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The notion that the government can, in effect, execute one of its own citizens far from a combat zone, with no judicial process and based on secret intelligence, makes some legal authorities deeply uneasy.

To eavesdrop on the terrorism suspect who was added to the target list, the American-born radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who is hiding in Yemen, intelligence agencies would have to get a court warrant. But designating him for death, as C.I.A. officials did early this year with the National Security Council’s approval, required no judicial review.

“Congress has protected Awlaki’s cellphone calls,” said Vicki Divoll, a former C.I.A. lawyer who now teaches at the United States Naval Academy. “But it has not provided any protections for his life. That makes no sense.”

Administration officials take the view that no legal or constitutional rights can protect Mr. Awlaki, a charismatic preacher who has said it is a religious duty to attack the United States and who the C.I.A. believes is actively plotting violence. The attempted bombing of Times Square on May 1 is the latest of more than a dozen terrorist plots in the West that investigators believe were inspired in part by Mr. Awlaki’s rhetoric.

“American citizenship doesn’t give you carte blanche to wage war against your own country,” said a counterterrorism official who discussed the classified program on condition of anonymity. “If you cast your lot with its enemies, you may well share their fate.”

President Obama, who campaigned for the presidency against George W. Bush-era interrogation and detention practices, has implicitly invited moral and legal scrutiny of his own policies.

But like the debate over torture during the Bush administration, public discussion of what officials call targeted killing has been limited by the secrecy of the C.I.A. drone program. Representative John F. Tierney, who on April 28 held the first Congressional hearing focused on the lawfulness of targeted killing, said he was determined to air the contentious questions publicly and possibly seek legislation to govern such operations.

The reported targeting of Mr. Awlaki “certainly raises the question of what rights a citizen has and what steps must be taken before he’s put on the list,” said Mr. Tierney, Democrat of Massachusetts and chairman of a House subcommittee on national security.

Counterterrorism officials, with the support of Democrats and Republicans in Congress, say the drone missile strikes have proved to be an extraordinarily successful weapon against militants in the tribal areas of Pakistan, the location of all the known C.I.A. strikes except one in Yemen in 2002. By their count, the missiles have killed more than 500 militants since 2008, and a few dozen nearby civilians.

Both the New York Times and the BBC reported that prisoners who passed through the facility reported abuse, like beatings and sexual humiliation, to the Red Cross, which is not allowed access. The commander in charge of detention operations in Afghanistan, Vice Admiral Robert Hayward, has insisted that all detainees under his purview have regular Red Cross access and are not mistreated.

It has been previously reported that the facility, beige on the outside with a green gate, was operated by members of a Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) group, allegedly outside of Hayward’s jurisdiction. But JSOC, a component command made up of highly secret special mission units and task forces, does not operate the facility.

Instead, it is manned by intelligence operatives and interrogators who work for the DIA’s Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC). They perform interrogations for a sub-unit of Task Force 714, an elite counter-terrorism brigade.

Called the “black jail” by some of those who have transited through it, it is a way-point for detainees who are thought to possess actionable information about the Taliban or Al Qaeda.

Intelligence gleaned from these interrogations has often led to some of the military’s highest profile captures. Usually, captives are first detained at one of at least six classified Field Interrogation Sites in Afghanistan, and then dropped off at the DIA facility — and, when the interrogators are finished, transferred to the main prison population at the Bagram Theater Internment Facility.

“DoD does operate some temporary screening detention facilities which are classified to preserve operational security; however, both the [Red Cross] and the host nation have knowledge of these facilities,” said Bryan Whitman, a Pentagon spokesperson. “Screening facilities help military officials determine if an individual should be detained further and assists military forces with timely information vital to ongoing operations.” Whitman would not say who ran the facility or provide any details. A DIA spokesperson declined to comment, as did the White House, which referred questions to the Pentagon.

Under a directive issued by the commander of coalition forces in Afghanistan, Gen. Stanley McChrystal, those captured on the battlefield can be detained for only 96 hours unless they are deemed to possess intelligence value. In practice, military units can unofficially transfer detainees they pick up to other field units before they arrive at interrogation sites, giving American and Afghan interrogators more time to ferret out useful information.

According to other officials, personnel at the facility are supposed to follow the Army Field Manual’s guidelines for interrogations. When he took office, President Obama signed an executive order banning the Central Intelligence Agency and the military from using techniques not listed in the manual. But he has a task force studying whether the expressly manual-approved tactics are sufficient.

When interrogators are using Appendix M measures, the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, Gen.James Clapper (Ret.) is the man on the hook. Detainees designated as prisoners of war cannot be subjected to Appendix M measures.

The DCHC is a relatively new organization. It has several branches and has absorbed staff from the the now largely disbanded Strategic Support Branch, which provided CIA-like intelligence services to ground combat units. The DCHC also performs some of the work that the Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA), which was accused of spying on American political groups, used to do. Many of the staff, civilian and military, as well as many contractors, previously worked with CIFA.

Defense officials said that the White House is kept appraised of the methods used by interrogators at the site. The reason why the Red Cross hasn’t been invited to tour it, officials said, was because the U.S. does not believe it to be a detention facility, classifying it instead as an intelligence gathering facility.

A Defense official said that the agency’s inspector general had launched an internal investigation into reports in the Washington Post that several teenagers were beaten by the interrogators, but Whitman disputes this.

When the Obama Administration took over, it forbade the DIA from keeping prisoners in the facility longer than 30 days, although it is not clear how that dictum is enforced. It is also not clear how much Congress knows about the DIA’s interrogation procedures, which have largely escaped public scrutiny.

“In all our facilities the standard is humane treatment and all DoD detention facilities are required to be compliant with Common Article III, The Detainee Treatment Act, the Executive Order signed by the President last year, and the DoD Detainee Directive and the Army Field Manual,” Whitman said.

Although the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program was investigated and a Justice Department prosecutor is currently reviewing those files, the Defense Department’s parallel activities have been given little scrutiny. To this day, the Department denies the existence of a “special access program,” codenamed “Copper Green,” which allegedly authorized military interrogators to use extremely harsh methods, including the infliction of sexual humiliation, on high-value terrorists.

Only about 200 military and civilian personnel were aware of Copper Green’s existence before it was disclosed by the New Yorker’s Seymour Hersh. The CIA’s program, known internally by the acronym “GST,” has been discontinued. Although “Copper Green” was disbanded, the Defense Department’s detainee affairs section has set up a new special access program under which the rules for battlefield interrogations are established. It is classified Top Secret.

Bagram is in the middle of a major expansion, and the DIA facility is being renovated, officials said.

Mayor Dave Bing has pledged to knock down 10,000 structures in his first term as part of a nascent plan to “right-size” Detroit, or reconfigure the city to reflect its shrinking population.

When it’s all over, said Karla Henderson, director of the Detroit Building Department, “There’s going to be a lot of empty space.”

Mr. Bing hasn’t yet fully articulated his ultimate vision for what comes after demolition, but he has said entire areas will have to be rebuilt from the ground up. For now, his plan calls for the tracts to be converted to other uses, such as parks or farms.

Even when the demolitions are complete, Detroit will still have a huge problem on its hands. The city has roughly 90,000 abandoned or vacant homes and residential lots, according to Data Driven Detroit, a nonprofit that tracks demographic data for the city.

After a stuttering start, caused by a dispute over the disposal of asbestos from demolished homes, the program is just now gaining pace.

City officials say they aren’t sure how many structures ultimately need to be torn down. The mortgage crisis compounded Detroit’s economic decline, leaving nearly 30% of the city’s housing stock vacant, according to Data Driven Detroit.

“Neighborhoods that are considered stable are now at 20% vacancy,” said Deborah Younger, a development consultant involved in the demolition effort.

Sarkozy made the threat at a Brussels summit of EU leaders last Friday that sealed a rescue package, Zapatero told a meeting with leaders of his Socialist Party on Wednesday, the newspaper reported.

Germany, Europe’s biggest economy, has been the most reluctant euro nation to help the Greek government.

However the French president demanded “a commitment by everyone, for everyone to help Greece, each according to his means or France would reexamine its situation in the euro,” Zapatero was quoted as saying.

“Sarkozy banged his fist on the table and threatened to withdraw from the euro, which twisted the arm of Angela Merkel,” the German chancellor, a Socialist official who heard Zapatero’s account was quoted as saying.

Underestimating the spill may hinder efforts to control it, the Massachusetts Democrat said in a statement yesterday. Markey said he plans to investigate how much oil is gushing into the Gulf and send a letter to the company asking about their methods of determining the size.

“If you don’t understand the scope of the problem, the capacity to find the answer is severely compromised,” said Markey, chairman of a House Energy and Environment subcommittee. Estimates have risen to as much as 70,000 barrels a day, he said, citing “independent analyses reported in the media.”

BP’s Macondo well, about 40 miles (64 kilometers) off Louisiana’s coast, began leaking oil after the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig exploded on April 20. U.S. Energy Secretary Steven Chu has picked a team of scientists to help BP and industry experts come up with back-up plans to stop the leak. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has estimated the well is spewing 5,000 barrels of oil a day.

On the Surface

“The assessment that is being used remains 5,000 barrels of oil a day, as estimated by NOAA,” Toby Odone, a spokesman for the London-based company, said by telephone today. Measuring the exact volume of oil leaking from the well is difficult and estimates are based on what appears on the surface, he said.

National Public Radio reported May 13 that 70,000 barrels of oil a day may be spilling into the sea, relying on analysis by an associate professor at Purdue University in Indiana. The accident may be worse than the Exxon Valdez incident of 1989, NPR said.

BP’s effort to use robots on the seafloor to close off the well failed, and a 40-foot steel structure meant to cap the leak was scuttled when the containment box became clogged with an icy slush of seawater and gas. The company is deliberating between using a smaller containment chamber to control the well or inserting a tube directly into the leaking pipe to channel the oil.

About $450 million has been spent on cleanup operations and settlements, or an average of $20 million a day since the rig exploded, up from the previous $6-million-a-day estimate. BP is also considering injecting debris including tire pieces and golf balls to seal the top of the well.

“You have the great problem of a potential disintegration of the euro,” Volcker, 82, said in a speech in London yesterday. “The essential element of discipline in economic policy and in fiscal policy that was hoped for” has “so far not been rewarded in some countries.”