![]() With the memo today, the court also released a less-redacted version of the opinion it issued in April. In its April ruling, the appeals court ordered the government to release the July 2010 OLC memo with redactions to protect “intelligence sources and methods.” The government filed a motion asking the court for additional redactions, which are reflected in version of the memo released today. The New York Times submitted a similar but narrower FOIA request, and the two resulting lawsuits were combined. The request specifically seeks memos written by the OLC that concluded that the killing of American citizens would be constitutional in certain situations. The ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit seeks documents related to the legal and factual bases for the government’s killing of three Americans in Yemen in 2011: Anwar al-Aulaqi, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, and Samir Khan. In May, the Senate confirmed Barron’s nomination to the U.S. The memo is a 41-page classified document, dated July 16, 2010, captioned “memorandum for the attorney general” and authored by David Barron, who was then the acting chief of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC). “This memo’s release will allow the public to better understand the scope and implications of the authority the government is claiming.” There are few questions more important than the question of when the government has the authority to kill its own citizens,” said ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer, who argued the FOIA lawsuit before the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. ![]() “The release of this memo represents an overdue but nonetheless crucial step towards transparency. In the memo, the government claims broad authority to kill American terrorism suspects without judicial process or geographic limitation. The July 2010 memo was the basis for the government’s extrajudicial killing of an American citizen, Anwar al-Aulaqi, in 2011. CONTACT: YORK – In response to a court order in consolidated Freedom of Information Act lawsuits filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and The New York Times, the Obama administration has released a key Justice Department legal memo on U.S. ![]()
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