A secret Obama administration legal memo cleared the way for the killing of radical, U.S.-born Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen, declaring that it would be legal for the U.S. to kill him despite an executive order banning assassinations, according to a report in The New York Times. The "crucial" legal analysis, written a year before the drone strike that killed Awlaki last month, said the killing would only be justified if Awlaki, a U.S. citizen, could not be taken alive. Does this 50-page memo settle the debate over the legality of Awlaki's killing?
No. The government needs to defend its actions openly: "As American citizens we have a right to know when our own government believes it may execute us without a trial," says David Cole at The New York Review of Books. Everybody knows war isn't pretty, but "leaked accounts to The New York Times are no substitute" for openness. "As long as the Obama administration insists on the power to kill the people it was elected to represent — and to do so in secret, on the basis of secret legal memos — can we really claim that we live in a democracy?"
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