American Citizen Anwar Al-Awlaki was killed by a drone strike in Yemen solely on the authority of President Barack Obama. Al-Awlaki never received a trial, was never indicted, nor given any opportunity to address the allegations against him. But today during President Obama’s extensive terrorism speech Mr. Al-Awlaki finally received his trial, a show trial. [...]

While Kevin’s at the Bradley Manning trial, I’ll pick up on something on his beat. The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center on Constitutional Rights have sued the Obama Administration over the deaths of three US citizens as part of the still-classified Predator drone program. Anwar al-Awlaki, Samir Khan and al-Awlkai’s son Abdulrahman were [...]

Attorney General Eric Holder helpfully explained when the government can kill you without a trial, in a speech last night at Northwestern University. He didn’t take questions, because he was so crystal clear about it. Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. asserted on Monday that it is lawful for the government to kill American citizens [...]

Sen. Ron Wyden has led a lonely battle against state secrecy. He wanted his findings from the Intelligence Committee on what he perceived as a misuse of the Patriot Act to be made public. And now, he wants a public record on the death of Anwar al-Awlaki. Five months after Yemeni-American cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was [...]

The ACLU filed suit in federal court yesterday seeking to force the White House to turn over records related to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the US citizen assassinated in a drone attack in Yemen last year. The lawsuit, filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charged the Justice [...]

The New York Times sued the Justice Department over their reticence to turn over a memo from the Office of Legal Counsel detailing the argument for how the US government can legally assassinate an American citizen. The Times has previously reported on the memo, which justified the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, but that report from [...]

Charlie Savage digs out the process for authorizing the assassination of Anwar al-Awlaki, killed in Yemen late last month. He wasn’t able to obtain the secret memo from the Office of Legal Counsel authorizing the placing of Awlaki on a kill list, but he had some of the memo described to him: The secret document [...]

This was a good day for this poll to come out. A new Gallup survey finds that Americans believe government has overreached. The irony of that coming out today, when the US completed the executive assassination without trial of Anwar al-Awlaki, even though the survey results have nothing to do with that kind of executive [...]

If you knew where to look, you could find a healthy debate about today’s announcement of the government-sponsored killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, a US citizen. Over at Wired there’s a debate about the Constitutionality of the drone strike, between law professors Charlie Dunlap and Mary Ellen O’Connell, who says that “The United States is not [...]

The fact is that the entire US program of extra-judicial assassinations by drone requires a bit more study and debate, but this is especially true when the targets are US citizens. In that case, the Constitution comes into play, and the right of due process of the law. But we never really had such a [...]

C.J. Chivers reports hopefully on rebel gains in the Libyan civil war (remember that?). They are small gains, to be sure – the breaking of a front line a few miles west of Misurata, a successful fight near Brega. But the real strategy was revealed in the NATO airstrikes: Early Tuesday morning, NATO aircraft flew [...]