But the issues that mostly come up in discourse over civil liberties are the issues I don't have too much of a problem with. They're definitely not unprecedented in principle.
What's the difference between drone strikes of terrorists posing imminent threats and cops killing legitimately dangerous criminals in the act without oversight beforehand if it's necessary to prevent serious violence to an innocent?
Even the quote from the leaked Justice Department memo that was widely excerpted does not assert any unprecedentedly undesirable principle:
"The condition that an operational leader present an 'imminent' threat of violence attack against the United States does not require the United States to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future."
Do we need to know what specific attack is going to happen (what target? by what means?) for our preemptive intervention to be justified? It seems to me that we only need to know that an attack is sure to happen.
How about "immediate"? Need the threat be in the immediate future, or just the future in general? Surely just the probability/certainty of the threat is what matters, and not the chronology. By extending the concept of self-defense so far as to include preemptive action (which doesn't require one to include prevention, i.e. the Bush Doctrine), we've already allowed that justified self-defense can go so far as to include actions performed even before the presumptive instigatory violent act, so why does it matter how much before? The only possible reason for that is that proximity in time is a function of our uncertainty, but no the time difference itself.
Further, what difference does on U.S. soil make vs. anywhere else in the world? Also, what difference does being an American citizen make rather than a person in all this?
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