Failing still to shed civil libertarian tears for al-Awlaki

I'm ready to admit that if I'm any sort of liberal at all, I might be a very bad one, because I still can't entirely convince myself to feel especially remorseful over the death of Imam Anwar Al-Awlaki. It's a messy business, my representative government deciding that someone who repeatedly was involved with figures who had it out for my countrypersons and who, at the very last instant of his life, was riding with the creator of a bomb that was going to be used by an actual terrorist on a flight with real, live, American people on it....isn't it? Wasn't he at that moment not, um--a combatant?  Or was he?

I don't know. I guess that he was an American citizen should mean more to me than to consider this heinous ass a traitor, and his having been at one point associated with CAIR should make me think something other than that he was an especially duplicitous kind of traitor at that. And some law-loving part of me should think he merited a trial, and that he expatriated himself and openly preached violence against my country and my countrymen and women should just be so much circumstantial evidence of his traitorous and terroristic activities.  And I should have, in fact, devoutly wanted him to be lawfully captured and brought to a trial.  This would accomplish the important business of establishing a precedent for exactly how we should deal with US-born persons just like this, who so apparently renounce their citizenship by both word and deed, and still haven't quite done something explicitly illegal on US soil.

I might have appreciated the appropriateness and the legality and the due process of the latter approach. But insofar as this expatriate was located deliberately in a law-forsaken hellhole that even tried him in absentia themselves for his murderous activities--with no effect, and with the decree he be captured dead or alive--and I just think....fuck it. I'm not especially unhappy al-Awlaki is dead because he was al-Awlaki.  He was a big-mouth ingrate who was nurtured in the US bosom and who encouraged others to strike at us. I am not convinced that it was legal to kill him, and nonetheless, some part of me thinks killing him was a right action, because his business only meant more death.

I am not a great fan of war or murder. This does not, however, make me any kind of pacifist, or even convince me that no death might be entirely well-earned. I rather hoped that time might make me see this in a more lawful, rational way. But I am still rather glad he's dead.  And I don't think I can or will say anything more truthful or correct on the matter. So that is my final word about it.  I'm rather glad he's dead. Full stop.