death

Between 2001 and 2011 the [US] Department of Defense’s base budget, which excludes war and nuclear weapons funding, grew from $390 billion to $540 billion, an increase of 38 percent.

American militants like Anwar al-Awlaki are placed on a kill or capture list by a secretive panel of senior government officials, which then informs the president of its decisions, according to officials. There is no public record of the operations or decisions of the panel, which is a subset of the White House's National Security Council... Neither is there any law establishing its existence or setting out the rules by which it is supposed to operate.

The role of the president in ordering or ratifying a decision to target a citizen is fuzzy. White House spokesman Tommy Vietor declined to discuss anything about the process. [Officials] said targeting recommendations are drawn up by a committee of mid-level National Security Council and agency officials. Their recommendations are then sent to the panel of NSC "principals," meaning Cabinet secretaries and intelligence unit chiefs, for approval. The panel of principals could have different memberships when considering different operational issues, they said. One official said Obama would be notified of the principals’ decision. If he objected, the decision would be nullified.

You cannot kill an ideology with a gun. You can only come with a better ideology and let them explain it and see what the facts are. We did that at Nuremberg. I had mass killers there; I was chief prosecutor in a trial where our lead defendant admitted killing 90,000 Jews because they were Jews, including their children, and their grandchildren, and anybody else. Well, when they explained their motivation - that this was a pre-emptive attempt to avoid attack by Russia and to secure German security [and] for the rest of the world forever - that argument was rejected, and rejected correctly by honest judges who explained why that position cannot be tolerated if you want to have a civilised world. If everybody can go out and decide he's threatened by his neighbour, in his opinion, and therefore kill him and everybody around him, what kind of a world would we have?

Number of Palestinian children killed as a result of Israeli military and settler presence in the Occupied Palestinian Territories:

2000 94
2001 98
2002 192
2003 130
2004 162
2005 52
2006 124
2007 50
2008 112
2009 315
2010 8
TOTAL 1337