CBC's Neil Macdonald wrote an analysis of this that I found pretty interesting (found Here.)

Essentially, he draws parallels between Anwar al-Awlaki defecting to Yemen and Luis Posada Carriles defecting to the USA. Both were accused of crimes, but never tried in a court of law. He states; "One suspects Washington, which has refused to hand him over to Cuba or Venezuela, would regard a drone strike killing Carriles (and, possibly, various civilians that are near him at any given moment) as an act of war." So, while the USA Congress has given the president 'permission' to go out and assasinate these terrorists, there is no valid reason to do so if they are not also willing to accept others doing the same on US soil.

He makes a good point, except I believe the Yemenese Government has given the US permission to hunt terrorists within it's borders.

CBC's Neil Macdonald wrote an analysis of this that I found pretty interesting (found Here.)

Essentially, he draws parallels between Anwar al-Awlaki defecting to Yemen and Luis Posada Carriles defecting to the USA. Both were accused of crimes, but never tried in a court of law. He states; "One suspects Washington, which has refused to hand him over to Cuba or Venezuela, would regard a drone strike killing Carriles (and, possibly, various civilians that are near him at any given moment) as an act of war." So, while the USA Congress has given the president 'permission' to go out and assasinate these terrorists, there is no valid reason to do so if they are not also willing to accept others doing the same on US soil.

He makes a good point, except I believe the Yemenese Government has given the US permission to hunt terrorists within it's borders.

Oh, I was not aware that they were given permission to hunt in Yemen. If that's the case then I don't think the USA did anything 'wrong' in terms of international diplomacy (killing of one of it's own civilians is another matter of it's own). While TIF was down, an interesting story surfaced out of the USA where Iran allegedly attempted to assasinate the Saudi ambassador. One US official was quoted as saying:

"We will not let other countries use our soil as their battleground," Preet Bharara, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, said at a news conference in Washington with Holder and FBI Director Robert Mueller.

So IF the USA didn't have Yemen's permission to kill al-Awlaki, then they just became the biggest hippocrites in the world.

 

Full story here.