The Justice Department white paper released on Monday by NBC News is the public's first direct glimpse at the legal reasoning that the Obama administration relied on in using a drone strike to kill Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S. citizen living in Yemen. The memo's arguments are troubling on many levels. Although the Obama administration's brief is directed at the assassination of Americans abroad, the arguments it offers could apply with equal force to the assassination of Americans at home; lawyers for the Bush administration who tried to justify lesser outrages have been pilloried for supporting torture. But perhaps most troubling is the administration’s attempt to redefine the idea of the kind of “imminent threat” that can justify a targeted assassination.

The U.S. Supreme Court has previously held that the police can only use deadly force against fleeing, dangerous suspects when killing the suspect is “necessary to prevent the escape and the officer has probable cause to believe that the suspect poses a significant threat of death or serious physical injury to the officer or others.” But, in a vast expansion of this narrow precedent, the Obama administration says that the U.S. is not required “to have clear evidence that a specific attack on U.S. persons and interests will take place in the immediate future” in order to assassinate U.S. citizens whom the government believes are Al-Qaeda leaders. Instead, the memo argues a “decision maker determining whether an al-Qaeda operational leader presents an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States must take into account that certain members of al-Qaeda …. are continually plotting attacks against the United States; that Al-Qaeda would engage in such attacks regularly to the extent it were able to do so; that the U.S. government may not be aware of all al-Qaeda plots as they are developing and thus cannot be confident that none is about to occur.”

In light of the government’s possible ignorance of plots that may or may not exist, the memo concludes, when an al-Qaeda leader “has recently been involved in activities posing an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States, and there is no evidence suggesting that he has renounced or abandoned such activities, that member’s involvement in al-Qaida’s continuing terrorist campaign against the United States would support the conclusion that the member poses an imminent threat.”

This is an extraordinary conclusion. In Fourth Amendment cases, the Supreme Court has stressed that “the use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so.” In reaching this conclusion, the Court rejected the eighteenth century rule allowing the use of whatever force is necessary to arrest a fleeing felon because “changes in the legal and technological context”—namely, the expansion of felonies to include non-violent offenses and new weapons technology (in particular, automatic guns) that make it possible for the police to kill suspects whom they previously would have had to physically subdue.

The Obama administration takes this narrow precedent and twists it beyond recognition. While the Supreme Court cited the existence of new weapons technology as a reason for narrowing the conditions under which the police can use deadly force, the Obama administration uses drone technology as an excuse for broadening those conditions. “What would constitute a reasonable use of lethal force for purposes of domestic law enforcement differs substantially from what would be reasonable in [this] situation,” the administration concludes. (In fact, the possibility of tracking suspected terrorists with drones, rather than killing them, suggests that targeted assassinations are even more constitutionally vulnerable today than they would have been at the time of the American framing.)