That would be stretching it_其他_趣味英语-查字典英语网

That would be stretching it

And as for McMahan's mention of “other ways than killing of preventing the release”—would we be asked to feel better about things like prior restraint and locking up journalists? (Another practical question: How would the neighbors of targets, say, know to avoid getting too close and becoming collateral damage?)

Another question that came up during our chat seems relevant: There has been a good deal of outrage about the idea that the President can order Americans killed, but why are Americans so special? Do their lives deserve different consideration? Both Walzer and McMahan said that they do not and, of course, in a moral sense that is true. But what rightly bothers people about the extrajudicial killing of Americans is the sense that the law has been broken and Constitution abused.

Beyond that, there is a suspicion that our political processes have been compromised, and could be interfered with. When a President dismisses due process in order to kill an American, he has two targets. He is setting up circumstances in which, by denying Americans redress, declaring enemies, creating fear, and closing what should be open deliberations, he could shape political, and even electoral, outcomes—vote-rigging by drone.

These concerns are magnified in the case of journalists, whose job it is to provide a check to the government. The target-killing program, as even many of its advocates acknowledge, suffers from a lack of transparency. Both McMahan and Walzer thought that a reasonable model would be secrecy before the strike and as much accountability as possible afterward. But how would that work? At what point does secrecy stop being a necessary operational constraint and become the point of all this? Targeted killings are offered as moral exigencies; how quickly do they become tools of politics?