That is certainly what the strikes are supposed to do. And police are supposed to target specific actors believed to be criminals, but because of how much potential error there is in that, we all agree human rights are only safeguarded if there are reviews and limits on what they can do to them. I have never seen any explanation why this case is different.
In the case of Mammana Bibi, I agree this was an unintended civilian casualty. But I don’t know if that possibility was carefully evaluated, if there was some important target to justify that risk, or if it was all a case of shoot-everything-just-in-case without caring about the people down there. Because there’s no procedure that gives those citizens advocates, I don’t know if their rights ever came up in the decision process.
And no, simply trusting the US executive and military on properly considering such rights has not been a solution in the past. Why are these people less deserving of defense lawyers than domestic criminals?
Fair enough. I remembered your user name, but apparently not who you were; my apologies for the assumption.
Absolutely. English can be used with different levels of precision, so I give people in the “we have to use words just so” camp a lot less latitude than people who are more concerned about what is happening, because the latter may simply be trying to evoke a description without making claims about the precise legal meanings. The cost of being pedantic is being held to a stricter standard.
Absolutely, the level being terrorism that can’t be stopped without greater harm.
I mean, you’re already accepting a certain level of rights violations here, of civilian deaths and people being killed without judicial process, just so long as it’s all externalized to other Yemenis and Pakistanis. In the long run, that approach just makes things worse by encouraging them to push the violence back to you, when what we need is for it to be actually minimized.
And by the way, I don’t agree with the killing of bin Laden in the sense you are using it. I agree that it is something that could have been done in a justified way, that is, they probably could have actually made a case for it and justified it with some appropriate public procedures. I don’t think anyone would have blinked if congress That in no way means that it should serve as a precedent saying those things aren’t important for dealing with people in general.
You’ve been giving a lot of hypotheticals, so let me ask you one: when does a person have a right to a trial? Most people accept that you can neglect them to stop imminent danger, but rarely has that ever included someone simply plotting to do something. Is there a certain magnitude of their accused crimes, or a certain difficulty of capturing them, that negates the need for them to face their accuser and receive an advocate?
