There is an absurdly huge difference between killing someone who is in the process of killing or harming another person and killing someone who might or has or someone thinks will do something but no imminent threat to life exists.
Yep. And?
It's called due process and it is a right all Americans have and one that none of us should allow to be stripped away in the slightest bit. Even worse is the bullshit terrorism excuse that we are being fed as the reason that we need to forfeit said rights.
I'm aware of what due process is, thanks. I guess where we differ is to whom it applies and to what degree. When you join a terrorist network and start waging war on your country,
you forfeit
your rights. They haven't been taken away, they have been discarded.
Obama isn't to be blamed for the life decisions of American jihadi, but he will be blamed if an oversight and lack of action on his part leads to a substantial American bodycount. Innocent civilians deserve to live more than self-professed holy warriors coordinating attacks, kidnappings and bombings from protected areas. Foreign areas at that.
Pretty darn clear to me....
If you say so. Sounds a little more like idealism than realism to me, but maybe that's just my mileage varying...
A person who commits a violent act towards an innocent person does not deprive themselves of due process. There is a fundamental difference between a persons immediate actions requiring an immediate response in order to stop them and killing someone who is not an immediate threat without due process.
I think you are focusing on my misuse of a word. Not exactly sure why I went with 'violence' there. Weird. That encompasses far too wide a swath of actions. What I meant was 'lethal,' which is why I used the examples I did - necks being slit and brains being blown out. Acts that I think we can both agree on as being a bit more serious than merely violent. When a perp puts a life in immediate danger, the present law enforcement is duty bound to prevent that taking of innocent life
even if it means killing the perp.
It sounds like you are acknowledging that in some instances lethal force must be brought to bear in order to extinguish a lethal threat decisively, I just hope you can bring yourself to realize that LEOs respond immediately with gun blazing. They try negotiation, appeasement, misdirection, tactics short of all out war. But sometimes 'war' is what it comes down to
Riding in a jeep in another country far away from any other Americans does not represent an immediate threat.
Please. If that wonderfully vapid example you pose is really the type of situation you envision a CiC using this kind of power for, well... I think we're done here.
This ability is for when that jeep has enough security to rule out bag-and-grab by SF or local assets, when it's riding around in a country we can't really operate in, and when the threat involved can't be ignored.
So no judge, no jury, nothing but some asshole who decides that you are guilty and does not give you the ability to defend yourself who has the power to order your assassination to be carried out by the military?
Funny, here I thought I posted how I was upset over there not being enough oversight.
And I wasn't ignoring the Cabinet, Joint Chiefs, etc like you are now either...heh
That is called tyranny. Our founders guaranteed our right to due process for a very good reason, its a shame that people like you are so willing to allow it to be whittled away.
You misspelled treason. Since you brought up the founders you should look into what they thought of it and how it just might apply to this memo.
And good news, there's no reason to feel shame here: my views on this are a little more in-depth than what is abbreviated by your conflating approval with tactics to approval with policy.
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