U.S. to offer legal backing for "targeted killing": source

From Reuters.

(Reuters) - The Obama administration on Monday plans to outline how U.S. laws empower the government to kill Americans overseas who engage in terrorism against their home country, a source familiar with the matter said, months after a drone strike killed a U.S.-born cleric who plotted attacks from Yemen...

"At bottom, the administration is asserting the unreviewable authority to kill any American whom the president declares to be an enemy of the state," Jameel Jaffer, the ACLU's deputy legal director, said in a statement.

U.S. officials have linked Awlaki to several plots against the United States, including the 2009 Christmas Day attempt by a Nigerian man to blow up a U.S. commercial airliner as it arrived in Detroit from Amsterdam with a bomb hidden in his underwear.

When the bomber, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, was sentenced to spend the rest of his life in a U.S. prison, authorities said that Awlaki himself approved and directed the plot from Yemen.

It is important to also note here, the example they use, the christmas/underwear bomber, was witnessed by a fellow passenger to have been let on the plane on purpose by some kind of agent, as well as Under Secretary of State for Management Patrick Kennedy admitted to letting the bomber fly. So the very example they use for the necessity of assassinating individuals is a fraudulent one.