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mattnewport comments on Open Thread: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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No, in general I think they are about as unhappy as you might expect US citizens to be if the Chinese government was conducting drone attacks on targets in the US with heavy civilian casualties. This was part of the basis for my prediction last year that there will be a major terrorist attack in the US with a connection to Pakistan. Let's hope that all would be attackers are as incompetent as Faisal Shahzad.
I don't believe anyone has challenged the truth of the story, it has just not been widely reported or received the same level of scrutiny as the extra-judicial imprisonment and torture conducted by the last administration. The article I linked links to a New York Times piece on the decision. The erosion of the rule of law within the US in response to supposed terrorist threats has been going on ever since 9/11 and Obama has if anything accelerated rather than slowed that process.
I imagine the assassination story would be a bigger deal if the target was still in the US.
It wouldn't happen. They'd arrest him.
Or, to put it another way - it would happen; it just wouldn't be called assassination, because it would be done using standard police procedure, and because other people would get killed. It would be like the standoffs with MOVE, or David Koresh's organization in Waco, or Ruby Ridge.
The word assassination is wrong for all these cases. These kinds of "assassination" are just the logical result of law enforcement. If you're enforcing the law, and you have police and courts and so on; and someone refuses to play along, eventually you have to use force. I don't see that the person being outside or inside America makes a big moral difference, when their actions are having effect inside America. A diplomatic difference, but not a moral difference.
I also think it's funny for people to have moral arguments in a forum where you get labeled an idiot if you admit you believe there are such things as morals.
Perhaps we should be grateful that technology hasn't advanced to the point where we can take these people out non-violently, because then we'd do it a lot more, for more trivial reasons.
Why shouldn't people argue over morals? The mainstream view here is that each person is arguing about what the fully-informed, fully-reflected-upon output of the other person's moral-evaluating computation would be. The presumption is that all of our respective moral-evaluating computational mechanisms would reach the same conclusion on the issue at hand in the limit of information and reflection.