Comment by themaninthedark

Abdulrahman al-Awlaki was a 16-year-old United States citizen who was killed by a U.S. drone strike in Yemen, a country with which the United States was not at war with.

Please let me know what was the established precedent for allowing extrajudicial assassination of American citizens is.

Edit add:

He was a boy who was still searching for his father when his father was killed, and who, on the night he himself was killed, was saying goodbye to the second cousin with whom he'd lived while on his search, and the friends he'd made. He was a boy among boys, then; a boy among boys eating dinner by an open fire along the side of a road when an American drone came out of the sky and fired the missiles that killed them all.

A 16-year-old American boy accused of no crimes was killed in American drone attack

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/news/a14796/abdulrahma...

So please, I would love to see the precedent.