It's it important, legal concept of imminence. It's self-defense if somebody points a gun at you, and you kill them in response. It's murder if you go to somebody's house, find them, and kill them because they hang out with bad dudes.

The al-Awlaki case was more like the latter example. He was accused of being a propagandist for al-Qaeda. He had not taken up arms, he had not engaged in violence, and any threat he posed was not imminent.

Moreover, the Obama administration recognized this, and argued that the President's assessment constituted due process of law, without the courts. Practically speaking, it means that the President can charge, try, and carry out the sentence of death, and there's no responsibility on anyone's part to prove that it was justified.

The upshot is that, for example, the President can now say that you're an "antifa terrorist," and execute you, even if all you did was post a meme mocking Hegseth, and you have no recourse.

I always find it interesting that using drone strikes on an objectively evil group (in this case Al Qaeda) gets so many panties get knotted…

I'm so glad that we'll always be able to trust the president to unilaterally decide which groups are evil and to use his power in the interests of the people.

I mean, can you imagine what would've happened if some bad actor got in and used those sorts of things for precedent? Like, what if a Republican president had got in and decided to, I don't know, accuse random Venezuelan fishing boats of being "narco-terrorists," and used the exact same power to kill them for sport? Just spitballing here.

But I mean, what are the odds of that, right? Surely we can trust the United States president with the power to be judge, jury, and executioner for the entire globe. This is a very sane and reasonable position, and I just can't understand why anyone would get their panties in a knot over it.

Abdulrahman was a 16 year old student, he wasn't in al-Qaeda.