Unless your name is Anwar al-Awlaki. And if it can be done to al-Awlaki, it can be done to others. I want to just highlight the last paragraph of my Washington Independent post:

The administration may very well be making the correct evaluation of the threat al-Awlaki poses. But if citizenship means anything, it means that a citizen can’t be killed because the government uses secret evidence to say he or she is an intolerable threat. Al-Awlaki is certainly exploiting his American citizenship. But CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told the Post’s Greg Miller, “This agency conducts its counterterrorism operations in strict accord with the law.” We at least have the right to know the legal basis the Obama administration reached to order the extra-judicial killing of an American citizen, and so I’ll be spending my morning filling out FOIAs.

What is the legal rationale the Obama administration is relying on here? The AUMF? Something else? Presumably it wouldn’t go so far as to cite inherent presidential authority, but who knows. It’s imperative we see and evaluate the legal strength of this claim. There’s no doubt al-Awlaki is exploiting his citizenship, but there’s also a reason why the guarantees of citizenship can even be exploited, and to take those away in this case, based on secret evidence and asserted claims leads us down a very dark path.