WHERE'S THE DILEMMA?:

Obama's Drone Memo Dilemma: The Obama administration released Bush-era legal opinions authorizing torture. Will it make public its own rationale for targeting US citizens for death? (Nick Baumann, Jan. 11, 2011, Mother Jones)

Sometime during Barack Obama's term in office, there's a good chance an American citizen will be assassinated on the president's orders.

Perhaps it will be Anwar al-Awlaki, the New Mexico-born Al Qaeda propagandist hiding in Yemen. Maybe it will be another of the "handful" of Americans reportedly on a list of citizens the government has determined are terrorists who can be legally killed by the CIA or the military's Joint Special Operations Command. But if and when it happens, death will probably come almost instantaneously. It will likely arrive in the form of a $68,000 AGM-114 Hellfire missile, fired from an unmanned drone hovering somewhere above the clouds. The target will never know what hit him. And when that person meets his fiery end, it's quite possible that the American people still won't have a good sense of exactly why the President believes he has the legal authority to authorize the killing of US citizens without charge or trial.

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The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is trying to change that. Last January, the group filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking a slew of documents relating to the Obama administration's reported targeted killing program. Among the materials requested were any documents outlining the legal rationale for the program. That would presumably include memos produced by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), the division of the Justice Department that provides legal advice to the executive branch. (The government has yet to acknowledge that such documents even exist, but it is highly likely that they do.)

The ACLU could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that the Obama administration might be willing to release OLC memos—or at least parts of OLC memos—relating to the drone program. After all, the Obama team waited just three months after his inauguration before releasing extremely controversial Bush-era OLC memos authorizing interrogators to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation, "stress positions," extreme temperatures, ear-splitting music, and "walling" on terrorist suspects. But when it comes to releasing the legal justifications for other controversial anti-terror practices, including its own, the Obama administration has dragged its feet.