The rare legal document that everyone is interested in reading: the Obama administration’s leaked—possibly on purpose?—16-page judicial rationale for why the United States is permitted to “kill a United States citizen if ‘an informed, high-level official’ of the government decided that the target was a ranking figure in Al Qaeda who posed ‘an imminent threat of violent attack against the United States’ and if his capture was not feasible,” per The New York Times. So don’t worry,legal scholars and bleeding hearts concerned with the due-process-less 2011 killing of New Mexico–born terror propagandist Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen. It was totally above-board. . . according to an unsigned memo written by the people who authorized the drone strike that killed him.
Small thing: when the memo says “imminent” it doesn’t mean, like, imminent-imminent. “It adopts an elastic definition of an ‘imminent’ threat,” The New York Times reports, “saying it is not necessary for a specific attack to be in process when a target is found if the target is generally engaged in terrorist activities aimed at the United States.” If that is what “imminent” means, then what does “an informed, high-level official” mean? “Some guy”? “A hunch”?