Then legally strip him of his citizenship -- such a thing certainly can be done in absentia.
I realize many comments, don't believe the distinction between citizens and non-citizens as particularly important, but I think it is the crux of the matter. As a citizen, before roads, a post office, police force, health care -- before all of those -- I demand that my government not murder me.
If we at all pretend to live in a free society, with government buy the consent of the governed, that right should be the most fundamental.
Awlaki was born in New Mexico. He is a natural-born citizen. No mechanism exists for his citizenship to be stripped, and creating such a mechanism would do more violence to the rule of law in the long run than killing him does now; such a mechanism would most assuredly be abused in the future, while the mechanism that enables his killing today (affiliation with an entity against which we've declared war, operating on foreign soil) is harder to abuse.
Isn't the death penalty legal and quite widely supported in America? Seems to me citizens have no problem with the government killing other citizens. The question is what paperwork needs to be filled out first.
The death penalty is supported by the majority of Americans, but not a huge majority. Gallup had it at 60% in 2012.
(Furthermore, there are of course many people who think that the death penalty is acceptable in principle but take exception with how it is currently carried out; possibly believing that our justice system is insufficiently just to use the death penalty.)
I realize many comments, don't believe the distinction between citizens and non-citizens as particularly important, but I think it is the crux of the matter. As a citizen, before roads, a post office, police force, health care -- before all of those -- I demand that my government not murder me.
If we at all pretend to live in a free society, with government buy the consent of the governed, that right should be the most fundamental.