The families of two Yemeni men killed in a drone strike in 2012, an imam and a police officer, sued the federal government.
They didn't seek any money. Their objective was simple: they wanted a court declaration that the strike violated international and US law.
They didn't win.

The unanimous ruling by a three-judge panel of the US court of appeals for the District of Columbia circuit in Washington upheld a lower court’s finding that it lacked the authority to question decision-making by the government over the missile strike.

No big surprise there.
However, one of the judges wrote a separate opinion that is far more interesting.

Judge Janice Rogers Brown, who was appointed by former President George W Bush and is known for her conservative decisions, agreed with two other judges that the president is the commander-in-chief of the armed forces and only Congress can provide oversight of his military actions.

"But congressional oversight is a joke, and a bad one at that," Brown said in a separate opinion.
"This begs the question: if judges will not check this outsized power, then who will?"

The other two judges on the panel, both appointed by Obama, did not join her separate opinion...

"When a senior judge raises an alarm about our democracy, it's time to sit up and take notice," Sullivan-Bennis said. "Judge Brown appears profoundly uncomfortable with her court giving our president carte blanche to kill innocents abroad."

Amen! Giving a president carte blanche to kill anyone, here or abroad, is beyond the pale.
BTW, when did assassinations become legal? When did killing innocent people have no consequences?

It's also notable that the Obama judges were perfectly fine with random assassinations of innocent human beings.

As for the drone program itself, another recent study shows that the U.S. only acknowledges one in five of our lethal drone strikes.
So technically, we could be causing vastly more carnage that the media has reported.

The secrecy of the drone program has made it difficult for civil liberties organizations in the U.S. to provide a full accounting of its impact. More importantly, this secrecy has also made it harder for civilians directly impacted by drones to even understand why they have been targeted. Lacking any ability to find out the details about cases in which they or their loved ones were harmed, Yemeni civilians are generally unable to even obtain recognition, let alone compensation, for the life-changing consequences of these attacks. That those targeted often come from poor and remote regions of the country only makes it harder for them to obtain justice.

Justice is not why we are in Yemen. Consider exhibit A - the grill.

They call it the “grill”: The victim is tied to a spit like a roast and spun furiously within a circle of fire. It is just one of the terrors inflicted by interrogators on detainees in Yemen who are routinely beaten with wires and were kept in filthy shipping containers, blindfolded for months — all by one of America’s closest counterterrorism allies.
...American defense officials confirmed Wednesday that U.S. forces have interrogated some detainees in Yemen but denied any participation in or knowledge of human rights abuses.

"Our democracy is broken. We must, however, hope that it is not incurably so."
- Judge Janice Brown

To be fair, Judge Brown, it's was proven several years ago that we are no longer a democracy.