U.S Military assassination teams of today

[Jan Klimkowski]

My emphasis in bold:

AMY GOODMAN: Yesterday, CNN interviewed Dick Cheney’s former national security adviser, John Hannah. Wolf Blitzer asked Hannah about Sy Hersh’s claim.

WOLF BLITZER: Is there a list of terrorists, suspected terrorists out there who can be assassinated?

JOHN HANNAH: There is clearly a group of people that go through a very extremely well-vetted process, inter-agency process, as I think was explained in your piece, that have committed acts of war against the United States, who are at war with the United States, or are suspected of planning operations of war against the United States, who authority is given to the troops in the field and in certain war theaters to capture or kill those individuals. That is certainly true.

WOLF BLITZER: And so, this would be, and from your perspective—and you worked in the Bush administration for many years—it would be totally constitutional, totally legal, to go out and find these guys and to whack ’em.

JOHN HANNAH: There’s no question that in a theater of war, when we are at war, and we know—there’s no doubt, we are still at war against al-Qaeda in Iraq, al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and on that Pakistani border, that our troops have the authority to go after and capture and kill the enemy, including the leadership of the enemy.

Thanks to CNN and John Hannah for reassuring me that They only execute people who've been "well vetted".

In truth, Cheney's Death Squads and the drones that wipe out entire families from thousands of feet in the air aren't very different.

Legally, it's known as extra-judicial killing.

Wiki defines it competently enough. However, wiki's examples are somewhat, um, incomplete.

Extra-judicial killings are the illegal killing of leading political, trades union, dissidents, and social figures by either the state government, state authorities like the armed forces and police (as in Liberia under Charles G. Taylor), or criminal outfits such as the Italian Mafia.

Extrajudicial killings and death squads are most common in the Middle East (mostly in Palestinian territories and Iraq[1][2][3][4][5], Central America[6][7][8], Afghanistan, Bangladesh[9], India and Kashmir[10][11][12][13][14][15], several nations or regions in Equatorial Africa[16][17][18], Jamacia[19][20], Kosovo[19][20] , many parts of South America[21][22][23], Chechnya[24], Russia[25], Uzbekistan, North Ossetia, parts of Thailand[26][27] and in the Philippines.[28][29][30][31][32][27]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extrajudicial_execution