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Because of the delay in writing up the FBI record of Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab’s interrogations, the OLC memo authorizing Anwar al-Awlaki’s killing was written just two days after the FBI memo it was partly based on.
Sometime between March 27 and April 15 of last year, the Office of Legal Counsel posted the two memos David Barron wrote authorizing the execution of Anwar al-Awlaki (February 19, 2010; July 16, 2010) on its list of memos “Not selected for publication” in its reading room. The website explains that these are memos that […]
As far as we know, the perpetrators of the November attack on Paris were radicalized by each other, in specific neighborhoods in Europe. According to the complaint filed against his Enrique Marquez, the friend who got him guns, Syed Rizwan Farook, adopted radical beliefs after consuming the lectures, videos, and magazine of Anwar al-Awlaki. In fact, Farook […]
Jameel Jaffer has a post on the government’s latest crazy-talk in the ongoing ACLU and NYT effort to liberate more drone memos. He describes how — in the government’s response to their appeal of the latest decisions on the Anwar al-Awlaki FOIA — the government claims the Court’s release of an OLC memo does not […]
Jason Leopold liberated another White Paper — this one dated May 25, 2011 — on drone killing. Man. It’s just like they kept throwing legal arguments against the wall in hopes that one saying “You can kill Americans with no due process” would stick. And since this one is not signed, we may never know […]
For years, defenders of the drone killing of Anwar al-Awlaki have always pointed to the second confession Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab made, implicating Awlaki in each and every part of his plot. There were always problems with that. Several pieces of evidence indicate the drone attack on December 24, 2009 that missed Awalaki had specifically targeted […]
Two days before the Administration was due to release a memo laying out its rationale for drone-killing American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, AQAP released a video that challenges the narrative the Administration has used for doing so. As Gregory Johnsen reports, the memo shows (see correction below) former Gitmo detainee Said al-Shihri embracing Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, then […]
As a number of people have noted (Jen Daskal is one), the OLC memo released yesterday doesn’t describe what the government considers an imminent threat. Meanwhile, Ben Wittes is unexpectedly spending his time writing interesting posts about why imminence is in there in the first place, and not mocking the NYT editorial calling for a […]
The Awlaki Memo has just been released. This post will be a working thread. Note, page numbers will be off the page numbers of the memo itself (starting at PDF 61). Pages 1-11: Barron takes 11 pages to lay out both the claims the government made about Anwar al-Awlaki and the request for an opinion. […]
The Government is trying to quasi appeal the 2nd Circuit’s order to turn over information on the Awlaki killing (in part, it appears, to claim the CIA was not involved in the killing after all!). It appears to be hiding a number of references to other OLC memos (and one memorandum that may not be from […]
