White House Says 'No American Citizen Will Ever Be Targeted' After 8-Year-Old Girl Dies in Yemen

As word spread that an 8-year-old American girl was killed by a U.S. military operation in Yemen over the weekend, White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer made what sounded like a departure from Obama administration policy.

Spicer, responding to a question about targeted killing attacks, assured reporters Tuesday that "no American citizen will ever be targeted."

The Obama administration took a different approach, drafting a 2010 legal memo justifying the targeting of an American citizen for death by drone strike. The author of the memo, David Barron, was later appointed to be a federal judge.

The young American killed alongside a number of Yemeni civilians and one member of the U.S. military on Sunday, Nawar al-Awlaki, was the daughter of radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, the al-Qaida propagandist for whom the 2010 legal memo was drafted.

Also known as Anwaar and Nora, the 8-year-old was shot in the neck and died two hours later, her grandfather said. He told The Associated Press she was visiting her mother.

The Obama era "drone memo" found that although an American, Anwar al-Awlaki posed a "continued and imminent threat" and was part of a group against whom Congress had authorized military force.

Many civil liberties advocates, however, consider the CIA's targeted killing of the elder al-Awlaki in 2011 -- with approval from President Barack Obama -- an extrajudicial execution that deprived him of his constitutional rights to a trial and due process.

White House and Justice Department spokesmen did not immediately respond to inquiries about whether Spicer's statement reflects a change in U.S. policy.

"I would caution against putting too much weight on that statement without hearing their answers to follow-up questions,” says Jameel Jaffer, a former American Civil Liberties Union attorney and author of "The Drone Memos," a book about targeted killing policy.

“There are so many follow-up questions that could be asked," he says, for example, "Do you draw a distinction between conventional battlefields and places that are not zones of actual hostilities?”

Watch: Spicer's remarks on targeting Americans:

Spicer says "no American citizen will ever be targeted" after being asked about Nawar al-Awlaki, 8, who was killed Trump's first raid pic.twitter.com/lwzhyzjLmu

— Sara Yasin (@missyasin) January 31, 2017

Jaffer, who now leads Columbia University's Knight First Amendment Institute, adds: "The distinction between Americans and non-Americans here obviously is a purely legal one. The moral implications of killing civilians is the same whether whether they are Americans or not."

Though it's unclear if the statement reflects a policy change, University of California at Berkeley law professor John Yoo says such an approach would be strategically unwise.

"This is a big mistake," Yoo says. "Such a policy would prevent the U.S. from targeting Anwar al-Awlaki, for example. It would create a force field around any U.S. citizen who joins al-Qaida or ISIS. Al-Qaida and ISIS leaders would immediately start recruiting Americans, even more heavily than now, and placing them in leadership positions."

Yoo wrote Justice Department justifications for interrogation tactics that critics call torture in the early 2000s that later were repudiated. Yoo says it's unlikely to be known if the 2010 drone memo is rescinded without a public statement from the administration.

Anwar al-Awlaki is the only American the Obama administration admitted targeting with a lethal strike. The attack also killed American Samir Khan. Al-Awlaki's 16-year-old son Abdulrahman died in a separate drone strike less than a month later.

Jaffer says even if there were a policy against targeted killing, there would remain questions about application. “You can carry out a strike not targeting a particular individual but knowing a particular individual will be killed in a strike," he says.