That’s one way to distinguish between “citizens” vs “consumers”. They are mutually exclusive categories when the shit gets real.
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Could be. The Obama administration continued many of the Bush administration’s post 9/11 excesses and over reaches. Still orders of magnitude better than the Bush or Trump administrations on most everything else. Sad to have to parse it that finely, though.
Yikes, troubling stuff 
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Frankly, it doesn’t benefit the discussion to neglect the difference between combat and drone assassination regardless of the citizenship of the victim/target. No person arguing in good faith could conflate the two.
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What value did you intend to provide in restating my post with your response?
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The point about the distinction is that whatever amount of a grey area you leave between the two will be pushed on by the government. There needs to be civilians in the loop some how with regard to making sure that that vague line isn’t crossed over. If you make a law that says “The US government can’t kill an American unless they present a clear and present danger”, someone will say “He said Allahu Akhbar. He’s a clear and present danger.” and proceed with their drone assassination. I see the distinction as obvious and you see the distinction as obvious but unless you make people justify their decisions in front of some sort of authority, people will pretend they don’t see the distinction in order to do what they want.
Ah, but you see, the iTunes User Agreement doesn’t apply here since the US Government has weapons of mass destruction!
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I don’t think dragging the situation of combat into it is helpful. Rather the opposite. It isn’t needed to discuss the merits of drone assassination, due process for American citizens, or what “clear and present danger” means. Bringing up combat muddies the waters rather than clarifying them. Because no matter what we think of any of it, there’s no practical way of bringing civilian review into as dynamic an environment as person-to-person combat. The only way of dictating that scenario is preemptively, by making clear the rules of engagement as well as the punishment for violating them.
But that has nothing to do with drone assassinations, which is also why they are not carried out by the military. Drone assassinations of non-combatants explicitly violate the rules-of-engagement.
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The argument that the department of justice is making here is that those decisions are never reviewable, whether they are carried out in combat or not even after the fact. I would argue that there always needs to be some sort of civilian review, even if it is in combat, after the fact, at the very least. It’s been pointed out that the very definition of combat has become so muddied that it isn’t a reliable line to draw as to when there should be such a distinction made. Yes bringing up combat muddies the situation, that’s why there should be a set of rules that apply whether combat is involved or not.
Civilian review doesn’t raise the dead. And that still derails the topic towards the combat scenario, unnecessarily.
Let’s just cut to the chase: should the United States government (or any government) be drone striking American non-combatants? No, not under any circumstances. How about non-American non-combatants ? Still no. Still a violation of multiple international treaties and standards.
I think it’s controversial and worth discussing whether drone strikes should be used at all, but that is a different conversation.
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I agree with all of this. The problem again is that, what you and I call a non-combatant, might in someone else’s mind still count as a combatant. As long as you allow the government to make the decision to call someone a combatant without having any sort of civilian review, then we are still in the same place of the government being able to “unilaterally decide to kill US citizens.” Trump can issue an order that says “Joe Biden is an enemy combatant” and unless there is some way to oversee such a determination he can launch a drone strike on Delaware.
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But he can’t. The military has a definition for both combatants and non-combatants, and 45 can’t change that on the fly. Anyone who followed such an illegal order would (rightfully) be court martialed. And they know it.
But intelligence agencies don’t have those restrictions. The cogent discussion is, if they don’t have those restrictions, should they be allowed access to the equipment that enables drone assassination? And we seem to agree that, no, they should not. But that is a discussion about civilian applications, not combat.
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Remember when the Dems claimed to be horrified by Trump’s advocacy for targeting the families of opponents of the US?
The empire is bipartisan.
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I think the bigger problem is secrecy. Liberal societies are based on the idea that objections to any iidea are celebrated, and any decision of consequence involves open discussion. Secrecy prevents people from chiming in with “Hey wait a goddamn minute. Those are my, [or his or her] rights you’re talking about! Justify yourself!”.
The notion of a war without spatial or temporal bounds (The War Against Terror) is fundamentally incompatible with this kind of liberal polity.
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BTW: do you think the US public response to the murder of Abdulrahman al-Awlaki would have been equally muted if he were white and Christian?
Rhetorically: why did bipartisan white America not consider the Denver-born Abdulrahman to be a “real” American child?
Additionally: why is there a bipartisan consensus that the murder of non-American children is a less significant (to the point of almost complete non-significance) event?
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Well, we could have an uprising and demand a constitution where “national security” is not a justification for anything … except we ALREADY HAVE ONE 
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There is a constitutional amendment saying you have a right to free speech and yet the government has passed a law that prevents you from drawing Mickey Mouse (and obviously death threats, inciting crimes, etc.).
Turns out people balance things (even thought American judges pretend this isn’t true). A baseline of “no killing, you assholes” is the right baseline.
I’m sure there are some people who would think that way. But I think after a drone 100% legally shot a missile into their homes their replacements would think my idea was a really good one.
(Please note: this is pretty much a standup comedy bit, my very real “we shouldn’t kill people” stance actually means I have no inclination to have people killed)
ETA: I’d just like to say that in terms of laws against killing people; not killing people is more important than the law. If a circumstance justifies killing a person, it also justifies breaking the law, every time. The idea that a person would be held back from shooting the person about the nuke New York because it’s against the law is bizarre. If a person has time to actually weigh what is legal or not legal in a situation, they have time to try to think of an option other than killing someone.
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I thought there was another established precedent on this — other than, ya know, the entire historical behavior of US foreign and defense policy. Thanks for pointing that out!
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