The United States government has released the memo that authorizes and justifies the killing of an American citizen with a drone strike, after a long and hard-fought judicial battle to keep it secret.

The memo, published on Monday, served as the basis for the 2011 drone strike that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen living in Yemen who was accused by the U.S. of being a leader of the al-Qaeda offshoot in the Arabian Peninsula. The memo was written in July 2010 by David Barron, then the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC).

The 31-page document was released in response to a court order stemming from a Freedom of Information Act Lawsuit brought forth by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and the New York Times. The Obama administration had fought to keep the memo under wraps, and a Federal District Court in January ruled in the government's favor. But a Court of Appeals overturned that decision in April, ordering the government to publish the memo.

In the document, which contains several redactions, the government concludes that killing Awlaki, despite the fact that he is an American citizen, does not go against the U.S. Constitution because Awlaki at the time posed "a continued and imminent threat of violence or death" to other American citizens and his apprehension was not feasible.

This way, the U.S. government "claims broad authority to kill American terrorism suspects without judicial process or geographic limitation," according to the ACLU.

Critics also noted that the Obama administration put Awlaki on its "kill list" months before the memo was written.

Obama determined a US citizen could be lawfully targeted in late 2009. The OLC memo providing the legal rationale was finished in June 2010. — Micah Zenko (@MicahZenko) June 23, 2014

The full memo is embedded below:

Barron Memorandum