Obama peut-il autoriser l'assassinat d'un américain?

On se souvient probablement que le Président Obama a autorisé le recours à des drones pour éliminer un terroriste d'origine américaine en 2011. Il est le premier Président de l'histoire à agir ainsi. Le Président envisagerait actuellement la possibilité de recourir aux drones dans un contexte similaire. Un tribunal devrait-il autoriser la "hit list" du président? Les argument de l'attorney general Eric Holder sont ils suffisants?

 "In a letter to the Senate Judiciary Committee in May 2013, U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder laid out the legal rationale the government uses to determine if an American citizen can be killed in a drone strike.

 In the letter, Holder said that based on Supreme Court decisions during World War II, merely being an American citizen does not make one "immune from being targeted." Holder also asserted that an American who poses an "imminent threat of violent attack against the United States" and is in a location where capture "is not feasible" could be killed.

 Holder explained that al-Awlaki "plainly satisfied all these conditions" as he had recruited the underwear bomber and instructed him to blow up an U.S. airliner "when it was over American soil." Al-Awlaki was also killed in a remote part of Yemen where a U.S. ground operation to capture him was deemed unfeasible by the Obama administration. There is a certain irony in Holder's legal reasoning. The FBI was monitoring al-Awlaki's e-mail account for years before he was killed. To monitor his e-mail, the FBI had to get a court order.

 http://www.cnn.com/2014/02/11/opinion/bergen-target-american-with-drones/index.html?hpt=hp_t1