Summations Only

Vociferous condemnation would be a good start followed by sanctions. Canada alone could seriously mess with their energy supply not to mention their grass and maple syrup. Put the squeeze on em. Something other than silent complicity.

This is the slippery slope that the US has embraced. Scary as fuck. I think the key point is that the US is not at war with Pakistan, Yemen or Somalia. Which I would say makes the killings illegal. I guess it is all under the mantle of the CIA which probably has a host of legal protections of which I know nothing.Still I think that it is morally reprehensible and a huge loss to the integrity of the rule of law.

I won't dispute for a minute that if I had to fight a war then I would want all the best tools available. I would be ruthless and unrelenting.This is altogether different from targeted assassinations outside of any recognizable theatre of war. Killing innocents on the battlefield is not the same as killing innocents in a controlled, zero danger situation.

But legality has nothing to do with morality.

The law is born of morality. No doubt there is a big separation between them but they are seriously linked.

No, law is born of practicality. Morality is seldom involved.

It occurs to me that not a single Chinese person was murdered by government soldiers during the Tiananmen Square incident of 1989, despite the fact that up to 1000 people died of high velocity lead poisoning. I wonder after reading some of the posts here why I thought an internal Chinese matter was a big deal?After all the Chinese government does not accept any blame for the incident.

That seems correct to me.The Chinese government was criticized for human rights violations, not for murder.

Fairly common for gov'ts to kill people with impunity I guess. After all, like Ringo says, what are you gonna do about it?Here is a Canadian soldier charged with 2nd degree murder for dispatching a wounded enemy in a war zone. He is charged because it is deemed that the wounded man no longer presented an immediate danger. So even in a hot battle zone our soldiers are only allowed to employ as much force as is necessary to neutralize the immediate threat.How can we hold our soldiers, who are being personally shot at right now, to a higher standard of responsibility than we do a soldier killing people from an office 4000 miles away from any danger?It just feels like some kind of snow job out of a movie about a dystopian future.

I don't see any double or even different standards being applied in your examples. The soldier in your example is charged with specifically targeting and killing someone who was not deemed an immediate threat.How is that in anyway related to drone strikes?

Scenario 1 — A soldier executes a dying man in the battlefield in a country that is in a state of occupation and near civil war. The man was absolutely going to dye and the defendant characterizes it as an act of mercy. He is accused of murder because he was not in immediate danger.Scenario 2 — A soldier executes a suspected militant and his family in a country not at war with anyone from 4000 miles away. The danger that is used to justify the killing is of a theoretical nature. He bears no responsibility for killing the 'militant' or the accidentally dispatched.They are connected mostly because I am comparing them to each other so as to point out what seems like an inconsistency in the application of our sense of right and wrong.Comprende?

No, I do not understand your point other than your seemingly totally misrepresenting the situations. The actual situation is that the soldier is restricted in what he can and cannot do under rule of law. One thing he cannot do is commit a mercy killing. There is no theoretical nature involved. The target is identified and assigned and the soldier carried out the orders.Sorry but I still see no correspondence between the two scenarios.

Surely this question is rhetorical. Of course we cannot. The question is whether we can hold the button pusher to a high standard. Because certainly we can and do assign responsibility based on the mental state of and the danger to the killer. I would address this point in answering Panda's question about why accidental killings by soldiers are different from accidental killings by drones.The situations are totally distinct, as is the nature of the "accident". With respect to the shooter, there is a difference between accidents that result from the "fog of war" and deaths resulting from spraying bullets and missiles at targets surrounded by civilians in situations where the shooter has chosen the situation in which to engage and where the shooter is in absolutely no danger.Further the opprobrium attaches not only to the shooter but to the person placing the shooter in the situation. It may well be that the situations are markedly similar for that perspective.Also, as you have pointed out, we are not at war with Pakistan. That alone ought to make it harder to justify killing innocent Pakistanis. Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

By theoretical nature, it is meant that the suspected militant is only projected to be a future danger. The accidentally dispatched are collateral damage justified by the hypothesis that some risk will be mitigated that is worse, in the decision maker's mind, than killing the accidentally dispatched.

But that is a misrepresentation of the situation.When someone is targeted it is not because they might be some future danger, it is because they are a clear and present danger.That is hardly theoretical.