If you insist in speaking in pseudo germanic dialect, at least try to pay attention to gender.

Due process was a great social advance for all, especially minorities; that advance has become retrograde in Der Homeland of the Secure.

Now if you doubt this, try to imagine the exact same scenario, only with China playing the part of Der Homeland and see if it still feels like the right thing to do.

I also want to distinguish between illegal and immoral here.  While there are certainly legal questions surrounding this assassination, I do not consider it to be immoral.  It took one of al-Qaʿida’s most effective propagandists out of service and likely saved the lives of many innocents over the long run.

As to the characteristics of the United States as a nation, we are first and foremost a nation of interests (just as all other nations are) and if you look at our laws, you will see that there are a fair number of ambiguities that can be exploited by whatever coalition of interest groups happens to come to power (both through elections and in the unelected bureaucracy).  I do think that it is beneficial to be consistent in how one executes those laws and thus the legal uncertainty around this attack is not a good thing.

However, compared to our actions regarding Libya, where our interests were not at stake and our administration rather cynically interpreted both international and domestic law to pursue its ends, this act is only a small blip.

He still had the same rights as any US citizen, including the right to due process and a trial.

It’d have been unethical and illegal, as opposed to the way it is now where it’s unethical, illegal and makes the country look even worse.

The only legal way to renounce citizenship is to explicitly renounce it and go through the legal process of doing so.

Your personal definition of citizen is not legally binding. The laws of the USA are.

Rule of Law, buddy.

As for the rule of law and all bets being off, I think we were well past that from the first moment of the republic. The rules are words, and the application of those words changes with the times, individuals, and scales involved. Competing interests are often weighed against each other in law, and justice for one interest often requires injustice for another

It’s an imperfect system. Elements of it have been improved over time, while other elements have gotten worse. Which have done which would depend on whom you asked. But I don’t think the assassination of Mr. Awlaki means the rule of law is terminal or illusory; it was just never what you thought it was, and won’t become what you want it to be.

John Kerry had a good line once: “How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?” President Obama might well have such a question in mind when he signs off on an assassination order for someone like Anwar al-Awlaki. In his position I might be able to explain to the parents of a soldier who died apprehending a militant fugitive that their son or daughter died because America doesn’t assassinate its own citizens via drones and secret bits of paper. I might be able to explain to them how we use courts and prisons and due process.

I don’t think that would comfort them, much.

So the next time the US tells the Muslim world that we are a nation of laws and morally just and they just laugh at us and point to things like this, we’re not feeding into their own propaganda

When the US chides China for human rights abuses, haven’t you noticed that Wen Jiabao’s chronic cough sounds like ‘gitmo’.

You are in a delusional world where you think that nothing can harm you.

I know I can be harmed, but I’m more concerned about heart disease, cancer, car accidents, falling in the shower, and everything else that is more likely to harm me than terrorism.  Aren’t you?

Even if I take it for granted that this is actually a crime (and I don’t necessarily), is the penalty for illegal speech supposed to be death?

Imagine Joseph Goebbels had been an American citizen.  In the course of WWII I would have been glad if we had managed to assassinate him.  Likewise, in this course of this (admittedly much less dramatic) warfare against al-Qaʿida, I am in favor of assassinating the propagandists that are the organization’s lifeblood if we do not have the capability to capture him.

This isn’t so much yelling fire in a crowded theater as telling disaffected Muslim youth a pack of lies in order to have them kill Americans in a warlike manner.  If possible, I would like him to be take out of action in a manner that reflects the maximum possible propriety, but if assassination in the only option, I’d certainly take it over nothing.

The issue is one of whether the US abides by its principles, or whether it discards them when they stand in the way of (as Brainspore put it above) “immediate mission goals”.

If the notion of abiding by the rule of law is too inconvenient (because, for example, your target is in Yemen, and political realities at home wouldn’t allow you to extradite him anyway). the United States will just do whatever the hell it wants to, and make up clever legal arguments to cover its ass.