was actually killed.
The ACLU has made some headway for transparency. We are litigating two other FOIA lawsuits seeking information about targeted killings. One of them is about the strikes that killed three Americans in Yemen: Anwar al-Aulaqi, his 16-year old son Abdulrahman, and Samir Khan. Despite the public promises of openness, the government has continued to fight tooth-and-nail against releasing documents in those cases – or in some instances, even admitting that it has any documents at all.
In both cases we have won important rulings in federal appeals courts, forcing the government to release some documents, including a 41-page Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel memo addressing the legal theories that were the basis for the extrajudicial killing of Anwar al-Awalqi. The belated publication of the memo was an important victory for transparency, which led to a broad and long-overdue debate about the lawfulness of the government’s targeted-killing programme and, in particular, of the lawfulness of the government’s deliberate and pre-meditated killing of a US. citizen. But the memo – almost a third of which was redacted – leaves many questions unanswered.
For example, the memo doesn’t explain the government’s definition of imminence, the circumstances that would make “capture infeasible” (and therefore, according to the government, lethal targeting permissible), or the reasons for the government’s targeting decisions. Worse, it points to a whole body of secret law that the administration continues to shield from the American public.
The administration’s subsequent gestures towards transparency are just as scant. The public summary of the secret Presidential Policy Guidance relies on the same conclusory definitions as the Office of Legal Counsel memo.
The government’s drone programme lives far too deep in the shadows. As long as the government continues its campaign of secret, unacknowledged lethal strikes across the globe, we will fight to subject this policy to the scrutiny and debate it deserves.
Excerpted from: ‘Obama Promised Transparency on Drones, But We’re Still in the Dark’.
Courtesy: Commondreams.org