I don't know. How would a drone save lives in a hostage situation? As far as I know, the existing drones use missiles to take out the enemy. Are there drones that can single out an individual with sniper-like precision and fire a projectile that only kills the individual?
It seems to me using a drone strike would risk killing innocent bystanders, just like it does in other countries where we use them. There's often collateral damage in a drone strike.
The other alternative is to wait for the individual to be in a situation where they are alone, as is sometimes done in attacks on foreign soil. In that scenario on U.S. soil, why would a drone be needed? Certainly it would not be necessary to kill the individual, unless there were specific reasons the administration wanted the individual dead.
I agree with hogman, there are a growing number of instances being reported where someone was classified as a "terrorist", where clearly that wasn't warranted. That's pretty much all it takes to immediately remove a person's rights to due process.
The real terrorists who want to take down America must be loving this. They won't need to attack us to destroy our way of life. They can sit back and watch us do it to ourselves. Those who really want to watch America implode could hack into our computer systems, plant some incriminating misinformation about some of our citizens, and watch the U.S. government discover this misinformation and start classifying their own citizens as terrorists and take action against them. Without the protection of the Bill of Rights and due process, this seems to me like a very plausible scenario.
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