In summary: :(
Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old American boy, eating dinner at a restaurant in Yemen while searching for his father. Nobody denies that he was completely innocent, and even the US government simply says he was "in the wrong place at the wrong time"[1].
You'll also notice that the media oftentimes use the euphemism "US-born" to refer to people like al-Awlaki and his father, but refer to Weinstein as American.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdulrahman_al-Awlaki
[1] We can also question why that place was "the wrong place", since (A) we're not at war with Yemen, and (B) the target of the drone strikes (his father) was also a US citizen who had never been convicted of any crime, but that's a separate matter, since it's not analogous to this incident.
It helps if they are the son of a "senior talent-recruiter and motivator who was involved in planning terrorist operations for the Islamist militant group al-Qaeda"
That's not really relevant, since the US drone program in Yemen was operating with the approval of the Yemen government.
Also you'll notice the American and the Italian have names -- Warren Weinstein and Giovanni Lo Porto.
That is very important, especially because all the Pakistani, Afghan, Iraqi women, children, elderly, by-standers, and other innocents never have names. They are just "collateral damage" or whatever the current PR terminology is.
"[...] Mr. Obama embraced a disputed method for counting civilian casualties that did little to box him in. It in effect counts all military-age males in a strike zone as combatants, according to several administration officials, unless there is explicit intelligence posthumously proving them innocent." [0]
So in the official language, a "military-age" male Afghan or Yemeni who is killed in a drone strike instantly transforms into a combatant by merit of being in a strike zone. Great.
[0] http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/29/world/obamas-leadership-in...