Beginning some six or so paragraphs into a long and very interesting post on the Volokh Conspiracy, international-law professor Kenneth Anderson properly finds alarming that State Department legal adviser (and radical transnationalist) Harold Koh may well have reserved judgment on the important question whether targeted killing of terrorists is lawful. Some excerpts:

If I were the administration, ever more committed by the President, the Vice-President, and down the chain of policy and command, to targeted killing especially via drone aircraft — embracing it as a strategy and publicly endorsing it — I’d be concerned that my chief international lawyer had so far reserved judgment on the question. . . .
While it would be unfair to say what Dean Koh’s view of their actions would be in the future, surely a senior CIA official would have some concern that after a year, the [State Department] had not affirmatively embraced in public the lawfulness of the practice or produced a public legal rationale for its lawfulness. . . . The US government needs to state the basis on which it thinks its several varieties of targeted killing programs (those in AfPak, those elsewhere, for example) are lawful. I think it needs to say so and assert it as formal opinio juris of the United States. The failure to do so and the increasingly conspicuous absence of the administration’s most senior, and most widely admired, lawyer on public international law and human rights to defend the practice cannot be a good thing. At what point does the State Department legal department have to express a view, stand with its clients or, as Dean Koh says, stand down?
Again, while it is wrong to over-interpret here, were I a senior CIA or NSC official with operational responsibilities for Predator attacks, I would wonder what exactly to make of the failure of the State Department’s lawyers to step up and defend what I’m doing — and instead to raise the possibility that no conclusion had actually been reached. Would I think my risks had just been increased — risks of investigation or prosecution five years from now, ten years from now, in some European court? Or by a future Holderesque Justice Department?
Far fetched? Maybe. But I think I would be saying to myself, hmm . . . my colleagues and I are out there killing people, and causing some number of collateral deaths, and the President says approvingly in speech after speech, we’re taking the fight to the enemy wherever they are. And the Vice-President, well, it’s as though he’s beaming with pride over his flock of Predator gooselings . . . meanwhile, however, the administration’s lawyer whose public approval, in that world of combined law-diplomacy-global elite opinion matters most to the personal legal protection of the officials tasked with carrying out the President’s policies . . . does not seem to have drawn a conclusion. At least not one he’s willing to share with the rest of us, and with Baltasar Garzon or Luis Moreno Ocampo.