A U.S. Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel memo on the legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen accused of being a terrorist was released by court order Monday.
After two months of jockeying over a government petition to rehear an April ruling by the court, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit released the “public authority justification” that provides the legal underpinning for Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency operations against al Qaida figure Shayhk Anwar al-Aulaqi, who was killed in 2011 along with two other American citizens, one of them his son, by drone strike in Yemen.
