re: #220 Obdicut

How do you square your support for extrajudicial killing with your adamant opposition to indefinite retention and torture?

Honest question.

The notion of clear and present danger and because of the risks involved with capturing people are sufficient to justify killing a terrorist whenever you have the bastard in your sights.

While it is unrealistic to apply the full court standing of innocent until proven guilty on a battlefield, there still should be the desire to and tendency to aver towards innocence rather than default guilt. I have no problem with clipping a know terrorist who brags about his evil deeds and openly plots more of them. I have a problem with killing the guy we are not sure about.

The real question is what you do with them when you do have them in custody.

There is a difference between a known terrorist - who openly brags about his crimes and the guy we picked up under whatever circumstances, but not necessarily an orgy of evidence pointing to his guilt.

So let’s compare and contrast.

You have a guy like KSM. We know he was guilty as sin and we know he was doing his best to kill more Americans. Had we decided that it was in America’s best interests to simply kill him, then that would have been a just killing.

On the other hand, you have whatever guy that the Army picked up. Some of those guys no doubt were really bad guys. Others may well have been in the wrong place at the wrong time - or even have been combatants, but had never done more than pick up a rifle. The army is not the police. The army does not have the time in the middle of a battle field to do a thorough investigation. This is not the fault of the army. However, this also means that inevitably some of the guys picked up did not deserve to be picked up.

As to torture. No we should not even torture Nazis. And the US refrained from doing so in the Second World War for very good reasons which I have argued strongly here before many times. But if we should not even torture Nazis or KSM when we have him, then we certainly should not torture the guy we are not sure of.

Once we have the guy in custody, we own them. We own the responsibility for what happens to them. We need to act with honor.