I have no problem saying that extrajudicial killing by the government is wrong (let's leave aside the diplomatic/geopolitical aspects of operating in another country when they've told us not to), except against a combatant in time of war, at which time the "due process" thing is covered by a declaration of war or legal authorization of military force.
The problem being that, while one can (as the Obama administration, and the Bush administration before them, does) claim that the AUMF and "War on Terror" make remote drone strikes against terrorists, even American citizen terrorists, legal under the rules of war (we'll also set aside collateral damage issues), the slippery slope of declaring all terrorists as enemy combatants who can be killed by drones (or tanks) is that it allows a corrupt, immoral, tyrannical, or even just incompetent administration to kill anyone simply by saying that, well, they had good (but, of course, top secret) information that the person killed was a terrorist, so stop complaining.
Whether you think Obama is the second coming of Christ or the Anti-Christ, that's a dangerous power for even a saint. And it's now in Obama's hands, and the next president's hands, and the next president, and the next …
So to my mind the question becomes not whether the death of the New Mysterious American Citizen being gunned for would actually be an extrajudicial killing, because it I think there's enough evidence to indicate they're not. The question is whether being able to treat "terrorists" (or "Commie spies," or other past or future threatening groups of individuals who don't wear uniforms of an attacking army) as a group we are at war with is a sound idea, if there are no barriers other than competence and moral fiber to keep that power from being abused.
Tweaking the Constitution to Make Extrajudicial Killing Easier
A thought experiment to get assassination advocates back on the right side of the law
I think there are two separate issues here:
1. The ability to kill enemy combatants
2. The ability to keep judicial proceedings secret
Perhaps this is naive, but what if we had a system that allows us to kill enemy combatants in a war such as the "War on Terror," but that the actual declaration of enemy combatants isn't a super-secret thing that even U.S. Senators don't know about?
For example, take Osama bin Laden. He was publicly identified as an enemy combatant, to the point of publicly being placed on FBI lists. Everyone knew that he had been so identified, and if someone thought that this identification was unfair, then the Congress could have hauled the Attorney General down to Capitol Hill and forced him/her to answer questions about the designation.
Why couldn't this have been done with the unnamed target in the Atlantic article, whose name, country of residence, and specific crime are being kept secret?
+John E. Bredehoft That can probably work in most cases for the most prominent individuals — the search for OBL was no great secret. On the other hand, while Mr. X might realize the US would want to take him out if they knew about it, that he was at the top of the hit list might cause him to change his activities or realize that the organization has a leak or something.
While knowing Mr. X provides some marginally greater transparency than not knowing Mr. X, it's not clear that even if Congress objected to a particular judgment that they could affect the Executive branch action here (though they might change the underlying law if they were particular riled up). At any rate, if we're talking about judicial treatment of assassination, then getting the legislature involved in judging the executive's actions isn't really the way our due process is usually supposed to work, either.