Court releases memo justifying drone strike on US cleric
June 24, 2014  01:06
A New York court has released an edited version of a US government memo legally justifying a drone attack that targeted and killed an American in Yemen in 2011. 

Radical US-Yemeni cleric Anwar al-Awlaki was targeted and killed in the drone attack in September of that year. Dual Pakistani-US citizen Samir Khan died in the same attack. 

Awlaki's teenage son, Abdul Rahman, was killed in a separate US drone strike in Yemen in October 2011. None of the three US citizens were ever charged with a crime. 

The New York Times and two of its journalists filed a lawsuit demanding the government make public secret papers justifying drone attacks against suspected terrorists, including American citizens.

The American Civil Liberties Union supported the Freedom of Information Act case. 

The released July 16, 2010 legal memo from the US Department of Justice justified Awlaki's targeting on the grounds that he was an enemy leader whose capture in Yemen would have been "infeasible." 
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