J. Scott Applewhite/Associated Press

The Senate Judiciary Committee held an oversight hearing on Tuesday, and most of the news reports focused on Operation Fast and Furious. NPR said there were “unanswered questions” regarding what Attorney General Eric Holder knew about the bungled gun-trafficking scheme while it was still a scheme and before it was bungled.

There was another important question that Mr. Holder left unanswered. Where’s the Anwar al-Awlaki memo?

Senator Patrick Leahy noted that “Anwar al-Awlaki was killed in an operation conducted by the United States in Yemen. And according to media accounts, the operation was conducted following the issuance of a secret memorandum issued by the Department of Justice which authorized the targeted killing of a U.S. citizen abroad.” He then asked “Is there any problem with providing this committee with a copy of that memorandum even if it is required to be in a classified session?”

Mr. Holder responded: “I will not address—cannot address—whether or not there is an opinion in this area.”

This frustrating dodge wasn’t surprising. In response to Freedom of Information Act requests from Charlie Savage of The New York Times, the Project on Government Oversight and the American Civil Liberties Union, the Department of Justice said helpfully that it “neither confirms nor denies the existence of the document.”

But we know it exists. We even know when it was completed (around June 2010), who wrote it (David Barron and Martin Lederman, both lawyers in the Office of Legal Counsel at the time), and what’s in it (too much to summarize here, but you can read about it in The Times).

This Department of Justice’s insistence that documents widely reported in the press may or may not exist is reminiscent of the Alberto Gonzales days, and I don’t mean that as a compliment.

Actually, there’s no need to reach as far back as Mr. Gonzales’s obfuscation when it came to torture and warrant-less wiretapping: the Obama administration has given us more recent examples of pretending that common knowledge is classified. Remember when the Pentagon banned four journalists from Guantanamo Bay because they had published the name of a former army interrogator? The Pentagon claimed his identity was under a protective order, but it had been public since 2005, when he’d been convicted of abusing detainees at Bagram Air Field in Afghanistan.

On the campaign trail, Mr. Obama liked to say that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” His administration might give this cliché a try instead of resorting to such sinister tactics.