Yoo too

I meant to take note of this this morning, but got caught up in...work. I know I'm probably considered a reflexive Obamabot, but the alleged decision to target an American citizen for death because he's gone from a propagandist for al Qaeda to a member of its "operations" group smacks of the worst abuses of his predecessor's administration. Spencer Ackerman writes,

The administration may very well be making the correct evaluation of the threat al-Awlaki poses. But if citizenship means anything, it means that a citizen can’t be killed because the government uses secret evidence to say he or she is an intolerable threat. Al-Awlaki is certainly exploiting his American citizenship. But CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano told the Post’s Greg Miller, “This agency conducts its counterterrorism operations in strict accord with the law.” We at least have the right to know the legal basis the Obama administration reached to order the extra-judicial killing of an American citizen, and so I’ll be spending my morning filling out FOIAs

And, just to say it, this does seem to shine some light on the administration's decision not to indict the authors of the "torture memos" the Bush administration used to justify their disregard for the Constitution and the Geneva Convention.