“It’s hard to believe that it was produced in a democracy built on a system of checks and balances,” said Hina Shamsi of the ACLU, in response to Monday’s leaked 16-page Justice Department “White Paper” on the legal basis for a lethal operation against a U.S. citizen al Qaeda leader. It is Shamsi’s job to declare on a regular basis that the executive branch is acting unlawfully and that our constitutional system is under threat. But her predictable reaction to the White Paper, and the White Paper itself, reveal some of the misunderstandings and pathologies that still plague the conduct of the global “war on terror,” now in its twelfth year.

There is little of substance that is new in the White Paper. Thanks in part to lawsuits and publicity campaigns brought by the ACLU, and to disclosures and leaks sparked part by these actions, we have learned a lot in recent years about the Obama administration’s targeted killing program, including its legal basis. Many elements of the administration’s legal thinking on targeted killing, including of American citizens, have been laid out as well in a series of remarkable speeches by senior administration officials.

Much is being made of the White Paper’s expansive conception of the “imminent threat,” which doesn’t require as a predicate for targeted killing evidence of a specific attack in the immediate future. Shamsi’s ACLU colleague, Jameel Jaffer, says the White Paper “redefines the word imminence in a way that deprives the word of its ordinary meaning.” Perhaps. But this is not news. In an address at Harvard in 2011, the president’s counterterrorism czar, John Brennan, argued that “a more flexible understanding of ‘imminence’ may be appropriate when dealing with terrorist groups,” and maintained that “the traditional conception of what constitutes an 'imminent' attack should be broadened in light of the modern-day capabilities, techniques, and technological innovations of terrorist organizations.”

Nor is the White Paper a repudiation of democratic principles or our constitutional checks and balances. Shamsi complains that the president claims an authority to kill American citizens “without legal involvement.” What she fails to mention is that the ACLU brought a lawsuit against the administration concerning the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen and member of al Qaeda in the Arabian Penninsula who was an operational leader who planned attacks on the United States from Yemen, including the failed 2009 “underwear bomber” attack. The court dismissed the case based in part on “the impropriety of judicial review.” The court added that the Constitution places “responsibility for the military decisions at issue in this case 'in the hands of those who are best positioned and most politically accountable for making them'”—Congress and the president. Judicial review before killing an American citizen might sound like a good idea in the abstract. But at present there is simply no constitutional or statutory mechanism for judicial review that the president could have deployed before killing al-Awlaki. Congress might be able to create a system of secret judicial review in this context, though it has shown little interest in doing so and its authority to do so is far from clear.

In the meantime, the president faced a threat and had the responsibility to act. Our constitutional democracy does not require the president to remain passive in the face of threats such as al-Awlaki. To the contrary, he has a duty to meet this threat, regardless of the citizenship of its author. Consistent with the legal judgment of two presidential administrations and based on principles articulated by federal courts reviewing detentions in Guantanamo, al- Awlaki also falls within the September 2001 congressional authorization of presidential force against al Qaeda.