ABSTRACT
In Chapter 9, the main focus of which was the Fort Hood shootings of November 2009, you also met the late Anwar al-Awlaki (aka al-Aulaqi). Widely believed to have been Usama Bin Laden’s inheritor, Awlaki was successfully targeted by the Obama administration for assassination in 2011. This decision was challenged in a lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union and others in the District of Columbia’s federal trial court. In announcing the suit, ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer said:
The United States is not at war in Yemen, and the government doesn’t have a blank check to kill terrorism suspects wherever they are in the world. Among the arguments we’ll be making is that, outside actual war zones, the authority to use lethal force is narrowly circumscribed, and preserving the rule of law depends on keeping this authority narrow. 1
