Death penalty by drone strike is a challenge for liberal minds

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/08/death-penalty-drone-strike-jihadis-reyaad-khan

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William Joyce went to the gallows unrepentant. “In death as in life I defy the Jews, who caused this last war, and I defy the power of darkness which they represent,” he said, shortly before being hanged in 1946. Joyce, more commonly known as the pro-Nazi radio propagandist Lord Haw-Haw, was the last person to be executed in Britain for high treason.

The case was straightforward. He had conspired with forces whose purpose was to defeat the British state and replace it with tyranny. As an opponent of the death penalty, I like to imagine that, had I been around at the time, I would have preferred to see traitors imprisoned. But it would be naive to project on to that hypothetical me, watching from the smouldering ruins of Europe, some immunity from the mood of the time. Even when I allow my imaginary self the benefit of liberal doubt, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have grieved for Joyce.

Then I look at the photographs of Reyaad Khan, one of the British nationals killed in an RAF drone attack, and feel a jolt of pity. He was a straight-As schoolboy with an idealistic interest in politics. He once said on Facebook that he dreamed of being Britain’s first Asian prime minister.

Related: How UK government decided to assassinate Reyaad Khan

Then he turns up a few years later in Syria, in an Isis recruitment video. He boasts on Twitter that he has “executed many prisoners”. Even in camouflage gear, cradling a machine-gun, the boy looks out of his depth in a man’s suit of war. The patchy down on his lip suggests it was barely mature enough for a razor. Yet he would surely have cut my throat – yours too – had we somehow fallen into his hands.

David Cameron told the Commons on Monday that Khan and his compatriots had been planning attacks on UK citizens. This is the legal justification for the assassination. There was no functional authority in Syria to assist with a capture, no option of arrest, and a case under international law for action in self-defence. It was us or them, so the prime minister pushed the button on them. And he will do so again. Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, confirms that the UK “would not hesitate” to use drones against British jihadis in the future.

Let us presume that the intelligence agencies were spot on in Khan’s case, although that asks a lot of anyone minded to be sceptical of secretive state agencies (and no doubt too much of those determined to see MI5 and GCHQ as tools of a warmongering establishment). Even if this case was open-and-shut, it is likely others will be less so. The precedent hinges not on punishment for an act, but on credible intent to commit the act. That intention is substantially contained in the decision to relinquish loyalty to Britain and swear allegiance to the most bloodthirsty, fanatical cult available. This is where the dilemma becomes acute: where and when is the offence committed, not just in terms of geography but of psychology?

“The world can be a lovely place but you’ve just got to get rid of the evil,” Khan said in 2010, when he was somewhere on the path between rage at social injustice in Cardiff and booking a flight to Syria. At what point did the fuse blow in his young mind so that getting rid of evil was rewired to mean murdering strangers? Was there a way back?

Related: UK forces kill British Isis fighters in targeted drone strike on Syrian city

It would be convenient if politically motivated killers were self-consciously diabolical, sharing our definition of good and defying it anyway. But history teaches that they weave a story of personal victimhood into a malign conspiracy and construct a self-reinforcing moral universe in which their crusade is the virtuous cause.

This is the mental apparatus that turns ordinary citizens into willing servants of totalitarian ideology. It was also the psychopathology of Anders Breivik, the Norwegian white supremacist who killed 77 people in 2011, and of Dylann Roof, who shot nine black people in a US church in July this year. But they didn’t have a country to go to, with an army to join, where their twisted view was normalised as the ethos of a pseudo-state; Khan did.

The easy way to square his execution with a liberal conscience is to imagine the atrocity he was poised to commit and be thankful that it was averted. Except he didn’t commit it, and we don’t know how close he came. How close will the next drone target be? How far should he be from carrying out the plan for a strike to be premature? Let’s look squarely into the face of this legal Gorgon, petrifying though it may be. The real charge against our mild-eyed, Welsh Jihadi Haw-Haw was treason. For want of an available courtroom, the death penalty was delivered by remote control.

The real charge was treason. For want of a courtroom, the verdict was delivered by remote control

I know I have transgressed Godwin’s law here, which states that an argument is forfeit by whoever first resorts to a Third Reich analogy. The comparison has been devalued in application to every despot whom interventionists have wanted to remove. Milosevic and Saddam deserved to be deposed, but they were not replica Hitlers. Likewise the badge of appeasement is too quickly pinned on anyone who predicts that military action will aggravate more problems than it solves. Then again, appeasement only became a term of abuse because it failed so badly as official policy. So yes, we need a new vocabulary to argue about the ethics of military deployment.

Meanwhile, Cameron will surely soon ask parliament for permission to extend airstrikes against Isis in Iraq to include targets in Syria. The case will be strategic and moral: doing nothing will be cast as an abandonment of international duty and a neglect of UK interests.

The counter-view will be compelling: striking at Isis does nothing to stop President Assad, whose bombs are the cause of most Syrian misery; diplomacy is the only sustainable way to resolve conflict; Russia and Iran need to be involved; Gulf states should be doing more.

Those are solid arguments, well-rehearsed in recent years, reinforcing the conviction of anti-interventionists. I do not see how they would have stopped Reyaad Khan from plotting against the country he once called home. A drone did that. All liberal scruple makes me crave a better way– if only we could find one.