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Didn't need to claim it. US citizens get killed without a trial all the time, as they have been since just about forever, in the course of law enforcement. The

by glurgh 13y ago

Didn't need to claim it. US citizens get killed without a trial all the time, as they have been since just about forever, in the course of law enforcement. There's no shortage of perfectly defensible complaints one can have with this or any other administration without having to resort to tinfoil hat ones.

mcantelon 13y ago
What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). That's not "tinfoil hat" (what a banal, overused term), simply acknowledging documented reality. The disposition matrix is being coordinated by John Brennan, one of the Bush administration's torture proponents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose
- dragonwriter 13y ago
  > What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before. Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues. But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
- mpyne 13y ago
  He didn't make it any more legal than it was before. As a military matter it's always been legal as long as there's a valid military justification behind it. What Obama has done is to take advantage of the increased ability to remotely use military force to avoid having to send in ground troops or fighter-bombers to accomplish the same goal. It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times. Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.

by glurgh 13y ago

mcantelon 13y ago

What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). That's not "tinfoil hat" (what a banal, overused term), simply acknowledging documented reality. The disposition matrix is being coordinated by John Brennan, one of the Bush administration's torture proponents. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposition_Matrix#Purpose

dragonwriter 13y ago
> What the Obama administration has done is make extra-judicial killing of citizens legal (and therefore less of a risk to decision makers) and scalable (for the purposes of domestic counter insurgence, which seems to be a big concern of post-9/11 security policy). There was a whole lot of extrajudicial killing of US citizens in the course of domestic counter insurgence between 1861 and 1865; Obama has neither made this legal (as if he could) or made it scalable in a way which it wasn't before. Both the threat environment and the tools used in response have changed, and certainly in the modern situation the line between interstate war and domestic insurgency is much less well defined, as are the fronts in either kind of war. This does produce quite involved issues in how to deal with both, and how to deal with that (and the interactions, in either the internal or international case, between war and police functions.) And certainly there is considerable room to debate the appropriateness of the particular choices and policies of this, the previous (and, no doubt, the next, etc.) administration on these issues. But lets not pretend that they are something they aren't, because that isn't helpful.
mpyne 13y ago
He didn't make it any more legal than it was before. As a military matter it's always been legal as long as there's a valid military justification behind it. What Obama has done is to take advantage of the increased ability to remotely use military force to avoid having to send in ground troops or fighter-bombers to accomplish the same goal. It has precedent all the way back to the Clinton administration (if not farther, I'm just going by my own memory), when Bill Clinton authorized cruise missiles to be used against "terrorist training camps" at least a couple of times. Actually, there was a time when the U.S. used military force against its own citizens in a legal, but extrajudicial fashion: The Whiskey Rebellion (which even occurred on U.S. soil). There were at least no direct battle fatalities as a result, but that was due to the fact that the insurgents gave up.