US to reveal justification for drone strikes on US citizens
21 May 2014, 10:28 -- The White House will reportedly comply with a court order to reveal a secret memo describing its legal justification for using drones to kill US citizens suspected of terrorism overseas. The Justice Department had been weighing whether to appeal a court order to disclose the memo but informed the White House on Tuesday that it would not, the official said. The decision came on the eve of a Senate vote on President Obama's nomination of David J. Barron, one of the memo's authors, to a federal appeals court judgeship.
The documents will be released later, pending court approval.
Administration lawyers are asking that the document be redacted to hide classified information, officials confirmed, although the legal reasoning will be legible.
Reuters quotes an unnamed official as saying that 'while the legal analysis that justifies the use of drones will be disclosed, some facts will still be excluded from the document.'
The decision comes as the Senate is set to vote Wednesday on advancing Barron's nomination to sit on the 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals in Boston.
A group of liberal and conservative senators had said they would fight the nomination unless the memo was made public, and others from both parties had called for its release. The White House allowed lawmakers to view copies of the memo last week in a secure Senate room.
The administration acknowledged last year that drones had killed four US citizens in Yemen, including cleric Anwar al-Awlaki, who was targeted by a CIA drone attack in September 2011. Obama called Awlaki the head of foreign operations for al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
Before this week, the Obama administration had fought the public release of the document, and had offered only to show unredacted copies privately to senators.
The official said that the redacted memo probably will be released in a "matter of weeks."
As part of its consideration of the case, the appeals court, after listening to government arguments, made its own redactions to the Barron memo. That is the version that the court has now ordered the administration to release. But the official said that the administration will go back to the court and re-argue for additional redactions on national security grounds.
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