Excerpt
JUDY WOODRUFF (Newshour): The U.S. war on al-Qaida claimed another high-profile kill today, this time in Yemen. The target was an American imam who preached at mosques in the U.S. before taking up jihad overseas.
Ray Suarez has the story.
RAY SUAREZ (Newshour): The announcement of Anwar al-Awlaki death made him the most prominent al-Qaida figure killed since Osama bin Laden back in May. Yemeni intelligence officials said he was located three weeks ago and tracked intensively on the ground and from the air.
Today, U.S. drone aircraft blasted Awlaki's convoy with missiles near the town of Khashef in Jawf Province, about 90 miles east of Yemen's capital, Sana'a.
President Obama had authorized Awlaki's killing almost two years ago. He hailed today's news at a ceremony for the outgoing chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
"Was U.S.-Backed Killing of Anwar al-Awlaki Legal?" (Part-2) PBS Newshour 9/30/2011
Excerpt
RAY SUAREZ: To assess the implications of Awlaki's killing, we turn to Brian Fishman, a fellow at the New America Foundation and the Combating Terrorism Center at West Point. Juan Carlos Zarate was deputy national security adviser for counter-terrorism in the Bush administration and is now a senior adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
I also have concerns about the legality of killing a U.S. citizen, even when overseas, for the same reasons as Mr. Fishman.
Another excerpt
RAY SUAREZ: Juan, Anwar all Awlaki was the first American citizen to be the subject of a CIA kill-or-capture order.
And now that he has been killed, a lot more attention is being focused on the nature of his death, without charge, without indictment, obviously without trial. Is this a problem?
JUAN CARLOS ZARATE: Well, I think it's something the administration is clearly sensitive to. And it explains in part why they are describing him so ardently as the chief -- external operations chief.
The administration is going to great pains to explain his operational role, the fact that he was engaged in ongoing activity. All of that is a way of framing this in terms of imminent danger to the United States that then gives the U.S. credibility under international law and under our own laws to take self-defensive measures and to take kinetic activities against an individual, even if that individual is an American citizen.
But we have known this issue has been out there. The ACLU had challenged, via Awlaki's father, the alleged targeting of Awlaki, a case they lost at the lower court level in federal court. And so this issue of what the government can do with respect to an individual, an American citizen who has joined al-Qaida, who is clearly trying to plot against the United States, what level of kinetic activity, what level of force can they use without some level of due process, that is clearly something the administration is very sensitive about.
RAY SUAREZ: Brian, was it legal?
BRIAN FISHMAN: Well, I'm not a Supreme Court justice, but I have got real concerns about it, because it sets a precedent.
And I simply don't understand the criteria by which the decision was made that Anwar al-Awlaki could be killed. What does an American citizen have to do to fall into that category? The second concern I have -- and why I think that a judicial process of some kind would have been useful here -- is that it would have been an opportunity for the U.S. government to lay out all the things that Anwar Awlaki has done.
He may be dead, but his vision and his message is not. And what I think would have been useful is to have a judicial process where you get to talk about the fact that he solicited prostitutes. You get to talk about the fact that he was sort of a hypocrite in and of himself. And because of that, the fact that we weren't able to do those things -- we didn't do those things, I think we have missed an opportunity to do more than just kill him, but to discredit the ideas that he pushed for years.
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