Condemning decisiveness, ctd

Yglesias presents a few legal points often missing from the debate around the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki:

You might ask yourself, what if during the height of the Vietnam War an American had defected to the North Vietnamese and served in their military. Couldn’t our soldiers shoot him? Wouldn’t that be the case even if he was in a support capacity rather than a battlefield role? Well at least part of the answer is that you’d lose U.S. citizenship if you defected. 

Benjamin Wittes makes the best point of all:

To insist that due process in such circumstances requires arrest and prosecution is to insist that due process requires tolerance of Al Aulaqi’s belligerency against us. Congress might, of course, attempt to create some alternative process to create oversight and judicial supervision of such targeting, but it has not done so. In the absence of any statutory framework, I am not uncomfortable with the notion that rigorous internal review of targeting decisions within the executive branch provides all of the process that is due. As I have argued before, Al Aulaqi had a option that would have removed him from the targeting list. He could have surrendered. 

My take on the matter here.