The Mossad has a reputation for extra-judiciary execution of terrorists.
The option is attractive, but they executed this way a French citizen by mistake because he had the same name as one guy involved in the Munich massacre (I saw once a fomer high ranking Israeli official from the Mossad doing all except actually recognizing that Israel had implemented such a policy). The whole thing went like “we never did that but let me explain to you why it would have been justified and a good idea to do so” , and since the relative of the guy mistakently executed was present included a part going like “we didn’t kill your brother, of course, but let me tell you that if we had done it, we would have felt very sorry for the mistake and I would have wanted to apologize to you on the behalf of Israel”.
That’s why we prefer to have courts that typically make sure first that the guy they sentence is actually the person they intended to prosecute. Note that in the case of the 'secret prisons", the CIA got a German guy detained in Yugoslavia for months for the exact same reason (same name as the guy they were after), and the French army might have done the same also I can’t remember in which country, mistaking again the victim for a war lord going by the same name. If neither the MOSSAD, nor the CIA, nor the French military intelligence can be relied on for not killing you because you have the same name as a bad guy, maybe we should stick to regular courts, as old-fashioned as it might seem.
Too late to edit : the same issue has been raised wrt “drone excutions” by the USA, since allegedly some people are killed on the computer analysis of movement patterns determining as likely that a person is involved in whatever the USA is after, without the human deciding that he’s going to be killed even knowing who he is.
The argument for is that those are really, really bad guys we should get rid of, even if they weren’t organizing attacks on western cities. It’s not like they previously had an impeccable record.
And getting rid of the “Caliphate” doesn’t mean that Islamist terrorist attacks will stop, for all I know, it might even exacerbate them (people detonating bombs instead of going to Syria to enlist, or deciding to avenge the glorious martyrs). So, no, I don’t think that what happened should influence heavily decisions about what should be done wrt ISIS.
I do think that the pressure on the DAESH is useful. there is a potential romanticism to appeal to the young and ignorant alienated youths that the DAESH has had.
But the approach of the westerners only providing the indirect support is best, the american or the french or the british troops fighting directly would be a huge error, and would give credence to some of the DAESH kinds of propaganda.
It is better to treat this as it is, a criminal and an intelligence issue, but to support the grinding of the DAESH by other forces.
The Israelis worked two groups. One would identify the bad guys, another would kill them. The ID group decided to kill the (wrong) guy themselves. I don’t know if a third unknown group would have made a positive ID before the kill group was sent in.
A Dutch journalist just tweeted that one of the Paris attackers arrived as a refugee on the Greek island of Leros on October 3rd, this according to the Greek minister of security.
People thinks drones are self-flying machines programmed to shoot whatever, whenever. There’s a man flying that drone, and a man pushing the button to fire the weapons. It’s just that the man sits in an office far removed from the cockpit of the drone. And that man is flying that drone according to the best available intelligence, not happenstance.
Yeah. But it just so happens that lately “the best available intelligence” often boils down to statistical probabilities based on metadata rather than, you know, *actual *intelligence. Or even simple, basic identification of who exactly the people getting blown up are. John Oliver did a whole segment on how disturbingly low the bar is set for drone strike approval and how that affects the lives of innocent people - and not just those getting blown up, either.
Because it’s not true. The amount of places where 100+ people gather versus the amount of times some guys walk in there and shoot everyone up is practically non-existent.