via TomDispatch At the Guardian, a remarkable piece by Jameel Jaffner, who argued the case for the release of the Obama administrations drone-killing memo before the Supreme Court for the ACLU, on what the Obama administration doesnt want us to know about: a) the thoroughly lame basis on which they justified the drone assassination of an American citizen -- and the secret body of law being created by the Justice Department but kept from the citizenry (just part of the world of secret law being created in the U.S. at the moment). (Tom Dispatch) The publication of the memo is a victory for transparency – the result of hard-fought litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union and the New York Times. (I argued the ACLUs case before the appellate court.) It is a very rare thing for a federal court in the United States to order the release of information that the government contends is properly classified. In transparency litigation in the national-security sphere, the courts almost invariably defer. That the court declined to defer here suggests that it found the arguments from the Obama administration to be not simply unpersuasive but wholly without foundation. But despite the release of the drone memo, the American public still does not have the information it needs in order to evaluate the lawfulness and wisdom of its governments policies. Indeed, to read through the memo is to be reminded of how successful the Obama administration has been at rationing even the most basic information. Large parts of the memo – almost a third of it – have been redacted. The first 11 pages, which describe the governments allegations against al-Awlaki, are redacted in their entirety. Throughout the remainder of the memo, citations, sentences and even whole paragraphs have been stripped out, in some cases to protect genuine sources and methods but in others to obscure the precedents underlying the governments legal arguments. The redactions in the drone memos footnotes are perhaps the most disturbing, because they suggest the existence of an entire body of secret law, a veritable library of authoritative legal opinions produced by Justice Department lawyers but withheld from the American public. theguardian/commentisfree/2014/jun/24/obama-drone-memo-secret-law-transparency
Posted on: Wed, 25 Jun 2014 20:36:49 +0000
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