In October of last year, the ACLU filed a FOIA request to have the Obama administration release the legal and factual information relating to the killing of three American citizens: Anwar al Awlaki, Samir Khan, and Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, Abdulrahman, all killed by drone attacks. The administration not only refused to release any information, it would not even admit the existence of a targeted killing program. So yesterday the ACLU sued the government for the release of documents containing the “factual and legal basis” for these actions. As the lawsuit says, “The Request relates to a topic of vital importance: the power of the U.S. government to kill U.S. citizens without presentation of evidence and without disclosing legal standards that guide decision makers. Given the momentous nature of the governmental powers that are the subject of the Request, the fullest possible transparency and disclosure is vital.”

As Glenn Greenwald says:

From a certain perspective, there’s really only one point worth making about all of this: if you think about it, it is warped beyond belief that the ACLU has to sue the U.S. Government in order to force it to disclose its claimed legal and factual bases for assassinating U.S. citizens without charges, trial or due process of any kind. It’s extraordinary enough that the Obama administration is secretly targeting citizens for execution-by-CIA; that they refuse even to account for what they are doing — even to the point of refusing to disclose their legal reasoning as to why they think the President possesses this power — is just mind-boggling. Truly: what more tyrannical power is there than for a government to target its own citizens for death — in total secrecy and with no checks — and then insist on the right to do so without even having to explain its legal and factual rationale for what it is doing? Could you even imagine what the U.S. Government and its media supporters would be saying about any other non-client-state country that asserted and exercised this power?

Greenwald points out that when convenient, Obama boasts about the killing of these people in public venues but when asked formally, the government “refuses even to confirm or deny if there is an assassination program, or if it played any role in the execution of these three Americans, because even that most elementary information is classified.”

We have reached the stage where the government feels free to tell reporters all manner of things in order to influence the public but invokes secrecy when it really matters, in courts of law.