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They're not needed. The government can just declare him an enemy combatant and stick him in Guantanamo. (see: Jose Padilla.) Or, drop a drone bomb on him. (see

They're not needed. The government can just declare him an enemy combatant and stick him in Guantanamo. (see: Jose Padilla.) Or, drop a drone bomb on him. (see: Anwar al-Aulaqi, Samir Khan, Abd al-Rahman, and Jude Mohammed.)

rayiner 13y ago
Jose Padilla was never held in Guantanamo. He was held in a military brig in South Carolina, longer than he should have because of litigation surrounding the authority of the Bush administration to hold him without charges. The Bush administration did charge him, likely because they lost Hamdi v. Rumsfeld which rejected their attempts to detain a different U.S. citizen. The only American citizen targeted in a drone strike was Al Awlaki. The others were killed because they happened to be traveling with Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan or Yemen who were targeted. We can argue about the legality of targeting Al Awlaki, someone who was actively waging war against the U.S. and tried to evade capture for a decade, but it's ridiculous to bring up the other three. Hundreds of U.S. citizens were killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that U.S. citizens may be killed collaterally in a military strike with legitimate targets has never been construed to be a violation of due process. Snowden is a completely different situation. He's not waging war against the U.S. and leaking classified information is a criminal charge, not an act of war.
- jussij 13y ago
  > He was held in a military brig in South Carolina, longer than he should have because So he was held for three and a half years as an "enemy combatant" under order of the US president, G.W. Bush. Is the US court system so broken that one person, one president, one dictator is now judge jury and executioner and gets away with such an atrocity? What has become of the rule of law in the USA? As a country, it's looking more and more like a dictatorship. As a country that stood for democracy, freedom of speech and justice for all, what has become of that? As a serious question, what exactly does the government of the USA stand for today?
  - jussij 13y ago
    As a juxtaposition consider this, just out today. Halliburton, the US energy services giant, has admitted destroying evidence relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst such disaster in American history. A Justice Department statement released late on Thursday said the company had agreed to plead guilty to criminal conduct that occurred when it was carrying out its own post-accident investigation. Is any one going to pay for the fact that they broke the law, screwed up in the lives of so many people in Florida, stuffed up the environment for years to come all for the sake of a dollar? No. The Justice Department is going to do nothing more than slap them on the wrist. And why is that? Obviously money talks!
    - rayiner 13y ago
      > Obviously money talks! You make it sound like Halliburton just wrote a check to the DOJ to make the problem go away. Big companies don't need to write checks--they have hostages. Put yourself in a DOJ prosecutor's shoes. You've got evidence of illegal conduct. You can't pin it on anyone specific, but you know the company overall engaged in the conduct. What do you do? Do you randomly prosecute the CEO, simply by virtue of his position, for activity you can't directly pin on him? If you do this, watch every multi-national rush to re-incorporate in Switzerland. Do you shut down the company, in the process putting tens of thousands of innocent people out of work in the midst of a shitty economy, punishing shareholders who had nothing to do with the illegal activity, and destroying a local economy?[1] All for what? To prove a point? No, you don't do any of these things. You do exactly what the DOJ did in this case: force them to make a $55 million "donation" to the National Wildlife Fund, pay a token $200k fine, and let them go on with a stern warning. That's just the nature of law enforcement in a globalized economy, where multi-national corporations can "vote with their pocketbooks" and have countries compete to see who can be the most lax about law enforcement. [1] E.g. consider the criminal indictment and subsequent dissolution of Arthur Andersen, and its impact on Chicago. While most of the personnel moved to other accounting firms in the city, losing the global headquarters of a $10 billion/year giant in the industry was not a good thing for the local economy.
      - 13y ago

rayiner 13y ago

Jose Padilla was never held in Guantanamo. He was held in a military brig in South Carolina, longer than he should have because of litigation surrounding the authority of the Bush administration to hold him without charges. The Bush administration did charge him, likely because they lost Hamdi v. Rumsfeld which rejected their attempts to detain a different U.S. citizen. The only American citizen targeted in a drone strike was Al Awlaki. The others were killed because they happened to be traveling with Al Qaeda leaders in Pakistan or Yemen who were targeted. We can argue about the legality of targeting Al Awlaki, someone who was actively waging war against the U.S. and tried to evade capture for a decade, but it's ridiculous to bring up the other three. Hundreds of U.S. citizens were killed in the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The fact that U.S. citizens may be killed collaterally in a military strike with legitimate targets has never been construed to be a violation of due process. Snowden is a completely different situation. He's not waging war against the U.S. and leaking classified information is a criminal charge, not an act of war.

jussij 13y ago
> He was held in a military brig in South Carolina, longer than he should have because So he was held for three and a half years as an "enemy combatant" under order of the US president, G.W. Bush. Is the US court system so broken that one person, one president, one dictator is now judge jury and executioner and gets away with such an atrocity? What has become of the rule of law in the USA? As a country, it's looking more and more like a dictatorship. As a country that stood for democracy, freedom of speech and justice for all, what has become of that? As a serious question, what exactly does the government of the USA stand for today?
- jussij 13y ago
  As a juxtaposition consider this, just out today. Halliburton, the US energy services giant, has admitted destroying evidence relating to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil rig explosion in the Gulf of Mexico, the worst such disaster in American history. A Justice Department statement released late on Thursday said the company had agreed to plead guilty to criminal conduct that occurred when it was carrying out its own post-accident investigation. Is any one going to pay for the fact that they broke the law, screwed up in the lives of so many people in Florida, stuffed up the environment for years to come all for the sake of a dollar? No. The Justice Department is going to do nothing more than slap them on the wrist. And why is that? Obviously money talks!
  - rayiner 13y ago
    > Obviously money talks! You make it sound like Halliburton just wrote a check to the DOJ to make the problem go away. Big companies don't need to write checks--they have hostages. Put yourself in a DOJ prosecutor's shoes. You've got evidence of illegal conduct. You can't pin it on anyone specific, but you know the company overall engaged in the conduct. What do you do? Do you randomly prosecute the CEO, simply by virtue of his position, for activity you can't directly pin on him? If you do this, watch every multi-national rush to re-incorporate in Switzerland. Do you shut down the company, in the process putting tens of thousands of innocent people out of work in the midst of a shitty economy, punishing shareholders who had nothing to do with the illegal activity, and destroying a local economy?[1] All for what? To prove a point? No, you don't do any of these things. You do exactly what the DOJ did in this case: force them to make a $55 million "donation" to the National Wildlife Fund, pay a token $200k fine, and let them go on with a stern warning. That's just the nature of law enforcement in a globalized economy, where multi-national corporations can "vote with their pocketbooks" and have countries compete to see who can be the most lax about law enforcement. [1] E.g. consider the criminal indictment and subsequent dissolution of Arthur Andersen, and its impact on Chicago. While most of the personnel moved to other accounting firms in the city, losing the global headquarters of a $10 billion/year giant in the industry was not a good thing for the local economy.
    - 13y ago