Al-Awlaki, Khan deaths spur calls to Obama

WASHINGTON -- A bipartisan chorus of political and legal voices is calling on the Obama administration to release a declassified version of the Justice Department memo that provided the legal analysis sanctioning the killing in Yemen last week of U.S.-born Anwar al-Awlaki.

Though not mentioned in the memo, another American citizen, Samir Khan, who was raised on Long Island, was killed in the same strike.

They said the reasoning behind the extraordinary step of killing Americans cannot be kept secret from scrutiny if the public is to continue to support counterterrorism operations.

The two men were killed in a CIA drone strike.

"While U.S. counterterrorism operations are, by necessity, classified, I do believe the administration should make public its legal analysis on its counterterrorism authorities, whether in the form of a legal opinion or a white paper," said Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), who chairs the Senate Committee on Intelligence.

Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.), chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, also said this week, "I would urge them to release the memo. I don't see any reason why they shouldn't."

The White House did not respond to a request for comment. The Justice Department also declined to comment. Both Feinstein and Levin said they supported the lethal action.

Khan, 25, who published the Web-based extremist magazine Inspire, attended high school on Long Island, where his turn toward extremism began.

No evidence has emerged that administration officials sought a legal basis for Khan's killing.

Jibril Hough, a spokesman for the Khan family, which lived in Westbury for about a decade and moved to Charlotte, N.C., after Samir Khan graduated from W.T. Clarke High School in Westbury in 2003, condemned the administration's secrecy and drone strike.

"Making new rules and exceptions to the law in the midnight hour, while everybody is sleeping, is contrary to what people think of as American values and beliefs," Hough said. "And it should be unacceptable for the U.S. government to assassinate citizens without trials and due process of the law."

Al-Awlaki was born in New Mexico, and administration officials said he was the chief of "external operations" for al-Qaida in the Arabian Peninsula, al-Qaida's affiliate in Yemen, which has attempted a number of terrorist attacks on the United States.

Several former Bush administration officials also said that some version of the legal opinion should be released.

Senior Obama administration officials have given speeches that offered a broad rationale for U.S. drone attacks on individuals in al-Qaida and associated forces.

With Will Van Sant