"Military force" doesn't actually mean indiscriminate killing is OK, otherwise we wouldn't consider My Lai a massacre.

So my government would have to, at the very least, demonstrate that you actually play some operational role within AQ where a targeted killing of you would appreciably impair the military capacity of AQ.

This was the logic used by the U.S. to send what was essentially a kill mission against the Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto during WWII, but it probably helped end that war faster so people don't seem to complain as much about that one, for some reason.

But either way, if you're a non-U.S. citizen in a 3rd world country then for whatever reason you're not someone that our civil libertarians in the U.S. care about, as they only care about the extrajudicial killing of American citizens.

I'm assuming when you say that they have proof that you are implying that the government is pretending they have proof but won't show it. If you're actually in AQ and involved in the violent death and destruction of Muslims, Americans, civilians and our allies throughout the world then I can't honestly say that I'd feel too sorry for you...

If 'you' (not you personally) really thought My Lai was a massacre then there would have been some more serious sentencing around that event.

From the relevant wikipedia page:

"While 26 U.S. soldiers were initially charged with criminal offenses for their actions at Mỹ Lai, only Second Lieutenant William Calley, a platoon leader in Charlie Company, was convicted. Found guilty of killing 22 villagers, he was originally given a life sentence, but only served three and a half years under house arrest."

Putting this event forward as an example of how well the US deals with military excesses is really not clever. See Fallujah for a more recent example.

My point is not that the U.S. "deals well" with military excesses. Like most other nations we have a hard time coming to grips at the time of an atrocity with the blood on our hands. We do usually come around though, such as My Lai which is now considered a massacre even by the U.S. Army, which now uses My Lai (among other notable crises) as a case study in their officer training curriculum at West Point. The massacre is taught as a "massacre" in our history books, and our guilt is not shirked or avoided.

On the other hand you'll even today see people claim that the German Heer (Army) wasn't so bad during WWII, that they were simply a professional army that wasn't involved in atrocities like the actual villains such as the Nazis, the Waffen SS, and the Gestapo. It's not actually true; senior German Army officers were just as involved in atrocities as the rest, even if they didn't participate in the worst extremes. I won't say that the current German Army training curriculum and senior leadership don't look at that aspect of their own history (in fact I'm sure they do), but if more armies had been like America's over the past 100 years world history would have been very different.

My point instead related to the comment about Anwar al-Awlaki. He was playing a military game and was treated as such, nothing more or less. If he didn't want to be treated by military rules then he shouldn't have joined a quasi-military organization that ended up at war with the U.S. But once it became a martial conflict different rules apply, including the Law of Armed Conflict and the Geneva Conventions.