What legal memos did the Obama administration rely on to justify the killing of Anwar al‑Awlaki?
Executive summary
The Obama administration relied principally on internal Department of Justice legal memoranda—most prominently a July 2010 Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) memo and an earlier February 2010 internal legal review—to justify the targeted killing of U.S. citizen Anwar al‑Awlaki, grounding that conclusion in the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) and in an assessment that capture was infeasible and Awlaki posed an imminent threat [1] [2] [3]. Those memos, produced after months of interagency deliberations, were later released under court pressure but remain the focus of sharp legal and civil‑liberties debate [4] [5].
1. The memos at the center: February 2010 review and the July 2010 OLC opinion
The government’s internal legal work began with a February 19, 2010 secret memorandum requested by the White House and addressed to Attorney General Eric Holder, which initiated the legal review of whether a U.S. citizen could be lawfully targeted abroad; that review fed into a formal July 2010 Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memorandum that concluded targeting Awlaki could be lawful under the law of armed conflict and the AUMF [2] [1] [6]. The July 2010 memo, prepared by OLC lawyers after interagency deliberations involving NSC, State, Pentagon and intelligence lawyers, became the decisive legal rationale the administration cited for the strike that killed Awlaki in September 2011 [4] [1].
2. The legal reasoning the memos employed
The released OLC memo framed Awlaki as an “operational leader” of al‑Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula and thus an enemy belligerent covered by the AUMF; it also concluded that his conduct posed an imminent threat to the United States, that capture was infeasible, and therefore that due process did not require further judicial process before using lethal force [5] [7]. The July 2010 memo explicitly tied its conclusions to the AUMF passed after 9/11, treating that authorization as the statutory basis for lethal operations against al‑Qaeda affiliates globally [3] [6].
3. How the memos reached the public and what they revealed
Longstanding Freedom of Information Act litigation by the ACLU and The New York Times, and a Second Circuit order, forced the administration to release a redacted version of the July 2010 OLC memo in 2014; civil‑liberties groups had argued the memos justified the unprecedented use of lethal force against an American without trial, and their release provided the public the first official articulation of the government’s legal theory [1] [7] [5]. Media accounts and archive briefings note that the memos were the product of months of careful, interagency legal work and were not framed as a broad doctrinal change but tailored to Awlaki’s alleged operational role [4] [2].
4. Contested judgments and alternative views
Civil‑liberties organizations, academics, and many critics argued the memos stretched the AUMF and the concept of imminence to permit extrajudicial killing of a citizen, and called for judicial review and greater transparency [5] [8]. Supporters of the administration’s decision — including some members of Congress who later defended the strike as within presidential authority under the AUMF — emphasized classified intelligence linking Awlaki to plots (including alleged involvement with Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab) and framed the memos as a lawful application of wartime authority [9] [2] [3]. The public record thus contains both the administration’s legal rationale and persistent challenges to its premises and redactions [1] [5].
5. What the sources do and do not show
The documents made public establish that the February 2010 review and a July 2010 OLC memorandum were the core written legal authorities the Obama administration used to justify killing Awlaki and that those memos relied heavily on the AUMF and on findings about imminence and infeasibility of capture [2] [1] [3]. Sources show interagency involvement and later court‑ordered disclosure, but reporting and the released memos contain redactions and classified material, so some internal factual assessments and classified legal reasoning remain outside the public record and cannot be independently verified from the sources provided here [4] [5].