Patrick Doyle/Reuters

Governments have good reasons for keeping secrets – to protect soldiers in battle, or nuclear launch codes, or the identities of intelligence sources, undercover agents and witnesses against the mob. (Naturally that’s not an exhaustive list.) Governments also have bad reasons for keeping secrets – to avoid embarrassment, evade oversight or escape legal accountability.

The Bush administration kept secrets largely for bad reasons: It covered up its torture memos, the kidnapping of innocent foreign citizens, illegal wiretapping and other misdeeds. Barack Obama promised to bring more transparency to Washington in the 2008 campaign, but he has failed to do that. In some ways, his administration is even worse than the Bush team when it comes to abusing the privilege of secrecy.



One example of this abuse is the government’s effort to block public scrutiny of its “targeted killing” policy – the use of drone aircraft to kill specific people identified as threats to the United States. The most notorious case is the Sept. 30, 2011, drone strike in Yemen that killed Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen, who United States officials say was part of Al Qaeda’s command structure. Another American was killed in the strike, and Mr. Awlaki’s 16-year-old son, also an American citizen, was killed in an attack two weeks later.

The Obama administration has refused to make public the legal documents underpinning the president’s decision to order the killing of an American citizen without any judicial review before or after the attack. So far, it has not even made those documents available to the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Accordingly, the American Civil Liberties Union has filed two lawsuits aimed at forcing disclosure. The advocacy organization wants to see the factual information that led to the decision to kill Mr. Awlaki, as well as the legal memo justifying it. (The New York Times has also filed a lawsuit. Our paper is only seeking the memo.)

But the government is blocking any consideration of these petitions with one of the oldest, and most pathetic, dodges in the secrecy game. It says it cannot confirm or deny the existence of any drone strike policy or program.

That would be unacceptable under any condition, but it’s completely ridiculous when you take into account the fact that a) there have been voluminous news accounts of drone strikes, including the one on Mr. Awlaki, and b) pretty much every top government official involved in this issue has talked about the drone strikes in public.

On March 15, the ACLU filed a brief in the U.S. Court of Appeals based in Washington, D.C., in which it challenged the government’s defense with 13 pages of examples of how “the government has already specifically and officially acknowledged the program that the CIA now says is secret.”

These include:

Leon E. Panetta, who was then running the CIA, was asked about “the remote drone strikes” during a public appearance in 2009. He said that he could not go into particulars, but he added, “I think it does suffice to say that these operations have been very effective because they have been very precise in terms of the targeting and it involved a minimum of collateral damage.” He later said, “Very frankly, it’s the only game in town in terms of confronting and trying to disrupt the Al-Qaeda leadership.”

On another occasion, Mr. Panetta mentioned a drone strike on a suspected bomb-making plant in Pakistan that killed Hussein al-Yemeni. He went on to warn that “we are continuing to target their leadership.” In June of 2011 he specifically referred to “the Predators:” the drones used for the attacks.

On Jan. 30, the Times reported that President Obama was asked about drone strikes during an Internet question-and-answer session with the public. “Well,” he said, “I think we have to be judicious in how we use drones.” But he said that the United States can “pinpoint strike an Al Qaeda operative” and that “obviously a lot of these strikes have been in” Pakistan’s lawless border regions.

So this is not a secret program, but the government continues to hide behind the secrecy shield to avoid turning over the legal document justifying (or at least rationalizing) it.

My guess is that the Obama administration aim here is to avoid accountability. I’d ask someone at the Justice Department, but they wouldn’t be able to tell me, because the answer’s a secret.