It's not that it's far away from us, it's that it happens to others. In this case, to the family of a terrorist that, while born in the U.S., spent a decade waging war against the U.S. on behalf of Al Qaeda while eluding every attempt to bring him to justice.
The U.S. reserves the right to have different rules for us versus others like every other people in the history of the world.
Sorry, but this is the sign of a seriously f*ed up nation.
We did give civilian trials to terrorists like John Walker Lindh and Jose Padilla who were American citizens in our custody. But Al Awalki evaded our attempts to give him judicial process for a decade. Does citizenship mean that you can't be touched as long as authorities can't bring you in alive?
> Yemeni authorities offered guarantees they would not turn al-Awlaki over to the U.S. or let him be questioned.
This demands explanation from the State Dept why they didn't pressure Yemen like they recently did to countries offering relief to Snowden. US-Yemen relations cannot be evinced in an Internet comment, but it appears to me the US was quick to pull the trigger when other options were not fully exercised. The least they could have done was charge him, right?
The places where we're conducting drone strikes are beyond the wild west. My dad was in Yemen when the Yemeni civil war broke out, and his hotel in the capital was shelled when fighting reached the city (he was ultimately evacuated with the other U.S. citizens by the U.S. military). The civil war is long over but the government has never been anything other than precarious, and the tribes have tremendous political power. One of the things Al Awlaki did was offer the protection of his powerful tribe to Al Qaeda officials against the Yemeni government.
The Yemeni government began trying him in absentia in November 2010, for plotting to kill foreigners and being a member of al-Qaeda. A Yemeni judge ordered that he be captured "dead or alive.
This is a very well-written piece, but the (clearly intelligent and well-spoken) author's characterization of his son makes me suspicious of the rest of the content.