Targeted Killings Guidelines: Not As Bad As Some Are Saying

Drum quotes the following passage from Scott Lemieux:

Much of the coverage of the memo, including Isikoff's story, focuses on the justifications offered by the Obama administration for killing American citizens, including Anwar al-Awlaki and Samir Khan (two alleged Al Qaeda operatives killed by a 2011 airstrike in Yemen.) In some respects, this focus is misplaced. If military action is truly justified, then it can be exercised against American citizens (an American fighting for the Nazis on the battlefield would not have been entitled to due process.) Conversely, if military action is not justified, extrajudicial killings of non-Americans should hardly be less disturbing than the extrajudicial killing of an American citizen. The crucial question is whether the safeguards that determine when military action is justified are adequate.

That's my view, though it's probably a little on the cosmopolitan side for most folks. OTOH, we might see the emphasis on citizenship in the discussion as an attempt to focus out attention on a claim roughly like: if they can do this even to American citizens, imagine what they're permitted to do to non-citizens. (Hint: we don't have to imagine. The answer is: Gitmo.) But that's a kind of sloppy response. My sympathies on these points are firmly cosmopolitan, and I agree with Lemieux.

He goes on to cite Connor Friedersdorf, who is worrying about the "elastic" definition of "imminent," and making a shaky comparison to the misuse of the term by the Bush administration in the run-up to the Iraq war. Look, 'imminent' is not necessarily "elastic," but it is inherently vague. As Peirce points out, there's nothing inherently wrong with vagueness, so long as you're clear about what you're being vague about. Imminence is exactly the concept we need here, and we can't do without such concepts. (Try making good driving laws without concepts like recklessness.) In a statement of principles, this is just what we'd want. (Similarly for informed.) To make good laws, however, we do want some more specific guidelines to constrain governmental authority. For example, one might reasonably say that a threat is sufficiently imminent to warrant such action by the president if the threat will act too quickly to allow for judicial review.

Anyway, Lemieux is, I think, right to say that we're entitled to throttle back a bit on our out-freaking. That doesn't mean that calm concern and further attention is unwarranted, of course. But let's make sure that our concerns are sensible ones.