Obama Administration Authorizes CIA to Kill U.S. Citizen

The White House has taken the unprecedented step of authorizing the CIA to kill a U.S. citizen suspected of having ties to a Nigerian man who attempted to blow up a Detroit-bound jetliner last Christmas.

It is believed that Anwar al-Awlaki, a Muslim Cleric, who lives in Yemen, is the first U.S. citizen the CIA has been sanctioned to target for assassination under a policy implemented by the Bush administration that has since been embraced by the Obama administration.

George W. Bush signed a classified intelligence finding that authorized the CIA and the military after 9/11 to target and kill Americans abroad who were suspected of carrying out terrorist plots against the United States or U.S. interests and posed an imminent threat.

Former government officials insisted that no Americans were ever placed on the Bush-era list. In November 2002, however, a CIA Predator drone armed with Hellfire missiles targeted a car driving through the desert in Yemen. The strike killed six alleged al-Qaeda operatives, one of whom was an American citizen, Kamal Derwish, who the CIA knew was in the car along with Abu Ali al-Harithi, one of the planners of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000 and the CIA's target.

Derwish was associated with an alleged terrorist cell in a Buffalo, New York, suburb known as the Lackawanna Six. Dick Cheney had pressured George W. Bush and other top administration officials to deploy U.S. soldiers to the arrest the suspected terrorists in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878, which generally prohibits the armed forces from acting in a law enforcement capacity.

Awlaki, 38, had previously been placed on a separate, top-secret assassination list maintained by the U.S. military's Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which means he's now a military and CIA target.

An unnamed U.S. official told The Washington Post Awlaki "recently became an operational figure for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula," where Nigerian Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was allegedly radicalized.

"He's working actively to kill Americans, so it's both lawful and sensible to try to stop him," the unnamed U.S. official told the Post. Another U.S. official who spoke to the Post on condition of anonymity said Awlaki is in "everybody's sights."

An unnamed U.S. official told The New York Times, "the danger Awlaki poses to [the United States] is no longer confined to words. He's gotten involved in plots."

"The United States works, exactly as the American people expect, to overcome threats to their security, and this individual -- through his own actions -- has become one. Awlaki knows what he's done, and he knows he won't be met with handshakes and flowers. None of this should surprise anyone," the U.S. official said.

But the intelligence on Awlaki, who was born in New Mexico and was an imam at mosques in several U.S. cities before returning to Yemen in 2004, is far from a slam dunk. Intelligence agencies had previously considered him to be nothing more than a cleric with radical views about Islam whose passionate sermons stoked anti-American sentiment.

The assessment changed after Army Maj. Nidal Hassan, a psychiatrist, allegedly shot and killed 12 soldiers and one civilian at Fort Hood in Texas last November. Hassan had communicated with Awlaki via email, law enforcement authorities said, but he isn't suspected of planning the massacre.

A month later, after Abdulmutallab's failed attempt to blow up a Northwest Airlines jetliner, US intelligence officials revealed the Nigerian was a student of Awlaki's in Yemen, but the cleric denied he ordered the attack. The Los Angeles Times then reported in January that the CIA was working to add Awlaki to a list of about two dozen people targeted for assassination.