The United States itself does not respect international law and does not permit its soldiers to be prosecuted in the ICJ under any circumstances. Therefore there is no reason to afford it any similar consideration.

International law is largely a myth due to the extreme power differential between the United States and most other countries. The only hard and fast rule is that might makes right.

Following your argument, isn't then drone operatators in some respects illegal combatants? Or really anyone not easily identifiable as enemy combatants?

Not that I think that arguing from the point of international law, and especially war time international law is of much relevancy in this case.

US has in recently shown little respect for many aspects of what was thought to be international law, but through US acts the water has been muddied. The relationship with the ICC, one of the foremost attempts at establishing a legitimate international court for war crimes comes to mind. It is however far from the only issue where US recently shown an amount of disrespect to international law usually only seen from totalitarian regimes.

Operatives aren't protected and they don't even need to give the spook a trial - summary execution is allowed for spies and saboteurs but most governments usually find capture and trade more productive.

One thing I have wondered about is why we haven't seen any organized crime trying to claim uniformed combatant protections - they already have several process steps in many cases.