For years now, the Obama administration has been playing a self-serving and duplicitous game over its power to kill people away from any battlefield and without judicial oversight or accountability. It has trotted out successive officials and doled out tidbits of information attesting to the legality of President Obama’s claim to unilateral authority to carry out such killings, while withholding information essential to evaluating that aggressive claim of executive power.

In an important unanimous decision on Monday, a three-judge panel of the federal appeals court in Manhattan refused to go along with that tactic. The ruling, written by Judge Jon Newman of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, reversed a disturbing 2013 decision by a federal district judge, Colleen McMahon, upholding the government’s claim to secrecy largely on national security grounds.

The new ruling ordered the release of portions of a classified Justice Department memorandum that provided the legal justification for the targeted killing of a United States citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, who had joined Al Qaeda and died in a 2011 drone strike in Yemen. It came in response to lawsuits filed under the Freedom of Information Act by The New York Times and two of its reporters, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, and by the American Civil Liberties Union.

Essentially, the appellate panel reviewed the government’s overwrought claims of national security and found them seriously wanting. It concluded that the government had waived its right to keep the analysis secret, citing numerous public statements by administration officials and the Justice Department’s release of a 16-page, single-spaced “white paper” containing a detailed analysis of why targeted killings were legal.