The 16 year old kid was a US citizen who was murdered by his own Government. This is not right under any circumstance and violates our constitution. Al Awlaki and his son should have been formally charged, captured and brought to trial. You can't just execute a man and his family. If any us citizen can be deemed a threat and executed and corporations are deemed people we are morally fucked.
I agree. This isn't a question of whether Al Awlaki or his son said bad things about the US. Maybe they did. However, should those words have merited a death sentence? Perhaps. But when our Executive branch assassinates American citizens, without even so much as bringing charges before a judge, we have allowed a precedent to be set; one that can be used against any one of us should we have the temerity to speak out against the government. Remember, we are a country at war. We have legislation like the Patriot Act. We kidnap people around the globe and do who know's what to them or we simply outsource torture. We've suspended habeus corpus for American citizens (if we label them enemy combatants). Now, we kill Americans by remote control without even hearing the bang of a gavel. This is a very dangerous time for our country.