Jeremy Scahill, who provides the most exhaustively reported account of Abdulrahman's death, reports:



QUESTION: Thanks for doing this. When Anwar Awlaki was targeted in Yemen and his 16-year-old son was killed who was also an American citizen, I'm just wondering how do you see this? Do you see it as collateral damage or guilty by association? Where does he fall in terms of being just the son of Anwar Awlaki?



SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Sure, I'll just say a couple of things. First of all, as was made clear in the letter yesterday, Anwar Awlaki was the one U.S. citizen who was targeted for direct lethal action by the United States. And the purpose of that decision was rooted in the fact that Anwar Awlaki posed a continuing and imminent threat to the United States as a chief of external operations for AQAP, as somebody who had played a role in plots like the Christmas Day attack, like the effort to blow up cargo planes headed for the United States, and in ongoing plotting against the United States. In those other instances, I don't want to get into the details of each of those instances. What I will say generally is that there are times when there are individuals who are present at al Qaeda and associated forces facilities, and in that regard they are subject to the lethal action that we take. There are other instances when there are tragic cases of civilian casualties and people that the United States does not in any way intend to target -- because, again, as in any war, there are tragic consequences that come with the decision to use force, including civilian casualties.

If I were a senator and saw that a senior official in the Obama Administration said (after departing) that its highest counterterrorism official thought an innocent kid had been killed intentionally in a drone strike, I would investigate! Especially since, if the account is accurate, Brennan thinks it is at least possible to wrongly target an individual American for death in a way that would surprise both he and Obama after the fact. How? If that doesn't warrant scrutiny, what does?There was also an anonymous official quoted in a 2012story who called the 16-year-old's killing "an outrageous mistake .... They were going after the guy sitting next to him." Aren't outrageous mistakes that wrongly kill someone the sort of thing we usually investigate?And don't forget the infamous outburst from Robert Gibbs, former White House press secretary, who, having moved over to Obama's reelection campaign, responded thusly to a question on the 16-year-old: "I would suggest that you should have a far more responsible father if they are truly concerned about the well being of their children." That's the sort of explanation given when there isn't any defensible explanation to give.As Marcy Wheeler notes , a "senior administration official" was also very cagey about the 16-year-old's death when doing a press briefing pegged to Obama's recent "I'm morally nuanced" speech. Here's the transcript put out by the White House (emphasis added):Are those "general" statements hints or misdirection?The administration insists that it conducts copious reviews in the aftermath of drone strikes and always does due diligence helping Congress to fulfill its oversight responsibilities. Either they're lying about that, or there's a report pertaining to the drone strike that killed Abdulrahman al-Awlaki. It should be declassified and shown to the American people. As I see it, a good rule of thumb is that if you wrongly kill an American citizen who also happens to be a minor, you lose the prerogative to keep what you did or how it happened a secret, especially if you then repeatedly tell Americans how much you value transparency and debate.In that sense, this is a test -- when Obama said in his speech that he sought to "facilitate transparency and debate on this issue," were those just words? Or will he back them up?