Yeah no shit he's not being "targeted as a criminal", nobody even feels up to the task of proving he's done anything actually illegal to a court of law, that's why he's getting assassinated instead and the President's planting secret prisons like fucking plantation fields all over the world for people someone in some office has a hunch might have done a bad thing - but we'll never know, it's too dangerous to know, the dirty illicit deeds of al Qaeda operatives are like some Lovecraft shit where if you so much as speak their names out loud in front of a judge everyone's eyeballs explode and demons come crawling out of impossible geometries in the room. God knows what one of their preachers could do to a man if we ever tried to capture one alive - can the very insidious harmonies of his voice turn a righteous God-fearing American soldier into a depraved terrorist? Scientists say possibly!
But hey, that's okay, we weren't using all that boring trial shit anyway. I mean who could possibly deal with something as unheard-of as organized crime without tossing out every legal stricture and protected right developed in the last five hundred years? I mean, they act like criminals, pssh, yeah, but they work together! Like, like... an army! So clearly they're military! And that means, uhm... I'm not sure what it means. Those wierdies who wrote military law and policy don't seem to have really thought out how something that isn't really an army would be handled like it's an army. Guess that means they're really a SUPERARMY, and anything anyone does to them is by definition legal.
Hey, cut the feds a break, we've got no other precedent to work with here! Imagine if bad guys - working together - some even travelling across borders - had been skulking around all this time. Would Thomas Jefferson have written all that flowery shit no one reads about due process if he'd ever imagined such a thing? Would anyone have ever been so foolish as to attempt to arrest and try one of these, let's call them "gang members", rather than gun them and everyone they ever spoke to down on sight? Madness! The only reasonable route to a safe and civil social order is to, as one of the founding philosophers of modern ethics said, "Exterminate all the brutes!"
Re: Excellent train of logic
But hey, that's okay, we weren't using all that boring trial shit anyway. I mean who could possibly deal with something as unheard-of as organized crime without tossing out every legal stricture and protected right developed in the last five hundred years? I mean, they act like criminals, pssh, yeah, but they work together! Like, like... an army! So clearly they're military! And that means, uhm... I'm not sure what it means. Those wierdies who wrote military law and policy don't seem to have really thought out how something that isn't really an army would be handled like it's an army. Guess that means they're really a SUPERARMY, and anything anyone does to them is by definition legal.
Hey, cut the feds a break, we've got no other precedent to work with here! Imagine if bad guys - working together - some even travelling across borders - had been skulking around all this time. Would Thomas Jefferson have written all that flowery shit no one reads about due process if he'd ever imagined such a thing? Would anyone have ever been so foolish as to attempt to arrest and try one of these, let's call them "gang members", rather than gun them and everyone they ever spoke to down on sight? Madness! The only reasonable route to a safe and civil social order is to, as one of the founding philosophers of modern ethics said, "Exterminate all the brutes!"