No Due Process For You!

Attorney General Eric Holder has acknowledged four U.S. citizens have been killed in drone strikes since 2009.  In a letter to the Senate judiciary committee, Eric Holder defended the targeted killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.  But he said Awlaki's 16-year-old son as well as two other individuals were "not specifically targeted by the U.S."

The disclosure comes as President Barack Obama prepares to make a speech on counter-terrorism and the drone program on Thursday.  The president will "discuss why the use of drone strikes is necessary, legal and just, while addressing the various issues raised by our use of targeted action", administration officials said.

His speech coincides with the signing of new "presidential policy guidance" on when drone strikes can be used, the White House said.  According to news reports, the Pentagon has already started taking over responsibility from the CIA for drone strikes outside Pakistan. 

The disclosure of the killings in Yemen and Pakistan marks the first formal public acknowledgement of the U.S. citizen deaths in drone strikes.  Holder defended the killing of Awlaki, whom he described as a "senior operational leader" of al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.  Holder said officials "appropriately concluded that [Awlaki] posed a continuing and imminent threat" to the U.S.

Awlaki, who was born in the state of New Mexico, was killed in a missile strike from an unmanned plane in Yemen in September 2011.  The original announcement of his death did not officially reveal he was killed by a drone.  Samir Khan, a naturalized U.S. citizen who produced an online magazine promoting al-Qaeda's ideology, died in the same missile strike.

Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, who was born in Colorado, was killed in Yemen a month later.  Jude Kenan Mohammad, a North Carolina resident with a Pakistani father and an American-born mother, was thought to have died in a strike in November 2011 in Pakistan's South Waziristan region. Speculation of his death had been reported in local media in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he lived, but was not confirmed by U.S. officials before Wednesday.