the killing of al-Awlaki

So, a drone strike has killed Anwar Al-Awlaki, an American citizen, al-Qaeda member and radical Islamic cleric who had been hiding in Yemen. The strike was a long time coming; Al-Awlaki has been on the chief hit-list for over a year, at least. This event has led Glen Greenwald to bemoan the "new" power of the American president to "murder" American citizens by targeting them for assassination without due process.

To call the power in question a "new" power is somewhat polemical. Does anyone doubt that, at least in a classical battlefield situation, the Commander-in-Chief has always had the power to target enemy commanders (or soldiers), whatever their citizenry? You throw in with the enemy, you take your risks. So then the point is, I think, either that:

a) the war against Al-Qaeda and its members is, in a relevant moral sense, different from the aforementioned classical battlefield situation- (perhaps we say -- it is not "really" a war at all, but I've never been convinced by the arguments here, and, anyway, I don't think the point is really to wrangle over the legal definition of "battlefield") (the point must be to find and then draw a distinction based on the relevant moral sense of things) or

b) even if the war against Al-Qaeda and its member is not in any morally relevant sense distinct from other sorts of wars, still there ought in any case to be more or different process when determining a hit against an American citizen, even if he is, say, an enemy commander beyond the reach of traditional legal process- (but then let's have a concrete alternative proposal)-

I don't think a can be maintained on reflection (although not everyone agrees, obviously), and I'm sympathetic to b in some moods, but I have yet to hear a workable alternative concrete proposal. The question would be: what process would we trust more than the current one (which basically amounts to ex post political review -- the President can be punished by the electorate in one way or another if they think he oversteps). And what process would be appropriately sensitive to the operational demands of a dynamic battlefield situation? What do we do? Top-secret trials in abstentia? That indeed might be an improvement-- I wouldn't necessarily oppose it-- but even that has its downsides. There would still need to be secrecy in the case of top-secret evidence, and the defendant would still not be "confronted" by the evidence against him. From the (dogmatically) civil libertarian viewpoint, there would be much still to oppose. From the military perspective, the process could be unduly cumbersome (remember the old stories about letting bin Laden get away shortly after 9/11 because some functionary lawyer advised against a targeted strike?- even if apocryphal, the story has a moral).

But then what? Do we really think that there should be a de facto per se ban against deliberately killing any enemy combatant who has American citizenship and is effectively beyond the reach of American law? I don't especially, and I doubt most others do on serious reflection. I'm not (as Greenwald says) "cheerleading" here. But I'm frustrated with civil libertarians who are long on hand-wringing and short on any constructive alternative proposals, and who anyway tend to give no indication of appreciating the real, practical difficulties.

(Maybe Al-Awlaki was indeed no very serious threat; but, then again, maybe he was, and the evidence which shows it could not safely be made public. The assumption to make when trying to develop policy is the latter, because that is the assumption which brings out the real difficulties. (If you want a recipe for myopic policy, it would be to ignore real difficulties and practical problems as a rule.) In this vein, I agree that the question is not about Al-Awlaki particularly, but is bigger-- it is about the sort of policy we ought to have in a certain sort of desperate case.)