During last week’s confirmation votes on David Barron, the Justice Department was promising to comply with a court order to release a partially redacted version of the Barron Memo, which offers the administration’s legal justification for killing Americans overseas with drone strikes.
Now that the Senate has confirmed Barron, the administration has changed its mind, and is pushing the court to give them permission to even more heavily censor the document.
The initial court order had allowed the censorship of certain “facts based on classified intelligence,” but insisted the legal justification had to remain intact. The Justice Department now says there are other passages that should be censored based on “other legal protections” the court forgot about.
In addition to the motion seeking to keep more of the memo secret, the Justice Department also filed a motion asking to be allowed to keep the first motion a secret. The court rejected this, but said it will allow the motion to also be redacted before being made public.
What difference does it make, dead men tell no tales. All memos coming out of this administration will be doctored to fit Obama’s “transparency” rhetoric.
Despite court orders, I suspect that the Administration will get what they want…and everything will remain as it is now – the American people don't have the right to see what the government we elect is doing in our name.
Congress and the House should institute a new rule: No laws passed, no nominations approved, unless and until the laws are read and examined, the nominees are fully vetted. If it's a mystery, then it's an automatic NO!
He is probably not going to be named the worse president of all time by the democrats, but he defiantly working very hard on the issue.
It occurs to me that a potential Presidential candidate in the next election may get a lot of traction by citing all the Obama administration's memos and overly classified documents and promising to declassify those and release the original, unredacted versions to the public. If a government is doing something 'in our name' and 'for our security' we deserve to know what honors are being bestowed upon us. As it stands, the US government is about as transparent as Stalin's regime.
I'm sure the Obama admin doesn't want the US public to see its legal rationale for drone killings because, like the memos that authorized torture, that rationale amounts to little more than "because we said so."
I'm guessing that the only legible words will be "yes we can".
The documents will be comprised of sheets of paper with a Government Seal at the top and a body of 100% redaction.
Bastards! That the Democratic Senators treated this as though it were a routine confirmation vote is outrageous. Their only defense could be that Jay Bybee was promoted to a position on the 9th Circuit court after signing off on the infamous torture memos created by John Yoo.