He wasn’t on the battlefield. He wasn’t engaged with U.S. troops. He was in Yemen. I’m thinking that this is bad precedent, irrespective of what a bad guy Awlaki was. Can you imagine, they’d be trying to indict Bush and Cheney for murder at the World Court had this happened during the Bush administration!
According to U.S. officials, al-Awlaki was promoted to the rank of "regional commander" within al-Qaeda in 2009. Like other members of the group, he repeatedly called upon Muslims to commit jihad against the United States. In April 2010, U.S. President Barack Obama approved Al-Awlaki's targeted killing, a first for an American citizen, and a move unsuccessfully challenged by al-Awlaki's father and the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
Al-Awlaki was believed to be in hiding in Southeast Yemen in the last several years of his life. The Yemenese government began trying him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda, and a Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive".Yemeni sources originally said al-Awlaki might have been killed in a pre-dawn air strike by Yemeni Air Force fighter jets on a meeting of senior al-Qaeda leaders at a hideout in Rafd, a remote mountain valley in eastern Shabwa, on December 24, 2009. But he survived.
U.S. unmanned drones were deployed in Yemen to search for and kill him,] firing at and failing to kill him at least once, before reportedly killing him in Yemen on September 30, 2011.
al-Awlaki was a dual national. He held two passports and was a Yemeni citizen as well as a US citizen.
Yes he was.
I understand your point, I just don’t agree with it. There is no slippery slope here where the U.S. government, even Obama, is going to just start murdering innocent American tourists overseas. If you want to avoid being targeted by a hellfire missile— don’t join a worldwide terrorist organization and plot to kill fellow Americans.
The fight against Al Queda is not one for the courts. It’s for soldiers. I have zero problem with that.