Anwar al-Awlaki's Denver-born son Abdulrahman was, like his father, killed by American forces. The lesson from Abdulrahman's story, says Nation correspondent Jeremy Scahill, is that the US can aim "targeted strikes" at anyone—with impunity. "It’s the most horrific form of pre-crime," Scahill says. "They don’t know the identities of the people that they’ve been killing, they don’t know whether they’ve been involved in any activity, they are killed for who they might be or who they might one day become." Scahill joins Democracy Now! for a special hour-long segment on his new book, Dirty Wars.

—James Cersonsky

Read an excerpt from Scahill's new book at TheNation.com.