I’m more interested in hearing why you believe Anwar al-Awlaki hadn’t committed treason.

The issue raised from the article and this overall discussion isn't necessarily concerned with one individual case, it is about what processes should be followed to make such a determination regardless of who that individual is.

Even if an individual appears to be obviously guilty, shouldn't some form of process be followed in all cases to prevent wrongful convictions and/or executions?

And not just "some process", because the DoJ argues that they do follow a process. It's just not a process that involves the judiciary, or trials, or what have you.

Shouldn’t you explain what he did that qualified as treason under US law?

Or, if it's so incredibly obvious, why can't he be tried and sentenced by the normal process of law? "Oh he was on foreign soil so we couldn't get to him" doesn't hold a lot of water when children in the region are known for having clear skies as a PTSD trigger from the number of drone strikes we've done in the area.

> "Oh he was on foreign soil so we couldn't get to him" doesn't hold a lot of water when children in the region are known for having clear skies as a PTSD trigger from the number of drone strikes we've done in the area.

That only would seem to follow if the argument was that we couldn't get him by a drone strike, which obviously is not the argument, as drone strikes don't really do a good job of hauling people before a court.

If we can indiscriminately bomb 10s of thousands of civilians in the area, we can drop down a helicopter to pick him up.

No, the whole reasons for a drone war is that drones work very well in conditions where you can't safely land people on the ground to do things, or even operate manned aircraft without unreasonable risk of losses.

If the question is safety: we have complete air superiority over Yemen.

If the question is politics: we're nearing 100k Yemeni civilians dead, they won't say no, and won't have the choice anyway.

> If the question is safety: we have complete air superiority over Yemen.

Air superiority, or even air supremacy, doesn't make putting feet on the ground safe.

It's never going to be perfectly safe, but that's literally the point of being a soldier.

If you don't want that tradeoff, then don't say an oath that requires you to put your life on the line defending the constitution.

> It's never going to be perfectly safe, but that's literally the point of being a soldier.

No, taking unnecessary risks to do things that aren't legally required for enemies in war is kind of the opposite of the point of being a soldier.

> If you don't want that tradeoff, then don't say an oath that requires you to put your life on the line defending the constitution

The Constitution doesn't require the government to take any special restraint in war when someone fighting on the other side is a US citizen.

There may be a good argument that the law ought to given the realities of modern war, sure. And that's a debate we should have.

His arrested conspirators alleged under FBI questioning that he coordinated terrorist attacks.

Working for a designated terrorist organization to commit terrorism is a crime in the United States, because terrorism is a crime.

The requirement in the statute isn't just that he committed treason, actually. The loss of citizenship from committing treason doesn't actually occur until the conviction for treason. And conviction for treason is both statutorily and constitutionally impossible unless you have two witnesses testify to the commission of the same overt act, or unlesss you have a confession in open court. This was a very intentional protection by the founding fathers based on prior abuses of treason laws in England.

So, even if he absolutely did commit treason, he is a citizen unless the prosecution both occurs and achieves all of that. Citizens deserve due process, period, since government conclusions and criminal charges can both be wrong, and loss of life is a very severe thing to make a mistake about.

If you can't legally blow up citizens you cannot assert after the fact that in theory they could have lost their citizenship if you had actually bothered to collect evidence, go to court and present it.

If you CAN legally murder your citizens then a lot of things cease to matter because you are no longer governed by the rule of law in the first place.

Legally, since the US didn't declare war, he has an argument for this not to be treason. It's part of the issue when you start doing things outside of the law, it becomes difficult or impossible for administrations in the future to do things legally, and it tends to get worse from there.

Reading his Wikipedia, it seems he was guilty of hate speech against the country, and his connection with committers of violence was through writing and "inspiring".

If that's treason, then I suppose a future leftist Castro-esque president should be free to drone-murder hate speech mongers like Rush Limbaugh and many in the Fox News commentary department.

America likes to talk about respecting democracy and the rule of law, but the way it acts is nowhere near that.