it would be better to try the syrian police than to start assassinating people for something which may not have been very serious but which we will never know the details of. or do you think it is better to start with extrajudicial execution merely on the basis that these people are somewhere abroad?
well it always has been objectionable that states go round doing 'extra judicial murder' or whatever we want to call it. Just been trying to think of the oldest example I can in modernish history- them IRA bods in Gibraltar maybe?
i suspect it was going on long before mairead farrell, sean savage and daniel mccann were gunned down on the streets of gibraltar
this is why I said modernish, cos if you go back enough, well I bet Rome employed assasins on foriegn soil etc
there's not a great gap between the roman empire on the one hand the 6/3/1988 on the other. the americans were at it in the 60s and 70s - the famous phoenix program in vietnam was targeted extrajudicial assassinations. and there was of course the attempt on gaddafi's life in the 1980s.
What on earth do you think the Syrian police (a Syrian government body) could do about a couple of geezers who are firmly ensconced with a heavily armed organisation that is currently kicking the shit out of the Syrian government, left right and centre?
so you do favour the extrajudicial assassination of people who may or may not have been doing what they're alleged to have done
me, i like to think that there's a contintuum of measures that can be taken, that it's not death or nothing. there may of course have been more to have been gained from letting them carry on while monitoring their communications: because what may happen now is that they'll find other ways of communicating which are much harder for 'the west' to monitor.
a government that assassinates its citizens when parliament voted against direct british action in syria.citizens who joined a military force that tortures British aid workers to death for shits and giggles
This is a duplicate of the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011 (& his 16 yr old son 2 weeks later). Same over-concern that the American gov killed a citizen without proper procedures/trial etc. We're not playing patty cake here. Jihadist wackos need to know that they get involved in this stuff & they're goners. Just as with fighting the Nazis, the legal niceties can't always be followed.
Well you can use whatever emotive phrases you like to describe what's happened here but if you asked them what they were doing they would likely have told you that they were soldiers fighting a war. In wars soldiers are targeted by the opposing team. So yes, I'm wholeheartedly in favour of degrading these cunts in this manner. My main concern is value for money; guided weapons are awfully expensive and it seems the RAF only took out two bastards with this strike which doesn't seem like an awful lot of bang for the buck.
you do like your military euphemisms, don't you - you're in favour of blowing them up and injuring or killing anyone unlucky enough to be near them under the lovely term 'degrading'.
being as this is the sort of thing parliament voted against (direct british involvement) i thought you might be against it. what should differentiate this country from isis is respect for law and human rights. in the aftermath of 9/11 there were lots of articles piously saying we shouldn't change our way of life to let the terrorists win. but we have changed things, and the situation in the middle east is a result of that change. i don't think killing two people on perhaps very good grounds, perhaps very shitty grounds, is a good idea when it flies in the face of any claim to respect parliament cameron may utter. and if the prime minister is quite happy to do this then the next five years are going to be shittier than any of us thought.
i think it's telling that the government avoided any of the legal processes at their command and went straight for the illegal. the legal processes are their rules. and when the legislature of this country's voted against this sort of thing, i think it's well worth while pointing that out. only a complete twat would argue that what has happened is better than the state following a legal process. what states do is to introduce precedents against people the vast majority hold in contempt - people like isis, the bnp etc etc. so what happens to isis today may very well happen to someone else we hold in higher regard tomorrow.I think it's interesting and telling that some radicals on here are actually saying they wanted to State to engage some avenue of 'legal process' here instead.
Scratch the surface of an 'anarchist' and you often see a Guardian reader underneath...
