You do have the right to ever use assassination as a tool. We are a civilization. If some country or person breakes the laws. They should be delt with according to law. Through arrest and judicial proceedure!
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
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What if said person is not under your jurisdiction? What if said person is in a position of authority and is committing crimes against humanity? Or is in hiding with perpetual guard and can only be accessed by sparse insiders?
I agree its amoral, but due process is not always applicable.
Murder is murder without due process.
The proplem is assassination tends to only start wars. Are all physists targets for these attacks?
Thanks for reading my work.
Aaron
Do you're in charge. You find out a crazed leader of a militant organization is killing thousands of people. You can't go in with force without taking heavy losses and losing hundreds of civilians in the process. You have one or two spys in his organization without any influence, but capable of getting close enough to take him out.
Not acting is costing you innocent lives. Taking him prisoner would cost you innocent lives. Leveling his whole operation would cost you innocent lives.
What do you do?
I agree with you.
In the case that you set forth, The crazed leader has already been charged with killing of civilians. Then your small force executes the courts decision. Then your sniper team has the authority to kill.
But at minimial there is a proceedure.
So you agree with assassination after all.
There already is procedure... the public just doesn't get to take part. You want... what? More visibility? A public hearing of some sort? Some public laws that say when you can and can't assassinate someone and how many forms need to be signed before doing so? So that somehow you can get a warm fuzzy that the accused was properly "judged"?
Either way, you've just killed a man, likely under laws he's not even bound to. It's still an assassination.
Maybe someday when we're one big unified society, we can then ensure everyone is tried under a common law via a common process, and thus replace "assassinations" with "death sentences". Either way, people die.
There is a strong difference between capital punishment and assassination. Capital punishment shows proof and is based on laws. Assassination is based on fear. Fear causes conflict... Capital punishment occurs because of events that have occured. Assassination is about fears of the future.
As we have more inputs and outputs this system will naturally conclude to a neural structure. We do not assassinate opposing political system leaders. But assassination as a fear releaver is destructive, childish, and not a legal tool
You seem to be assuming that assassinations BYPASS morality, as if we're killing folks that haven't done anything yet, but might some day. And I'd bet that's happened before... no doubt. And that's morally bankrupt, true.
But in other cases, government assassination is just capital punishment where the target can't be tried because the laws the punishment is based on are not applicable to the target. YOU CAN NOT SHOW PROOF AND BASE THE KILLING ON LAWS. They are YOUR laws, not the target's. No matter how rigorous you are, you're just making yourself feel better. It's still an assassination. The best alternative you have is to ask the target's country politely to take care of him, but that may not get you very far.
Which is why I said... if someday we're all under one code of law, then we won't need assassinations any more. We can feed them through a trial and then electrocute them with a clean moral conscience.
Now, other cases, like some nut job killing because his cult told him to, or some company hiring a hitman to eek out a little more profit from a dead competitor... that's another story. That's just murder. The cultist nor the company had any legal justification for the killing, and even if they did somehow, they did it off the books.
Another case is rebellious assassinations, which are slightly more ambiguous. I won't touch that, as it doesn't seem to be the case you're interested in.
BTW, war itself has the same problem. When you decide to invade a country, you do so based on your own moral and legal code, not the target's. You may justify your actions, but the target may think you're morally bankrupt in doing so. And who's to say you're right in that scenario? Certainly both sides will disagree on a choice of "right", so in the end, whoever has the bigger guns wins.
We live in a world where law only applies to local bubbles. People are subject to the law of their country, but countries are subject to no greater power. Only cooperative agreements between them, which are shaky at best.
As such, you CAN'T enforce fair judgement and punishment across borders. You can hope for it, assuming both sides adhere to the same code and play nice together, but beyond that...
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