USG Brief in CA2 Targeted Killing FOIA Case

Last Friday the government filed this brief in CA2  in the NYT’s and ACLU’s appeal in the case involving FOIA requests  on targeted killing. (Here is our account of the decision below, which the government largely won, and here is the ACLU brief on appeal).  I’m headed for vacation this morning and don’t have time to read carefully and analyze the brief.  Suffice it to say that the government takes an aggressive anti-disclosure stance.  In particular, it reads the President’s acknowledgment of USG involvement in the al-Awlaki strike narrowly, to require as little disclosure as possible.  To give you a flavor, the government argues that it cannot disclose “whether OLC provided legal advice to the CIA on the lawfulness of targeted lethal force” because “it would reveal whether the CIA itself was operationally involved in lethal targeting operations or was authorized to conduct such operations, as well as CIA interest in specific operations against identified individuals.”  And it adds that “even with the President’s acknowledgment of the previously properly classified fact that the United States carried out this particular operation, DOJ is not in a position to disclose additional details about the dates, nature, recipients, or contents of the classified responsive DOJ records, because such details would tend to reveal information protected under FOIA Exemptions 1, 3, and 5.”