Court orders Obama to release documents related to Awlaki

[Terralthra]

Here's the thing about al-Awlaki serving in a planning role - the guy has got no military qualifications. He attempted to get degrees in Education. He got a BS in civil engineering and an incomplete doctorate in Human Resource Management. Academically, he was a failure. How did he provide some huge service to planning attacks? It is possible that AQ trained him in that, but without extra evidence none of that screams strategical mastermind to me.

No one said you have to be particularly good at planning attacks on the US government in order for it to be criminal.

[Thanas]

Yes, but assuming AQ are not idiots, why would they move him from being a valuable propaganda figure to a planning role, especially if it puts him into more danger?

[Gaidin]

Yes, but assuming AQ are not idiots, why would they move him from being a valuable propaganda figure to a planning role, especially if it puts him into more danger?

I doubt we'll ever find that out, as this ruling is just for the memo justifying such orders. But the thing to note regarding that question is that for the past thirteen years we've done a particularly good job of knocking out AQ players over and over and over, at some point, you're not going to have anybody but your lowly civil-engineer propaganda figure for the planning role.

[Metahive]

Well, either this or Al-Quaeda and friends have always been more like paper tigers that got lucky when it comes to threatening the livelihood of the West.

[Simon_Jester]

Perhaps more to the point- if al-Awlaki has no special credentials or skills that would make him a dangerous planner of terrorist operations, then even if he plans an operation or two, why is it so important to kill him?

As long as Al Qaeda has members, someone will be planning their attacks and activities. And if they're that close to the bottom of the barrel, it's not like we weaken them very much by making them replace the current bottom-of-barrel planner with another bottom-of-barrel planner.

It's one thing to say "we assassinated Admiral Yamamoto because he was the seniormost and arguably best admiral Japan had." It's another thing to say "no, we cannot POSSIBLY hold off on assassinating this guy, even if he is an American citizen, because it is JUST THAT IMPORTANT to stop him from planning more attacks."

For that to be an adequate reason to specifically target and kill an American citizen, you should need some kind of special, overriding argument for why it's such a big emergency to get rid of him.

[Gaidin]

The issue there is the court order is sort of being read wrong from the argument I'm seeing in this thread. The court order is just for the classified memo that says it's legal to target and kill people linked to terrorism even if they're Americans. The argument I see in this thread is all about Awlaki and his qualifications, for which the what judgement may have been made based on intelligence on a whole different level. They've given no hintings on that that I'm aware of so no argument can be made that they have no choice to make such intelligence public that isn't already public.

[Metahive]

Actually the argument is that the US executive shouldn't be able to declare people fair game without having to explain themselves. Well, and that they shouldn't be given the power to declare people fair game in the first place. As it looks by what is actually available evidence-wise, Awlaki was killed off for mouthing off and that definitely shouldn't be sufficient to give the POTUS the power to issue death sentences on people.

[Channel72]

Suppose Tim McVeigh had an accomplice who fled the United States and was hiding in a remote location in Columbia or something.

Would it be okay for Obama to order a drone strike to kill this person?

I think my main concern with the Awlaki situation is not so much that he's an American citizen. Before Sept 11th, it was an American citizen who was responsible for the worst terrorist attack in US history, after all. What concerns me is that the evidence against Awlaki is vague. The Obama administration is claiming he did a lot more than just "mouth off". I'm not sure if I believe them. However there are countless Imam's all over the Middle East (and even in the US) who are constantly "mouthing off" against America, and encouraging a Jihadi mentality. We don't hellfire just anyone, so I'm inclined to believe Awlaki was more actively involved. Allegedly there is evidence he was directly involved with the 2009 attempted American airline attack.

My concern is that a lot of the connections Awlaki has to terrorism is more in the vein of "inspiration" rather than "actual planning". He seems to have been connected with a lot of actual terrorists, including a few of the 9/11 hijackers and the Times Square bomber. The problem is that it seems he sort of just "egged them on", rather than actually assisted in the implementation of these attacks. If that's the extent of his crimes, his death does set a disturbing precedent.

[Gaidin]

Actually the argument is that the US executive shouldn't be able to declare people fair game without having to explain themselves. Well, and that they shouldn't be given the power to declare people fair game in the first place. As it looks by what is actually available evidence-wise, Awlaki was killed off for mouthing off and that definitely shouldn't be sufficient to give the POTUS the power to issue death sentences on people.

See, the thing is, Awlaki's gone. He's not really a part of the argument anymore except to say people related to him have a case to make. In a sense he's just a huge distraction in this argument. So is every other person killed in a targeted fashion. What's at the heart of the matter is the justification. Forget the targets for a moment. Once the justification is out, even in partial form, how broad do you think it will be? Read the thread again. Read some of the things that have been said and what some of you guys seem to be trying to scare yourselves of. It's more important to bother yourselves with the justification and getting that document back into a judges hands to pare it down than it is the specific case of someone who's already dead, especially considering it deals with information you'll never get and no court will never force into your hands. Dealing with the justification deals with the future. And I'm not so sure you'd need the specifics of some dead person's case to really deal with a legal justification, but someone like Thanos would be better equipped to answer that than I would. I'm kind of armchair lawyering with this post.

[Simon_Jester]

The issue there is the court order is sort of being read wrong from the argument I'm seeing in this thread. The court order is just for the classified memo that says it's legal to target and kill people linked to terrorism even if they're Americans. The argument I see in this thread is all about Awlaki and his qualifications, for which the what judgement may have been made based on intelligence on a whole different level. They've given no hintings on that that I'm aware of so no argument can be made that they have no choice to make such intelligence public that isn't already public.

Requiring Obama to clarify his reasons and procedure for killing American citizens is a necessary first step to anything else we might want to do about his policies.

Suppose Tim McVeigh had an accomplice who fled the United States and was hiding in a remote location in Columbia or something.

Would it be okay for Obama to order a drone strike to kill this person?

No, I don't think so. If it's that vitally important that this person be punished for his crime, then let us go to the trouble of staging a commando raid to at least try to capture him in person. If it's not that vitally important... well, we do accept, as a practical matter, that some criminals manage to escape our jurisdiction.

Or if we DO accept that we can implement the death penalty for crimes against the state without giving the target his day in court... we need a process that makes it very clear and practical to the target that his choices are "turn himself in and face a fair, open trial" or "death." At the moment, someone like al-Awlaki is having to choose between death and "extraordinary rendition." Or between death and Guantanamo. Or something like that.

Frankly, the US government is acting abominably, and is basically stacking the deck to ensure that anyone we accuse of terrorism would remain a fugitive and risk death, rather than surrender to us for trial.

I think my main concern with the Awlaki situation is not so much that he's an American citizen. Before Sept 11th, it was an American citizen who was responsible for the worst terrorist attack in US history, after all. What concerns me is that the evidence against Awlaki is vague. The Obama administration is claiming he did a lot more than just "mouth off". I'm not sure if I believe them. However there are countless Imam's all over the Middle East (and even in the US) who are constantly "mouthing off" against America, and encouraging a Jihadi mentality. We don't hellfire just anyone, so I'm inclined to believe Awlaki was more actively involved. Allegedly there is evidence he was directly involved with the 2009 attempted American airline attack.

My concern is that a lot of the connections Awlaki has to terrorism is more in the vein of "inspiration" rather than "actual planning". He seems to have been connected with a lot of actual terrorists, including a few of the 9/11 hijackers and the Times Square bomber. The problem is that it seems he sort of just "egged them on", rather than actually assisted in the implementation of these attacks. If that's the extent of his crimes, his death does set a disturbing precedent.

Yes. That's the other prong of my real complaint here. There is no clear evidence about al-Awlaki that he is so especially bad that it justifies distorting our constitutional protections and setting a dangerous precedent.

If we were talking about a person who, say, had a concrete role in repeated, specific terrorist attacks that had caused real deaths, and who had been proven guilty of these things (or admitted guilt publicly) I might be less disturbed. But here we're dealing with a man who was, by all evidence I'm aware of, all talk.

In essence, he was inciting violent revolt or attack against the US government. I can understand making that punishable by death, but I cannot support making it punishable by death without trial. That just sets us up for a situation where the government declares certain people 'enemies of the state' and kills them purely for its own benefit, not for the sake of public safety.

[K. A. Pital]

Wait, are people seriously saying that you can just order to kill Tim McVeigh? Do you even realize what this means? What if 'secret evidence' pointed at someone else who is not McVeigh, and got him killed? There'd be no way of ever knowing it happened. So McVeigh should be tried in court. Yes, even him. In fact, even if you knew 100% it was Tim McVeigh, simply killing criminals is not allowed, otherwise we may do away with due process and just replace the judiciary with a quasi-judgement. We can even call them Groups of Three, or Troikas. They would, on the basis of secret evidence, decide who has to be offed.

It's you guys who make the US look exactly like what is shown in Person of Interest. In fact, I can no longer consider "Person of Interest" merely a work of fiction. It's too prophetic.

[Gaidin]

Wait, are people seriously saying that you can just order to kill Tim McVeigh? Do you even realize what this means? What if 'secret evidence' pointed at someone else who is not McVeigh, and got him killed? There'd be no way of ever knowing it happened. So McVeigh should be tried in court. Yes, even him. In fact, even if you knew 100% it was Tim McVeigh, simply killing criminals is not allowed, otherwise we may do away with due process and just replace the judiciary with a quasi-judgement. We can even call them Groups of Three, or Troikas. They would, on the basis of secret evidence, decide who has to be offed.

It's you guys who make the US look exactly like what is shown in Person of Interest. In fact, I can no longer consider "Person of Interest" merely a work of fiction. It's too prophetic.

Theoretically the thing about said document and McVeigh, is that McVeigh did an act of domestic terrorism, tying him in with what the document justifies. Though, him being on the continental US, puts him entirely within reach of law enforcement, much less military, so I have no idea why his name is being brought up.

[K. A. Pital]

I have no idea why people conjure these crazy scenarios where they need to kill someone (much more so on US territory!) without due process. Bloodthirstiness? The desire to be as tough as all those dictators that can just flip their finger and order an undesireable to be killed - to be Dredd, the judge and the jury and the executioner in one?

I don't know. But I see that even here (a place deemed super-left by American standards) people keep wondering if they should just kill people. In the US, outside the US.

The answer is no. Due process can only be abandoned in case of complete collapse of judiciary (generally encountered during a revolution). In other cases it should never be forgotten for the sake of expediency.

[Simon_Jester]

Wait, are people seriously saying that you can just order to kill Tim McVeigh? Do you even realize what this means? What if 'secret evidence' pointed at someone else who is not McVeigh, and got him killed? There'd be no way of ever knowing it happened. So McVeigh should be tried in court. Yes, even him. In fact, even if you knew 100% it was Tim McVeigh, simply killing criminals is not allowed, otherwise we may do away with due process and just replace the judiciary with a quasi-judgement. We can even call them Groups of Three, or Troikas. They would, on the basis of secret evidence, decide who has to be offed.

It's you guys who make the US look exactly like what is shown in Person of Interest. In fact, I can no longer consider "Person of Interest" merely a work of fiction. It's too prophetic.

Are you talking to me, or to someone else?

I think part of the problem is that we can all imagine a contrived scenario in which it is very hard to resist the urge to say "fire a missile at this guy." What if he's an accessory to terrorism ? What if we think he's planning another terrorist attack? Gasp!

While we're at it, what if Doctor Villainous threatens to blow up Paris unless we give him a billion dollars?

It's very natural for humans, especially humans who love bickering and debating things, to want to look for test cases, exceptions to rules, and so on. And it feels like harmless fun, because nobody seriously expects Doctor Villainous to appear. The problem is that it makes it much harder to draw a clearly defined line, or create a clearly defined rule. Because a lot of people in government don't understand the idea of a rule that is only to be broken in emergencies- they think that a guy like al-Awlaki qualifies as an emergency, when obviously he does not. And a lot of people in the general public don't grasp the idea of a rule that might be broken in emergencies but should otherwise always be followed at all, come to think of it.


Personally...

Even a person does pose such a threat according to 'secret evidence,' the response is obvious. If the threat is so profound that a man must die, and with no time for us to even think about allowing cooler heads to evaluate his guilt or innocence, then release the secret evidence already!

Any situation desperate enough to justify ignoring our constitutional rights is also desperate enough to justify ignoring government security classifications.

[Gaidin]

Are you talking to me, or to someone else?

I think part of the problem is that we can all imagine a contrived scenario in which it is very hard to resist the urge to say "fire a missile at this guy." What if he's an accessory to terrorism ? What if we think he's planning another terrorist attack? Gasp!

While we're at it, what if Doctor Villainous threatens to blow up Paris unless we give him a billion dollars?

It's very natural for humans, especially humans who love bickering and debating things, to want to look for test cases, exceptions to rules, and so on. And it feels like harmless fun, because nobody seriously expects Doctor Villainous to appear. The problem is that it makes it much harder to draw a clearly defined line, or create a clearly defined rule. Because a lot of people in government don't understand the idea of a rule that is only to be broken in emergencies- they think that a guy like al-Awlaki qualifies as an emergency, when obviously he does not. And a lot of people in the general public don't grasp the idea of a rule that might be broken in emergencies but should otherwise always be followed at all, come to think of it.


Personally...

Even a person does pose such a threat according to 'secret evidence,' the response is obvious. If the threat is so profound that a man must die, and with no time for us to even think about allowing cooler heads to evaluate his guilt or innocence, then release the secret evidence already!

Any situation desperate enough to justify ignoring our constitutional rights is also desperate enough to justify ignoring government security classifications.

Yet why should we even discuss what someone contrives? This thread is about a court order to reveal a classified memo justifying such orders. Not a scenario someone imagines. If we're going to do keep doing that let's split all those damn posts off into off-topic and start talking about the new season of 24 in the same damn thread since it's all fiction now anyway. How about that?

[K. A. Pital]

While we're at it, what if Doctor Villainous threatens to blow up Paris unless we give him a billion dollars?

Indeed. But I think people in the US are better at this than others. Decades of comicbook culture have taught them that there's a battle between superheroes (NSA agents will do, since Superman, Spiderman and Batman don't really exist) and supervillains. This cartoonish worldview leads them to believe that its normal to justify real criminal or illegal behaviour with contrived scenarios. That's what I'm angry about.

I mean, come on! Of course we can make shit up how Dr. Doom wants to kill everyone on Earth while he's smoking cigars in Latveria. This dehumanizes Doom, one, allows for a simplistic utilitarian calculation (kill Doom to save millions) to be completed in mere minutes and finally it makes the thought process completely detached from reality. Remember the last Superman film? The 'hero' destroys an entire town, possibly with casualties in hundreds of thousands if not millions, while fighting with a Threatening Enemy from Beyond. This is okay. The military accept this, the establishment and the people do too.

But it is not healthy to jump to these scenarios when discussing real life problems.

[Simon_Jester]

I am inclined to agree; it reminds me of an article I studied in college:

Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb, by David Luban.

Basically, the observation is that we become confused on issues by being "bewitched by a picture," by having this ultimately fictional notion enter our minds and drive out the realities we are talking about. The "what if this? What if that?" scenarios serve this role.

For example, "what if an accomplice of McVeigh ran off into the wilderness of Colombia to hide?" Here, we have this bewitching picture of said accomplice as a dangerous, evil man who will no doubt strike again if given the opportunity, a sort of personified Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.

But one might also sensibly reply "well, what if he did?" Such a man is hardly threatening in a realistic sense after fleeing justice. Plenty of fugitive criminals have found de facto asylum by escaping to remote countries. We can worry about them at leisure; there is no emergency which would allow a trigger-happy government to invoke the public safety as justification for killing.

A man who is a member of an active, ongoing criminal/terrorist organization is at least nominally a threat- but here too, we must ask "what is the emergency?" The idea of justifying a drone strike by resorting to the idea that the target is an extremely dangerous man is laughable when he spends months operating freely and his actions ultimately come to nothing.

So we get distracted into debating our fantasy scenarios of extreme danger and life-or-death decisions that will impact the lives of thousands... when the reality is of much lesser, very dubious dangers.

[Thanas]

I think the biggest problem Simon hit on is that the US lost a lot of credibility regarding humane treatment in the Bushobama years, meaning that nobody believes they will be treated fairly if they surrender. So the choice is to keep fighting until you are droned or surrender and be kept like an animal in a cage (after years of fun torture sessions where among other fun things they might slice your dick, rape you and keep you in a freezer) with no release ever.

How long have people now been kept in Guantanamo and nobody in politics really cares?

[Gaidin]

Ironically with that last statement I think 90% of the people in politics who vocally care about Guantanamo care in the wrong direction and so you get lines forcing it to stay open for X years attached to the budget functionally blackmailing the President whenever he tries something in the right direction.

[Thanas]

It is not as if he is really fighting for it anyway. When was the last time he dedicated a speech to closing Guantanamo?

[Gaidin]

Eh, I'm fairly indifferent to speeches. Speeches would kill the attempt and anybody here with half a brain knows it. Getting anything done these days requires a backroom deal mostly because of the near requirement that everything the President supports publicly be killed before it leaves the starting line as far as legislation is concerned.

[Thanas]

Yeah but I remember a time when he had majorities in both houses and still did not manage to push for it.

And now there is no political capital whatsoever invested in fixing the most egregious human rights violation in the western world.

[Grumman]

Eh, I'm fairly indifferent to speeches. Speeches would kill the attempt and anybody here with half a brain knows it. Getting anything done these days requires a backroom deal mostly because of the near requirement that everything the President supports publicly be killed before it leaves the starting line as far as legislation is concerned.

I do not agree. Speeches here would mean going on the offensive against those who would stop you. Every wrongful imprisonment, every case of torture, every innocent victim is a testament to the cowardice and incompetence of your opponents. Give names and faces to the innocent people who suffered because terrorists scared your opponents into lashing out blindly instead of following the plan laid out by the Founding Fathers and by international law. Call them out on the cowardice of letting innocent people suffer to avoid the embarrassment of admitting they mistreated them. And so on.

If they want to oppose you, let them throw their careers on the bonfire first.

[Simon_Jester]

The heart of the problem is that to use this strategy you need to be able to go into Washington without being complicit in these actions. I don't think Obama ever had the ability or desire to do this.

[Channel72]

I am inclined to agree; it reminds me of an article I studied in college:

Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb, by David Luban.

Basically, the observation is that we become confused on issues by being "bewitched by a picture," by having this ultimately fictional notion enter our minds and drive out the realities we are talking about. The "what if this? What if that?" scenarios serve this role.

For example, "what if an accomplice of McVeigh ran off into the wilderness of Colombia to hide?" Here, we have this bewitching picture of said accomplice as a dangerous, evil man who will no doubt strike again if given the opportunity, a sort of personified Sword of Damocles hanging over our heads.

But one might also sensibly reply "well, what if he did?" Such a man is hardly threatening in a realistic sense after fleeing justice. Plenty of fugitive criminals have found de facto asylum by escaping to remote countries. We can worry about them at leisure; there is no emergency which would allow a trigger-happy government to invoke the public safety as justification for killing.

A man who is a member of an active, ongoing criminal/terrorist organization is at least nominally a threat- but here too, we must ask "what is the emergency?" The idea of justifying a drone strike by resorting to the idea that the target is an extremely dangerous man is laughable when he spends months operating freely and his actions ultimately come to nothing.

So we get distracted into debating our fantasy scenarios of extreme danger and life-or-death decisions that will impact the lives of thousands... when the reality is of much lesser, very dubious dangers.

Perhaps. But no less of a fantasy "what-if" scenario than saying something like "OMG what if Obama uses this precedent to drone strike the Green Party!" (I can just see poor Ralph Nader going outside to get the paper, when suddenly... blam!)

The practical reality is that Obama can get away with killing Awlaki because the voting public doesn't care about the constitutional rights of someone working for Al-Qaeda, and nobody seriously believes there is some kind of slippery slope from "assassinate key Al-Qaeda propaganda mouthpiece" to "assassinate anybody I don't like". The practical reality is that the Awlaki precedent likely won't lead to Obama ordering drone strikes on the black panthers or the KKK or Green Peace or whatever.