When a president orders the targeted killing of an American citizen abroad — Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen (2011), and his 16-year-old son two weeks later — without trial, indictment, or judicial review, what do religious traditions and the Constitution say about the executive taking a citizen's life?
The al-Awlaki case is one of the most important constitutional events of the past two decades, and one this site is applying its standards to a Democratic administration for the reason that its standards apply to every administration. A U.S. citizen was placed on an executive kill list, killed by his own government abroad, and no court reached the merits of whether the Constitution permitted it. Religious traditions do not require passivity in the face of real threats; they require that even necessary force be exercised through the disciplines — witnesses, process, the distinction between the enemy in battle and the accused who must be tried. The precedent set in 2011 became the framework the current administration is now using at sea, and would be available to every future president of either party. The question the case raised was not, at the time, resolved. It is still the question.
Religious perspectives
Religious traditions distinguish sharply between the killing of an enemy in battle and the execution of a person, even a wicked one, without judgment — and they treat the second as belonging to a different category.
Judaism: The Torah's standard for capital cases is unusually demanding — "by the testimony of two or three witnesses a matter shall be confirmed" (Deuteronomy 19:15); a person cannot be put to death on a single witness. The rabbinic tradition tightened this further, calling a court that imposed a death sentence once in seven or seventy years "destructive." The Hebrew Bible does not oppose war against enemies; it opposes the taking of a life by the ruler's own decision, on his own evidence, without the process of judgment. A "kill list" is precisely the arrangement the tradition warns against.
Christianity: The Christian Just War tradition — Augustine, Aquinas, and the writers of the Catechism — carefully distinguishes combat against an enemy in an armed conflict from the punishment of a wrongdoer, which the tradition assigns to civil authority operating through law, not to the executive acting alone. Jesus himself was killed by an imperial procedure that skipped a real trial; the Gospel's memory of that injustice is part of why Christian tradition has been so insistent on due process, and so wary of executives who claim the power to decide alone who dies.
Islam: "Do not take the life that God has made sacred, except by right" (Quran 17:33) — and "by right," in Islamic jurisprudence, means through the established process of law, not by the decision of the ruler. Classical Islamic ethics on war requires proportionality, distinction between combatants and noncombatants, and legitimate authority — but never treats the ruler's designation of a person as an enemy as sufficient to authorize his killing without process.
The honest counterweight: Anwar al-Awlaki was, on the record, operationally linked to al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and to specific attempted attacks on Americans. Religious traditions do not require that a nation refuse to defend itself against those planning to kill its people; they require that even the necessary use of force be exercised through the disciplines the traditions name. What is condemned is not defense; it is the collapse of the disciplines — the moment when a suspect abroad becomes indistinguishable from a defendant tried, and the executive becomes indistinguishable from the court.
Constitutional & legal framework
The targeted-killing program under the Obama administration raised, in some of the sharpest form the modern era has produced, the question of what the Constitution requires when the executive proposes to take the life of an American citizen.
What happened: Anwar al-Awlaki was a U.S. citizen born in New Mexico. After joining al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, he was placed on a U.S. "kill list" in 2010. On September 30, 2011, he was killed by a CIA-led drone strike in Yemen. Two weeks later, on October 14, 2011, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman al-Awlaki — also a U.S. citizen, not on any list — was killed by a separate strike at a roadside restaurant in Yemen. The administration described the son's death as unintended.
The legal basis: A 2010 memorandum by the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel (the "Barron memo") concluded that killing an American citizen who was a senior operational leader of an enemy force posed no violation of the Fifth Amendment's Due Process Clause because the "public authority" doctrine and the AUMF supported the strike. The memo's reasoning treated due process as satisfied by internal executive review, without judicial process. The memo was withheld from the public and released only in 2014, after litigation.
The Fifth Amendment: "No person shall... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law." The clause protects "any person," and no exception on its face is drawn for citizens abroad. In Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004), the Supreme Court held that a U.S. citizen designated an "enemy combatant" was still entitled to a meaningful process to contest the designation. The al-Awlaki program applied the opposite premise: that a citizen designated an enemy could be killed without any such process.
The courts: Two lawsuits — Al-Aulaqi v. Obama (pre-strike, 2010) and Al-Aulaqi v. Panetta (post-strike, 2012) — were dismissed on political-question and state-secrets grounds. No court has ever ruled on the underlying constitutional question. The doctrine, in effect, is not what the Constitution says; it is that no court will decide what it says.
The precedent it set: The al-Awlaki program provided the legal template for continued executive targeted killings — under the same administration, and under the two that followed. The Venezuela boat-strikes campaign the site treats elsewhere is a direct descendant. When the current administration cites broad executive authority to kill suspected traffickers without trial, it is drawing from the memo the prior administration wrote.
See: Fifth Amendment → | OLC memoranda → | Hamdi v. Rumsfeld (2004) →
Sources cited:BibleQuranConstitutionSupreme Court