Although U.S. government officials, including the President and the Secretary of Defense, have made statements on the record confirming the existence of the targeted killing program, the government has not disclosed the process by which it adds names to so-called "killed lists;" the standards under which it determines which Americans may be put to death; or the evidentiary bases on which it concludes that those standards satisfied in any particular case.

Targeted killings have been a controversial topic [JURIST comment] during the current war on terror. In December, the New York Times filed a lawsuit against the US Department of Justice (DOJ) [official website] alleging the government violated the FOIA in refusing to release legal memoranda related to targeted killings of terror suspects. The suit relates to the death of the US-born radical Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki [BBC profile; JURIST news archive] who was killed in a US drone strike [JURIST report] in Yemen in September 2011. An Obama administration legal memorandum [JURIST report] from 2010 found that the killing of US citizen and senior al Qaeda [GlobalSecurity backgrounder] leader al-Awlaki would only be legal if it were not feasible to take al-Awlaki alive. The memo followed months of legal debate regarding the decision to kill a US citizen without first having a trial.