Killing Citizens Abroad

Imagine you travel abroad. And then for some crazy reason (your name is Islamic, your name matches a known child pornographer, you are friends with known radical Dan Song, etc.) the US decides you are a threat. So the CIA authorizes you to be killed by airborne drones. Sounds ridiculous, right?

It’s important to put yourself into these equations. Usually when we talk about stuff like this it is, "terrorist who authorized release of hideous deadly fart smells in D.C. subways authorized for death", except it’s usually a lot worse than "fart smells".

But remember, we (meaning the US government) do screw up sometimes on this stuff. Lets think about how many supposed criminals have been released lately due to DNA evidence. And those are people who went through actual trials with actual judges and were still wrongly convicted. Recent drone killings abroad have no trial or judge. We’re just smokin’ bad guys based on totally one sided evidence. And again, big picture, not that I’m against this.

But we tend to trust the government to kill a terrorist thousands of miles away with limited evidence, but not to give our grandmother a flu shot.

When you are debating whether this is something the government should be allowed to do, you shouldn’t always assume we are only talking about "guilty people", you should imaging that you decided to take a trip to Pakistan and for some reason the government confused you (Fred Patriot) with someone else (Fred Patrios).

I live in New York. I’m a big fan of not getting bombed/killed/etc. I like walking in Times Square without bombs exploding.

But I’m also a big fan of the uniquely US view of justice. That whole "innocent before being blown up by the CIA" thing.

So this story makes me a bit uneasy.