My Sunday column (linked here, and pasted below) expanded on my blog post about the U.S. Department of Justice's legal underpinning for the targeted killing of an American-born Al-Qaida operative in 2011. In the June 23 White House press briefing, Press Secretary Josh Earnest spoke as if the court's order was the result that Obama administration had in mind the whole time:
But what the administration did was we worked through the legal system and those who were most interested in seeing it to produce a redacted document that protected national security interests while at the same time trying to live up to our commitment to transparency that the President has talked about quite a bit. So I think in this case, I think even the groups that sharply criticized us would call this a win for transparency.
Here's the column:
The death warrant for an American-born terrorist carried an innocuous title.
"Applicability of Federal Criminal Laws and the Constitution to Contemplated Lethal Actions Against Shaykh Anwar al-Aulaqi."
That memo, written in July 2010 by a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer, gave the Pentagon and the CIA legal backing for the drone-fired missile that killed al-Awlaki, also known as al-Aulaqi, in Yemen in September 2011. The fact that the public is finally reading it now shows both what's good and what's bad about the law that's supposed to keep government from operating in secret.
Starting in 2010, news organizations and nonprofit groups filed Freedom of Information Act requests for the memo. In late June, a federal judge ordered the memo's release, handing victory to the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times.
"These are memos that our government uses to support the fact that they can kill U.S. citizens without what most people view as full due process," said Eric Ruzicka, a Minneapolis lawyer with Dorsey & Whitney and part of the team representing the ACLU. "It concerns me when our government has processes that are not open. We aren't a government of secret laws."