Even though a federal appeals court ruled in April of 2014 that the Justice Department must release memos with the legal justification for killing U.S. citizens overseas by drone strikes because the DOJ had already publicly commented on the contents of the memos, the DOJ is still insisting that it still has the right to keep the them secret even though the documents have already been disclosed through the court order. “When government agencies fight for secrecy, logic is immediately sent to the front line of the battlefield to die a swift and brutal death. We’ve seen this sort of behavior far too frequently, whether it’s the government ordering employees not to view leaked documents because they’re somehow still “secret” or agencies withholding/redacting documents that have already been made public,” writes TimCushing of techdirt, April 10, 2015.
Senators from both parties filed a brief in February to support the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times in their lawsuit to obtain the memos by a Freedom of Information Act request. The senators thought that documents released last summer under the court order contained excessive redactions and criticized the DOJ for creating a body of “secret law.” (ACLU, February 11, 2015, press release)