Texashiker: By my logic:
If someone does not pose an immediate threat, they are entitled to be arrested, and given a fair trial.
M: What takes place in your logic means nothing. The legal issues here have nothing to do with immediate threat, they have to do with imminent threat: The definition of an imminent threat is this:
"Imminent threat is a standard criterion in international law, developed by Daniel Webster, for when the need for action is "instant, overwhelming, and leaving no choice of means, and no moment for deliberation." In such a case, he argued, the use of force in self-defense is justified."
The use of force in self defense is justified against a threatening citizen. When a window of opportunity arises to take out a threat, as it did with this dude, the opportunity must be seized with all alacrity, least the window close. We are talking here about a person plotting the deaths of American citizens hiding as best he can from the law, thousands or miles away in a country without effective capacity or the will to bring him to justice.
T: If someone poses an immediate threat, shoot to kill.
M: Any time the police attempt to arrest a citizen for speeding away from a bank, say, they are in immediate threat. But the extent of the threat is unknown. Only a mad person would kill people just because he felt under threat. The nature and extent of the threat is the real issue, not it's existence.
T: A panel that instructs the president to kill people, is like a city council deciding what drug dealer the police should kill.
W: Utter rubbish. A city council is subject to higher authority and law. The President is the highest executive legal authority. His power is limited only by Congress and the Supreme Court. He holds the ultimate prosecutorial authority. The buck stops with him.
T: We would not tolerate a local city council instructing the chief of police to kill people in the community, but for some reason its ok for the president to do it?
M: Yup, especially the military.
T: Just because that drug dealer, or car thief "might" commit a crime is no reason to put the person to death. To keep crime down, the city council is going to instruct the mayor and chief of police to kill people before they have the chance to commit the crime. How is that supposed to be ok?
M: You are just simply loony. A drug dealer or a car thief are not an imminent threat. They may be an immediate threat but one of insufficient magnitude to warrant death, as I pointed out to you above.
You have become a form of bigot. You hold an irrational belief and because you are consumed in total by that belief it colors everything you see. Once you believe that your truth is the truth, that nobody can target an American for execution, it matters not to you what anybody else matters to you. Every argument you make serves your bigoted notion that what you think is the good. You have chained your mind with delusions the run in a circle. I am right because what I believe is right and what I believe is right is right because I am right. Meanwhile, in the real world where folk have to function practically, the evidence points to the fact that Anwar al-Awlaki was a terrorist plotting to kill innocent people, a window of opportunity opened to kill him and now he is dead. I wish he could be have been arrested and tired regardless of his citizenship but I believe in reason and the doctrine of imminent threat when countless lives may be at stake and the evidence looks solid. There are times when difficult choices have to be made and many of them fall to the President. I'm glad you aren't him.