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Obama DOJ again refuses to tell a court whether CIA drone program even exists
As the nation spent the week debating the CIA assassination program, Obama lawyers exploit secrecy to shield it from all review
By Glenn Greenwald
14 February 2013
It is not news that the US government systematically abuses its secrecy powers to shield its actions from public scrutiny, democratic accountability, and judicial review. But sometimes that abuse is so extreme, so glaring, that it is worth taking note of, as it reveals its purported concern over national security to be a complete sham.
Such is the case with the Obama DOJ's behavior in the lawsuit brought by the ACLU against the CIA to compel a response to the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request about Obama's CIA assassination program. That FOIA request seeks nothing sensitive, but rather only the most basic and benign information about the "targeted killing" program: such as "the putative legal basis for carrying out targeted killings; any restrictions on those who may be targeted; any civilian casualties; any geographic limits on the program; the number of targeted killings that the agency has carried out."
Everyone in the world knows that the CIA has a targeted killing program whereby it uses drones to bomb and shoot missiles at those it wants dead, including US citizens. This is all openly discussed in every media outlet.
Key Obama officials, including the president himself, not only make selective disclosures about this program but openly boast about its alleged successes. Leon Panetta, then the CIA Director, publicly said all the way back in 2009 when asked about the CIA drone program: "I think it does suffice to say that these operations have been very effective because they have been very precise." In 2010, Panetta, speaking to the Washington Post, hailed the CIA drone program in Pakistan as "the most aggressive operation that CIA has been involved in in our history". This is just a partial sample of Obama official boasts about this very program (for more, see pages 15 to 28 here).
Despite all that, the Obama DOJ from the start has refused not only to provide the requested documents about the CIA drone program, but they refuse to say whether such documents even exist. They do so by insisting that whether there even exists such a thing as a "CIA drone program" is itself classified, and therefore, they can neither admit nor deny whether they possess any of the documents sought by the FOIA request: "the very fact of the existence or nonexistence of such documents is itself classified," repeats the Obama DOJ over and over like some hypnotic Kafkaesque mantra.
Even in the face of the endless stream of public statements from the president on down discussing and boasting about the drone program, the federal judge presiding over the lawsuit last September meekly deferred (as usual) to the DOJ's secrecy claims and dismissed the ACLU's lawsuit. The judge, Rosemary Collyer, ruled that all of the public statements cited by the ACLU whereby Obama officials boasted of the drone program do not constitute official acknowledgment that the CIA (as opposed to some other government generally) has a drone program. The ACLU has appealed this decision.
[Excerpt]
Read more:
Obama DOJ again refuses to tell a court whether CIA drone program even exists | Glenn Greenwald | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk
