While I share your apparent concern for civil liberties, the assumption that we're likely to see armed drone strikes on US soil is hyperbolic and rooted in misapprehension of why the state uses drone strikes abroad.
Drone strikes are used as a replacement for manned air strikes, which in turn are used when a target is too isolated to engage with ground forces.
The reason that we're not going to see drone strikes on US soil is the same reason we don't see air strikes on US soil: you can deploy SWAT teams on US soil.
The actual danger from militarized drones actually comes not from "strikes", in the sense that the military uses them (mostly from large predator style UAVs), but in the militarization of police as it relates to using drones. In this case I am mostly seeing gas powered helo-uav's with armaments attached, and the laws are quickly being passed to dot the i's and cross the t's for LE.
So you are correct in that we won't see hellfire missles deployed on US ground, but rather small arms on wings... which is almost scarier to me simply because a hellfire would raise eyebrows, but a news snippet of using a armed drone to engage a $villan is sure to become normalized far too quickly.
The guy was a very bad person according to his indictments. A judge signed off on it as long as there was no way to arrest and try him, and given it was Yemen, there wasn't.
Now his son on the other hand is extremely questionable and smacks of revenge.
