"What, exactly, does the Obama administration mean by 'engaged in combat'?"

That's the unanswered question underlying the question that Holder answered, which was "Does the President have the authority to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil?"

The extraordinary secrecy of this White House makes the answer difficult to know....

If you put together the pieces of publicly available information, it seems that the Obama administration, like the Bush administration before it, has acted with an overly broad definition of what it means to be engaged in combat. Back in 2004, the Pentagon released a list of the types of people it was holding at Guantánamo Bay as “enemy combatants” — a list that included people who were “involved in terrorist financing.”...

In a 2010 Fox News interview... Hillary Rodham Clinton, said that “we have gotten closer because we have been able to kill a number of their trainers, their operational people, their financiers."...

[S]weeping financiers into the group of people who can be killed in armed conflict... is not the only stretch the Obama administration seems to have made. The administration still hasn’t disavowed its stance... that military-age males killed in a strike zone are counted as combatants absent explicit posthumous evidence proving otherwise.

ADDED: In what order do they make these decisions? Consider these 4 permutations.

A:

1. They want to kill X.
2. They arrive at the decision that X is an enemy combatant.
3. They kill X.

B:

1. They want to kill X.
2. They kill X.
3. They arrive at the decision that X is an enemy combatant.

C:

1. They arrive at the decision that X is a enemy combatant.
2. They want to kill X.
3. They kill X.

D:

1. They kill X.
2. They want to have wanted to kill X.
3. They arrive at the decision that X is a enemy combatant.

What do you think is happening?
	Mostly C, but D and A to cover mistakes and collateral damage.
	Mostly B, but D to cover mistakes and collateral damage.
	Mostly A, but D to cover mistakes and collateral damage.
	A clusterfuck of A, B, C, and D.
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Was that poll missing an option?
	No.
	Yes. I wanted a "Strictly C" or "Almost only C" option.
	Yes. But not "Strictly C" or "Almost only C." Explain in the comments.
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