Posted 5:44 PM by Floyd

When I was an impressionable pup of a student at Purdue University, I had my first contact with college professors. I decided they were pretty damn smart. They wrote our textbooks and graded our exams, and clearly knew the subject matter forward and backward. Of course, sometimes they were a little eccentric. There was a psychology professor who had jammed with Blue Oyster Cult, and who had a little dog whose hind legs had been lost in a car accident -- so he made a little wheeled seat for the dog's rump. And there was the sociology professor who held up a grenade in class, to see if we were paying attention.

Since then I have had more experience in the great wide world, and have found that some professors are intelligent, some are doing okay, and some -- well, check out this editorial by Laura K. Donohue, acting assistant professor of political science at Stanford University.

You can read the whole thing if you want. Here is the executive summary: USA Predator drone fires missile at suspected terrorists in Yemen. Terrorists are killed. Assassinations are bad. Bad USA, bad!

Some quotes, and my reactions thereto:

The incident in Yemen wasn't the first time in the war on terrorism that the Bush administration has assassinated people it considers ``enemy combatants.'' But it is the first time it has done so outside Afghanistan; it is the first time it has done so in a country with which the United States is not at war; and it is the first time it has assassinated a U.S. citizen.

If I were an acting assistant professor of political science -- or even an acting janitor who hears some lectures when he empties the trash can -- I would expect to know what constitutes an assassination. Killing a head of state or influential private citizen is an assassination. Killing a person who wages war, such as a terrorist, is not.

The target was clearly Harithi, a man Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld referred to after the killing as ``a suspected terrorist connected to the USS Cole.'' He was suspected of terrorist crimes, but he had not been charged -- much less convicted -- in any court of law. Neither had the other five, at least one of whom was entitled to U.S. constitutional protections.

If an American citizen joins the SS, and is wandering about France prior to D-Day, is he entitled to constitutional protections before being bombed or shot at?

Does Donohue think that all attacks made by American forces on enemy forces are preceded by a trial?

The White House refused to apply the Geneva conventions to prisoners and replaced the U.S. judicial system with military tribunals, claiming that due process did not apply to suspected terrorists. Now, the administration appears to be interpreting the resolution as a license to kill.

3000 US citizens are murdered during peacetime. And the US might actually kill people? Impeach Bush! Re-elect Al Gore!

On Nov. 4, the day after the assassination, President Bush denounced Al-Qaida as ``international killers.'' A State Department spokesman then announced, ``Our policy on targeted killings in the Israeli-Palestinian context has not changed.'' The United States cannot live by the standards it condemns.

I'm glad to see that Donohue sees no distinction between killing terrorists, and filling Israeli civilians full of nails. It makes the Fisking ever so much more guilt-free.

The assassination raises important moral questions. Is it better for one, or, in this case, six enemy combatants to die, their guilt unproved, than for American soldiers' or citizens' lives to be placed at risk? The utilitarian argument that might allow this ignores the central importance of individual rights -- rights that form the basis of our political structure.

Aren't enemy combatants usually attacked? When does Donohue plan to learn about how wars are conducted?

"Colonel, the Liebstandarte Adolf Hitler SS division lies between us and Paris. Shall we attack?"

"Captain, I can see that there are enemy combatants ahead. But is their guilt proven?"

If we suppose that we are at war, then the tradition of ``just war'' demands that the force we employ must be ``discriminate,'' providing immunity for innocents wherever possible. And it must be proportional to our ends.

That's exactly right, dipwad. That's why a missile was used, not a nuclear warhead. That's why we wasted six guys in a desert, and didn't drop a bomb on Aden.

In terms of proportionality, was the murder of six people proportional to the suspicion of the guilt of one?

"Sergeant, who can I shoot at?"

"Private, you can shoot at Heinz Sheisskopf. He's a known war criminal. You can kill some number of soldiers near him. Let me use my slide rule ... carry the three ... AUGH! I've been hit!"

"I'll avenge you sir!"

"Not out of proportion, private!"

The United States cannot insist that everyone else play by democratic norms and then turn the tables by establishing a separate set of rules for itself. It is not just irresponsible. It is dangerous.

Yeah, somebody might fly some airplanes into some buildings and kill a few thousand civilians. What's that? They already did, before the new assassination policy was approved?

I guess you don't learn about cause and effect until you become a full professor.