My point is not that the U.S. "deals well" with military excesses. Like most other nations we have a hard time coming to grips at the time of an atrocity with t

My point is not that the U.S. "deals well" with military excesses. Like most other nations we have a hard time coming to grips at the time of an atrocity with the blood on our hands. We do usually come around though, such as My Lai which is now considered a massacre even by the U.S. Army, which now uses My Lai (among other notable crises) as a case study in their officer training curriculum at West Point. The massacre is taught as a "massacre" in our history books, and our guilt is not shirked or avoided. On the other hand you'll even today see people claim that the German Heer (Army) wasn't so bad during WWII, that they were simply a professional army that wasn't involved in atrocities like the actual villains such as the Nazis, the Waffen SS, and the Gestapo. It's not actually true; senior German Army officers were just as involved in atrocities as the rest, even if they didn't participate in the worst extremes. I won't say that the current German Army training curriculum and senior leadership don't look at that aspect of their own history (in fact I'm sure they do), but if more armies had been like America's over the past 100 years world history would have been very different. My point instead related to the comment about Anwar al-Awlaki. He was playing a military game and was treated as such, nothing more or less. If he didn't want to be treated by military rules then he shouldn't have joined a quasi-military organization that ended up at war with the U.S. But once it became a martial conflict different rules apply, including the Law of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Conventions.