Massive hyperbole. I guarantee you its not the first time in history Americans have been killed on the battlefield while fighting for the other side. The executive branch has been given no power to indefinitely detain Americans. See Hamdi v. Rumsfeld. The people who have been detained are not Americans.

The scale of proxy wars engaged in then versus today can scarcely be compared its so different.

> The executive branch has been given no power to indefinitely detain Americans

Wrong.

1) Section 412 of the USA PATRIOT act permits indefinite detention of immigrants; see Jose Padilla, an American citizen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jose_Padilla_(prisoner)#Habeas...

2) Sections 1021 and 1022 of NDAA FY2012 (which Obama is defending right now in Obama v. Hedges): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NDAA_2012#Controversy_over_ind...

Padilla was ultimatey tried and convicted in a federal civilian court. Obama v hedges has nothing to do with indefinite detention of US citizens. Obama's signing statement explicitly said the act should not be interpreted to encompass US citizens. Given that and the precedent in Hamdi v. Rumsfield, iys clear those NDAA provisions do not apply to citizens.

In Hedges v Obama [1], the trial court blocked the government's power to indefinitely detain. The ruling was immediately appealed and the trial court's decision was stayed. I take it from the government's rush to appeal that there are people are being detained right now that would have had to be released had the ban been upheld.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hedges_v._Obama

The injunction in Hedges blocked the detainment power in its entirety (on the basis of being unconstitutionally vague), not only detainment with respect to American citizens. Obama is fighting to preserve the detainment power, not for the power to detain American citizens, which would be contrary to his signing statement and the expressed intent of Congress.

>Padilla was ultimatey tried and convicted in a federal civilian court

You're OK with indefinitely detaining American citizens until the government slaps some charges on & convicts? Spooky.

I'm not "OK" with what happened to Padilla, but the contention was that the executive branch "has been given the power" to indefinitely detain U.S. citizens, and that assertion is false.

Read the history of the Padilla case: http://www.nyclu.org/case/padilla-v-bushhamdi-v-rumsfeld-cha....

See also: http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/what-supreme-cou....

There was a legal wrangling over the scope of the President's detention powers, and Padilla's appeal to the Supreme Court was rendered moot by the government deciding to charge him. No U.S. citizen has been indefinitely detained since.

The drone strikes seldom occur on what a reasonable person would consider a battlefield (weddings, etc.). I think that is what parent is getting at.

Certainly American intelligence operatives have murdered their countrymen quietly over the decades. A big difference to me (at least) is that these assassinations are completely out in the open, publicly announced and such.

Anwar al-Awlaki was specifically targeted for assassination, not killed on a battlefield.

Yemen, lacking an effective civilian law enforcement system that could give him due process was itself a battlefield.

IT is not where a lot of my friends make a living; many of them are/were intel analysts (open source, meaning they do not do the classified stuff, they do large-scale cultural analysis that is the background to the classified reports; we all know the majority are not reading their work, hecne the problems) because language skills with a certain Middle Eastern language. And they will all tell you the same thing: every strike radicalizes more people, and is causing more problems than they intend to solve. They know this by the way through local media they are paid to read. Also every one I know from Yemen, and I know a few, will tell you the same thing as our government has progressively fucked up their country so bad no one sees straight. Agitating people in a lawless state, as you hint at, is only asking for desperate people to do desperate things.

But what do I know, this rationalizing logic (and to be fair it is not yours, it is the USG) is disgusting. But it works in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and worked so well in Iraq, yeah?

No, it did not. Strategy bad, implementation bad, and results bad. What a surprise.

That's tangential to my point. It may be a bad idea to pursue any specific criminal into Yemen. I'm not arguing that. I'm arguing that sovereign states can do so because in a lawless country there is no "cannot" in the face of physical ability to act. "Should" is a wholly different question.

This distinction is not irrelevant. In our system of government, courts decide "can" while the political process decides "should." But we have a tendency of equating the two, and responding to every instance of "shouldn't" with "you can't do that!" "Can" Obama pursue terrorist suspects into Yemen with force? Yes! Should he? Who knows.

To you it may be tangential, but my large amount of time in the Middle East (and I happen to like it here) has taught me that, unfortunately, stateless states should implode on themselves. They will anyway. The only reason they are able to cause damage is we shorten our proximity to them with forward operating bases and less legitimate covers in countries where the population does not approve of our presence, even nominally. That dislike is because of those very same FOBs, which are there to make the stateless stateful.

If we can learn anything from networking jokes, no amount of guns will make UDP TCP, just like forcing Yemenis to accept legitimacy based on your definition of the need for stateful intervention to prevent stateless chaos and terrorism (the biggest fad word of the decade) and will not work (I would not be surprised, knowing my history of ancient Greece, if the terrain and disconnected government are not so uncommon, see Afghanistan also).

I agree on the should-can dichotomy. The problem is that I was under the impression the should was important in the betterment of society than the can, and that has recently changed. But maybe because I was raised by lawyers, I was taught the should was more important the can, hence the idea of constitutional powers. I am under the impression that is the outrage with PRISM/FISA/general government malfeasance these days: like a cop who badgers someone he pulls over and does not follow his legal obligations, the USG in Yemen, in signals intelligence, in everything to be honest, does what it can and worries about the should later, and will find any excuse in the should category that is exceptional to justify a "can" they knew to be a "cannot." It is disgusting.

It is ok: my time abroad taught me all governments are shams, and we best tolerate them just to make them pleased with themselves. The USG is like all other bullies, and any government bully must be convinced in its total allegiance of the flock or it must (can) flex its muscle even though it knows it should not. Unfortunately when the bully beats too many people, they gang up and trounce on him.

Sorry, end rant. Not meant to be directed at you. Your last point is really good, but it defines exactly what makes me want to be Scandinavian. I do not want to support my government even tacitly anymore.

The entire world is a battlefield in the war on terror, even "the homeland". Which means that they can kill anyone they want anywhere in the world via secret order using secret evidence with no oversight. And terror can never be defeated so the war is permanent. This is a dangerous bullshit war that will continue to destroy our way of life until it is stopped.

Ok then, then what about his 16 year old son? Another American citizen (born in Denver), killed two weeks later in a drone strike. Does killing teens jive with your idea of due process?

Killing is the closest thing to a "natural right" that exists. We bargain it away when we form civilized societies, but no such society binds sovereign nations together.

The issue with al awalki was that we were bound, because as a citizen he was party to our social contract. That said, the constitution requires "due process" not a trial in every case. Al awalki was in a place where we could not effectively capture him and give him a trial (he had the option to submit to process by turning himself in-- he was wanted for years).

Its not a matter of it being a lesser or greater country. Its the matter of it being a different country. There is no "murder" in the state of nature. Nothing limits our use of force other than our bargaining away that natural ability when we form societies. But the fact that Americans have bargained that away with respect to each other does not mean we have done so with respect to non-Americans not on our soil.

Not really. China has the apparatus to apprehend a person such as al-Awlaki. It has nothing to do with greater or lesser.

Emphatically, I am not saying this in defense of the assassination of al-Awlaki, but instead I am saying this because I believe it to be a simple truth that is related to the case.