

Mr. Awlaki isn’t the group’s top religious scholar (Adil al-Abab), its chief of military operations (Qassim al-Raymi), its bomb maker (Ibrahim Hassan Asiri) or even its leading ideologue (Ibrahim Suleiman al-Rubaysh).

Rather, he is a midlevel religious functionary who happens to have American citizenship and speak English. This makes him a propaganda threat, but not one whose elimination would do anything to limit the reach of the Qaeda branch.

He’s not even particularly good at what he does: Mr. Awlaki is a decidedly unoriginal thinker in Arabic and isn’t that well known in Yemen. His most famous production is a lengthy sermon-lecture series called “Constants on the Path of Jihad,” which emphasizes the global nature of holy war: “If a particular people or nation is classified as ... ‘the people of war’ in the Shariah, that classification applies to them all over the earth.” But “Constants” isn’t really his own creation; it’s an adaptation of a work written by a Saudi militant killed in 2003. At most, Mr. Awlaki is a popularizer, someone who takes the work of others and makes it his own.

When he preached in the United States, first in San Diego and then in Virginia, he exploited his knowledge of Arabic and his Yemeni heritage to burnish his credentials as a genuine Islamic voice. He has been linked to Maj. Nidal Hassan, the psychiatrist accused of killing 13 people at a Texas Army base in 2009, and some of the 9/11 hijackers attended his services. But until the Obama administration put him on its hit list, he had little standing in the Arab world.

Now, however, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula is taking advantage of this free advertising. No propaganda from the group had ever mentioned his name before it was reported in January that the United States had decided he could be legally assassinated. Shortly after, an article in the official Qaeda journal trumpeted that Mr. Awlaki had not been killed in December, as had been reported, in an air attack on a gathering in Shabwa Province.

So now that it has given Mr. Awlaki such a high profile, the administration is in a bind: if it ignores him, it will look powerless; if it succeeds in killing him, it will have manufactured a martyr. The best way out is to redouble its efforts to track down the real, more dangerous leaders of the Yemen group like Mr. Wuhayshi and Mr. Asiri, who likely made the bombs used in the parcel attacks and carried by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called Christmas Day bomber.

Mr. Awlaki’s name may be the only one Americans know, but that doesn’t make him the most dangerous threat to our security.

So....what is your evidence for him being the great operational threat here?

Whether or not his operational role was overblown is irrelevant to this. He was placed on the list because his participation as a member of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula made him an overt military enemy of the United States. He was just as much a combatant as a Taliban goatherd taking potshots at Marines in Afghanistan. As it happens, we do have his statements that he considered Nidal Hassan as a "student" and hopes for much such students, that he is at war with the United States, his obvious role as a propagandist for Al Qaeda to show that he was taking affirmative steps to levy war on America. The balance of publicly available evidence, counting his own words and his actions in taking sanctuary with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, points to a role exercising some operational authority.

Unsurprising from you, you once more forget that agitating for violence does not make you a military target per se. Otherwise any gang member, drug enforcer, mob capo or whatever you have it would be a military target. It makes you a criminal in the vein of McVeigh, not a legitimate military target per se. The fact that the US is unable to afford due process to its own citizens is just that bad.

And once again you ignore the central feature of this case. Al-Awlaki was not targeted because he incited jihadist violence. He was put on the list because he went to Yemen to enlist in Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which was actively waging war on Yemen and the United States. He took up arms as a combatant and as such was liable to be killed as one in any circumstances other than an attempt to surrender.

None of that is in the least relevant concerning the issue that he was a citizen. You cannot just order a citizen killed. This is what you are not getting. Did he renounce his citizenship? No. Was he stripped of it? No. So what legal basis was there to kill him?

He was a combatant openly fighting the US government and its allies. Congress authorized the President to use military force against Al Qaeda and its adherents, which makes killing Al Qaeda combatants as legal as killing North Korean, North Vietnamese, and Iraqi combatants ever was. Al-Awlaki's presence on the battlefield as a combatant rendered his citizenship a moot point. As a self-declared enemy of the United States, waging a self-declared war against the same in the company of many other enemy combatants, his death was a consequence of going out on the battlefield. That it was administered by drone strike because we thought he was important in an operational capacity is merely a detail, since all of your barely veiled slippery-slope "qualms" would apply if we had just shot him dead in Afghanistan instead.

I'll be perfectly blunt - if somebody went over to the Nazis in WWII and actively fought against the US, it still did not automatically strip him of his citizenship.

So pray tell, what makess this situation special?

And if that hypothetical German-American was roasted alive in the firebombing of Hamburg, so what? Or blown apart in the Battle of the Bulge? Or killed by OSS operatives because he was an important technical specialist on some Nazi wonder-weapon? Did we also need to hold a tribunal before killing Confederate soldiers at Gettysburg

Seriously. Al-Awalki was operating as a member of an enemy armed force, against whom the President was duly authorized to apply American military force. He was killed as a consequence of fighting as a part of that armed enemy force. His citizenship cannot be used as a shield on the battlefield. And if he had not gone to an active war zone to participate as a combatant he would still be alive. That is all there really is to the case.

[Master of Ossus]

Any private group the US has declared itself at war with, no argument.

This portion of his argument is clearly directed at the domestic law situation. For the strike on Awlaki to be legal, it must comply with both US domestic law and with international law. He's arguing that it's legal under US law, which is a necessary condition for demonstrating the legality of the attack. It is not a rebuttal to say that the US activity must also comply with international law.

International law imposes additional requirements, which the US also clearly meets in this case.

See, this is where there needs to be a lot more specific language. What constitutes minimizing risk? Only firing 3 shells into a building as opposed to leveling a whole city block? Because I don't consider the risk from firing a missile 'minimal' to bystanders.

I'm not sure where this language comes from, but it doesn't appear to derive from the Geneva Convention or International Humanitarian Law, which are the sources that the US (and many, many other nations) rely upon in evaluating the legality of wartime operations.

These sources of law prohibit "indiscriminate attacks" (i.e., impose the "distinction" requirement), and attacks which "may be expected to cause incidental loss of civilian life, injury to civilians, damage to civilian objects, or a combination thereof, which would be excessive in relation to the concrete and direct military advantage anticipated" (i.e., the "proportion" requirement). In this particular case, the US action clearly fits within both criteria. It was not indiscriminate because it was targeted at a single legitimate military target (i.e., Awlaki himself), and the risk to civilians was not in excess of the military advantage derived from killing Awlaki--who was even by the most favorable accounts of his activities a mid-ranking leader in AQAP and may have been significantly higher in the organization.

OK. So what constitutes a war zone? I know there's unrest in Yemen, I didn't know it had gotten so bad it could be declared a civil war. A quick google indicates it hasn't, but I could be wrong. Ireland during the Troubles, would that be a war zone? Mexico City currently, is that a war zone? For that matter, if Yemen is fine with predator drone strikes on it's territory, then I would think it would be open to the idea of a small US team being sent in to extract him al la OBL, or even sending one to get him themselves in order to 'minimize risk to civilians.'

I don't know what this has to do with anything, but what's going on in Yemen definitely approaches civil war. Keep in mind that the President of the country was forced to flee following an assassination attempt, the two main tribal groups are engaged in a low-intensity armed conflict, and Yemen has been relying on its military forces to fight against militant groups (with support from the US and other western countries) for several years.

But regardless, international law does not require that the US "minimize" the risk to civilians. It merely imposes the proportionality requirement that the anticipated damage to civilians not be "excessive" in relation to the military advantage from carrying out the strike.

That's the real problem, that these rules that are being set in place are so loose that they could be used to justify the legality of a slew of actions that any government should not have the power to take. No, I don't expect them to be used to realistically be used to kill of protest movements tomorrow, but it leaves the door open for it to be lagally justified at any point in the future, which should be concerning.

There are at least two fundamental problems with your arguments, which I've detailed elsewhere in this thread and others:
1. These are not new standards that the US is applying. For all intents and purposes, they're the standards which were laid out in the 1949 Third Geneva Convention (with only slight gloss placed upon it by the Red Cross).
2. There is no "open door" for legal justification of military action against the types of targets that you seem concerned with protecting. To some degree, I can understand your concern: to you it appears as if there are no governing principles which distinguish these two types of people (ones like Awlaki and ones like the Wall Street Occupation Movement). However, if you bother to look up the actual law, you will find both that there are clear standards, and also that neither Awlaki nor the Wall Street protesters come anywhere close to the boundary between them. Awlaki fits squarely in the category of legitimate military target. The protesters don't even approach that status.

I do not claim that there is NO ONE who would be a close case--there probably are, and I'm sure you could construct a hypo which would be difficult to answer. I also do not claim that these standards are subjectively perfect or natural and that no other distinctions could be drawn which might be better. However, these are the standards that exist, and your criticisms that the standards are vague or difficult to apply in these cases are simply false. You seem to be confused only because you do not know what the standards are and (to the extent that you have assumed a standard of your own creation) you have created only vague boundaries in your mind which are subject to these criticisms.

Where, in any of my posts did I imply that this was done for shits and giggles. Of course it was carefully considered, but the decisions that were made, starting with the US feeling it can declare war on an organisation in order to justify its actions, set some legal precedents that should not have been set.

Again, both halves of this are false: while the US is in an ongoing armed conflict with Al Qaeda, this is expressly permitted under international law. See The Red Cross' position paper on this topic.

2. Non-international armed conflicts are protracted armed confrontations occurring
between governmental armed forces and the forces of one or more armed groups, or
between such groups arising on the territory of a State [party to the Geneva
Conventions]. The armed confrontation must reach a minimum level of intensity and
the parties involved in the conflict must show a minimum of organisation.

Secondly, the US is not treading new legal ground, here. It is applying standards which have existed and have been formalized at least since 1949, when they were codified as part of the Third Geneva Convention (and on which the ICRC paper I referenced is largely premised).

I'm a little tired of having to trot out this explanation in thread after thread after thread. Alkaloid (and Thanas, and any other people who disagree with this perspective who wish to take part in the discussion): please respond to these points to at least acknowledge that you have read them. We can work through it together if you disagree with the standard which I am applying to these circumstances or if you disagree with my assessment of how the facts in this case apply to the law, but at least demonstrate that you have read what I have to say because it really seems that you guys are deliberately ignoring my explanations and trotting out the same, tired, claims of US illegality without actually citing to anything but someone's unsupported gut feeling of what the law says or what it should say.

[Vympel]

And this is why I wanted you to read the thread. Because that objection is answered there. Instead of listening to my request you procede to ignore this.

I am not responsible for your incompetence.

You made a specific claim. Namely, that the assassination of Awlaki was legal under "international law". All you have done, so far, is quote reams of rubbish that is totally unrelated to proving that assertion. Indeed, the only thing that you have provided thus far to support that assertion is a flagrantly specious argument that the UNSC passing a resolution which has nothing to do with assassination is somehow support for this assertion.

That you are too fucking stupid to effectively answer that objection without going "oh, its in this thread" is simply not my problem, asshole.

I'm not a lawyer. I don't know international law backwards and fowards. Unlike you I don't pretend to and listen to people who know what they are talking about.

I'm going to quote the first 4 of MPs posts which answer your question. You could have actually looked at the thread and saved us time, but that would have required entertaining the possibility you were wrong. Instead you believe that everyone arguing against you is blinded by ideology.

Indeed, lets review your latest indiscriminate quote mine, so I can elaborate further on your complete ignorance:-

1. MarshalPurnell whining its not an assassination. This has nothing to do with your assertions regarding international law;
2. MarshalPurnell repeating the assertions about Awlaki as fact. This has nothing to do with your assertions regarding international law; and
3. MarshalPurnell making a specious argument about Congress' authorization for military force. This also has nothing to do with your assertions regarding international law, unless the US Congress suddenly became a legislator for the whole world when I didn't notice.

In conclusion, you are a rank imbecile who made a ridiculous claim and instead of admitting that claim has zero legitimate basis, are now quoting people talking about entierly different topics and pretending you've refuted something.

Indeed, if you had actually read what I said rather than ignoring it, you would've seen that I specifically addressed the complete speciousness of appealing to the USA's own internal justifications* for why its allowed to do something (for which any number of unscrupulous hacks whose mission is to justify unchecked executive power are available) as somehow being relevant to questions of "international law".

*Not, of course, that we even know what these justifications are. Though there are many people who would seek to justify American's behavior in the world, the actual justifications that were made up by government officials - after the order to kill Alwaki had already been made (always a good sign!) - by way of memo, remain secret (save for anonymous leaks). Given the sort of absurd legal nonsense the Bush administration routinely engaged to justify its own illegalities was also kept secret (OLC memos, aka "secret law") this is unsurprising. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

[Samuel]

You made a specific claim. Namely, that the assassination of Awlaki was legal under "international law". All you have done, so far, is quote reams of rubbish that is totally unrelated to proving that assertion.

Naming the crieria:

He was actively fighting as a combatant for Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. His presence on the drone strike list was a direct consequence of that fact. As a member of an armed paramilitary force engaging in open hostilities against an American ally, he was a legitimate military target.

Showing Alwaki fits

That al-Awlaki was primarily responsible for propaganda within the group does not mean he was a noncombatant, anymore than a logistics force is noncombatant, and there is certainly evidence he had command authority within the group as witnessed by his role in the attempted printer-bombings. He was still an armed member of a paramilitary force engaged in hostilities and therefore subject to being killed on the battlefield.

Special circumstances

He was only subject to being killed by American forces while he was operating as a hostile fighter in a war zone against American or allied forces. Had he not gone to Yemen to join up with that paramilitary belligerent force and instead gone to some country that was not in the middle of an Islamist-backed civil war, the worst he could have faced would have been extradition back to the US and a trial in the same. If he had just stayed in the US and continued spouting violent incitement on youtube he would not have faced any sanctions whatsoever. The scope of this action is thus highly circumscribed by al-Awlaki's own actions, which were to raise arms against the United States government and to engage an allied government in battle.

Evidence

He was acting as an officer of the paramilitary insurgent group Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. This is not at issue. His association with Al Qaeda was directly confirmed by al-Awlaki in various jihad propaganda and media. His role in operational planning has been the subject of considerable investigation by the US, and the evidence was sufficiently overwhelming that the UN Security Council placed him on the sanctions list of Al Qaeda operatives created under Resolution 1267. As Al Qaeda in Yemen is presently waging war against the Yemeni government, and has made efforts to strike against the US, it is clear that all members are combatants in the sense that all members of any military or paramilitary force waging war are combatants.

So yes, the posts I posted actually answered your question. You just refused to read them because they were long. It is amazing- it is like international law is a complex subject

Indeed, if you had actually read what I said rather than ignoring it, you would've seen that I specifically addressed the complete speciousness of appealing to the USA's own internal justifications*

I ignored it because what you said is wrong. The US is perfectly capable of self-justifying, but that doesn't make the legal rationales they give any less true. You are dismissing a source because you don't like the author. To dismiss it, you must show the reasons it gives are wrong. This is, once again, basic logic you seem to not understand.

[Vympel]

I ignored it because what you said is wrong. The US is perfectly capable of self-justifying, but that doesn't make the legal rationales they give any less true. You are dismissing a source because you don't like the author. To dismiss it, you must show the reasons it gives are wrong. This is, once again, basic logic you seem to not understand.

You really are fucking ignorant, aren't you? The internal legal rationales of a nation state have no bearing, whatsoever, on questions of international law. Do you not know the difference between the laws of a nation state and international law, you worthless fucking nitwit?

[Samuel]

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

Or, in short, internal US legal justifications must follow international law which consists of treaties the US has signed. American internal justifications are based on international law.