Fair and Square

Trey Smith

One of the things we Americans pride ourselves on is in winning a fight fair and square. This ideal is illustrated by the picture in the Old West of two men having a fair gunfight on Main Street or two blokes marching off paces and then firing in a duel. When individuals circumvent the unwritten rules of a fair fight, we tend to brand them as cheaters and cowards.

Take, for example, Robert Ford. He was the person who murdered the outlaw Jesse James. Ford fired his gun while James was standing on a chair straightening a picture on the wall. While he may have expected to be lauded for gunning down the outlaw, many people treated him as a pariah because he had shot a man from behind.

Another example from the Old West involves the death of one James Butler "Wild Bill" Hickok. Wild Bill was playing cards at a saloon in Deadwood, South Dakota, when Jack McCall walked up behind him and fired the fatal shot. McCall eventually was executed for the cold-blooded slaying.

As I think you can see from these two brief examples, Americans expect fights to be fair and square. So, the following snippet from a recent column by Glenn Greenwald should tear the cover off of this belief.

So here we have this incredibly consequential policy adopted in total secrecy by the Obama administration, one that empowers the President to secretly target people, including American citizens, for instant, due-process-free death. They have placed the policy beyond the rule of law — by insisting that it’s too secret for courts to examine — and shielded it completely from democratic debate. The only time we are permitted even to hear about it is when the President, his aides and loyalists politically exploit the corpses they create by strutting around with chest-beating, tough-guy boasting about how Strong it shows Obama to be (because, really, what is more courageous, more embodying of the noble American warrior spirit, than killing people by remote-controlled video game while the killers are ensconced in secure bunkers in the U.S.?). emphasis added

Is it a fair fight to target [sometimes not clearly identified] assailants from thousands of miles away? Is it fair when only the targeted person or persons stands any chance of death or injury? Is it fair when only one side has a gun and the unarmed person isn't even aware they are being targeted?

I don't know about you, but it seems to me that murdering people by drone isn't all that different than sneaking up behind them to shoot them in the back.