U.S. law professor proposes assassinating more suspected terrorists

In June, about 100 people gathered at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative Washington think tank, to hear a lecture by John Yoo on "fighting the new terrorism." Mr. Yoo recommended an unusual idea: assassinating more suspected terrorists.

A law professor at the University of California at Berkeley, he said his proposal would require "a change in the way we think about the executive order banning assassination, which has been with us since the 1970s." Such a change is needed, he said, because it is wartime: "A nation at war may use force against members of the enemy at any time, regardless of their proximity to hostilities or their activity at the time of attack."

Mr. Yoo, 38 years old, is no ordinary ivory-tower theorist. During a two-year stint at the Justice Department from 2001 through 2003, he wrote some of the most controversial internal legal opinions justifying the Bush administration's aggressive approach to detaining and interrogating suspected terrorists.