Anwar al-Awlaki's extrajudicial murder

[CHIMO]

Is this the world we want? Where the president of the United States can place an American citizen, or anyone else for that matter, living outside a war zone on a targeted assassination list, and then have him murdered by drone strike.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/cifamerica/2011/sep/30/anwar-awlaki-extrajudicial-murder

With Death of Anwar al-Awlaki, Has U.S. Launched New Era of Killing U.S. Citizens Without Charge?
http://www.democracynow.org/2011/9/30/with_death_of_anwar_al_awlaki

[ixion]

1. It's been going on since 2001

and continues through this day.

[MNBrewer]

2. Bush, Obama: Obama, Bush

[naaman fletcher]

3. Maybe,

we should have landed a constable and asked him to put his hands behind his back so we could cuff him.

[customerserviceguy]

4. It's the world I want

When we can identify an enemy so brazen, and so fucking complicit in the deaths (and attempted deaths) of civillian Americans, I hope that the present President and all future Presidents make the same decision.

al-Awlaki wasn't Roman Polanski, you know.

[bhikkhu]

5. There's a lot of things about the world that I don't want...

I don't want war, or killing, or the death penalty, or murder, or all kinds of hatred, or many other things as well.

I'm less concerned about al-Awlaki's citizenship - I don't see why that should make any difference.

But the guy comes right out and advocates murder, says murder is good as long as you are murdering americans, and he apparently has worked very hard to build up organizations dedicated to murdering americans. If you're the president, who's first and foremost job is to protect the country, if that's your main responsibility, then what are you supposed to do with the guy?

[saras]

6. It's amazing how thoroughly we can miss the point.

I simply don't care the slightest most trivial bit about the opinions of anyone here who thinks "we" did the right thing because al-Awlaki was a bad guy.

For the simple reason that no one here has, or is ever going have, the power to decide who's a bad guy. We don't get to decide who's a bad guy. Someone else does. In our recent past, Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld et. al. would have had that power.

At this point, our likely options are that Obama, Romney, Cain, Pawlenty, Bachmann, et. al. will.

None of them can, or should, be trusted with it.

There are other, better, fairer, more trustworthy methods of dealing with people like al-Awlaki. To the extent that America gets to claim any moral leadership in the world at all, this is a good place to start.


Some people just have the hardest time letting go of exceptionalism. They can't get that any rationale that we use to attack others with, others will use to attack us with, with potentially the same degree of success.

To want us to be shooting people down without public trial based on our judgement of being warred on, is to want that every other country in the world take the same liberty.