This seems vaguely familiar...

U.S. News - Holder: US can legally kill Americans in terror groups

"Due process and judicial process are not one and the same, particularly when it comes to national security. The Constitution guarantees due process, not judicial process."

I am no legal scholar. There is plenty I don't know regarding the nuances of law, and in this case of constitutional law. However, I must say this is the first I've ever heard of the phrase judicial process as distinguished from due process. So I went to three sites to look up the concept of due process (or due process of law).

Black's Law Dictionary (the most reputable of the three): Law in its regular course of admission through courts of justice.

Dictionary.com: The regular administration of the law, according to which no citizen may be denied his or her legal rights and all laws must conform to fundamental, accepted legal principles, as the right of the accused to confront his or her accusers.

Wikipedia: Due process is the legal requirement that the state must respect all of the legal rights that are owed to a person. Due process balances the power of the law of the land and protects individual persons from it. When a government harms a person without following the exact course of the law, this constitutes a due-process violation, which offends against the rule of law. (A treatment of due process law in the US Constitution can be found here, and the Fifth Amendment and Fourth Amendment pages can be found here and here, respectively).

My conclusion is that I won't be the only one who hasn't heard of a distinction between the two. After all, the judicial process has been a key part of due process of law for longer than anyone in the US has been alive. This reminds me of something, and I'm sure the AG, Eric Holder, would find it most unflattering a comparison. This reminds me of when President Bush's Justice Department came out with an opinion that declared that "enhanced interrogation techniques" don't qualify as torture. It was, frankly, torturous (pardon the pun, couldn't resist) to try to watch them snake their way around the Constitution so as to appear to still be following it. The same is true now, only more so.

President Obama ordered the killing via drone strike of Anwar al-Alawki in Yemen. If memory serves, two others, including another American, died in the strike. Anwar al-Awlaki was an American citizen. He was, constitutionally, entitled to due process of law. He was supposed to be "lawyered up" and given a trial, and the US government should be unable to assassinate him. Or at least that's what a lot of civil rights groups think, among them the ACLU.

Just so it's clear, I favor the strike. It seems to me that the notion of a battlefield has evolved over the last century. What the Founding Fathers would have considered war, and battle, was not what we'd consider war or battle. The notion that an American citizen could: camp out in Yemen, act as a leader in a transnational terrorist organization that was responsible for the mission that had 19 men hijack passenger planes and fly them into buildings, killing nearly 3,000 people, and doing it from their base in Afghanistan, be an effective recruiter for the Western world, exchange emails with a US soldier in Texas who then proceeded to go on a rampage at a US military base, and be involved in a young man out of Nigeria planting explosives in his underwear so as to blow himself up while on a passenger plane filled with Americans - that would never have occurred to the Madison, Jefferson, Franklin, Adams, or Washington. Many of his crimes, and his organization's crimes, would have been impossible two hundred years ago. To them, an American who harmed the US the way al-Awlaki has would either A) have been living in the US and thus be confront-able and arrest-able (unless he died resisting arrest, of course) or B) be living in a country that was hostile to the US and sheltering/harboring him. An option C) living in a country which has a government more friendly than not to the US but unable to arrest him on their own and out of the reach of US ground personnel for practical and political reasons, would not have existed. My point is, as the events in the real world change, so must our definitions, ideologies, &c. Therefore, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, via a drone strike against his location in Yemen, is permissible for the same reason it'd be permissible to kill an American citizen who was fighting on the front lines for Germany during WWI after US intervention. It's a battlefield; rule of law and due process of law don't apply there and they never have. The one change I maybe would like to see from what they did would be for them to at least have to get a warrant (or something like a warrant) for it, the way they used to (and sometimes still do) with wiretaps. Just to ensure some judicial oversight. It would at least seem more consistent with the style of government the US is supposed to have, currently has, and that its citizens want.

However, what have POTUS and the AG decided to argue so as to make the assassination in question permissible under the US Constitution? US citizens don't have a right to a trial by jury. Or a right to habeas corpus. Or the right to face one's accuser. Those rights should exist at most times, but the executive (note that: the executive, not even the legislature or courts) can choose to set them aside whensoever the president deems it necessary.

What bothers me most, I think, is the inconsistency. If a country with a less or non-democratic style of governance than what the US has, or that lacked a codified constitution or a bill of rights, had its leaders come out with this then I wouldn't think much of it. It's power that's potentially dangerous, but presumably the institutions exist that make this power just one strong power of the country's leader among many or provides for some way in which to limit its applicability. What does the US have to guard against it, should this doctrine be allowed to stand (and if SCOTUS or Congress knocks it down, then the AG's opinion on judicial process versus due process is irrelevant anyway)? The resistance of the people to it. Considering the general non-concern of the people regarding this story or its implications, banking on that is clearly not enough. Hopefully Congress does something, or SCOTUS does something, because I doubt the institutions will change anytime soon. Because, note the headline: the AG and POTUS right now are thinking of Al Qaeda but what they claim pertains not only to all American citizens (which it does) but most particularly to those tied to terror groups intent on harming Americans. This would include domestic terror groups (we do have those) like ALF, ELF, Weathermen, Army of God, and Aryan Nations. Most of us don't like most or all of these groups, but do we want the government to be able to off a Weatherman who lives down the street from you at their pleasure? Just have a couple of members of the FBI walk up to the porch, ring the doorbell, and start blazing away at whoever has the misfortune to answer it. I don't want that, and I doubt the American people do or even that the AG or president do. But it'd be possible if the doctrine put forth by them is allowed to stand.