Judges Order CIA to Disclose Armed Drone Programs

Judges Order CIA to Disclose Armed Drone Programs

March 17, 2013

The “most transparent administration” ever has proven to be the most secretive, refusing to reveal any details about gun-running programs to Mexico, terrorist attacks in Benghazi, and, most recently, its controversial drone program. A U.S. Court of Appeal, however, has just ordered that the CIA must provide information about the type of records it holds regarding drones and the reason those records cannot be made public.

The order arose because the CIA refused to response to a “Freedom of Information Act” request that the ACLU and a related organization made asking that the CIA produce documents describing how it uses drones to carry out targeted killings. The CIA’s response was to refuse even to confirm or deny that it had a drone program. A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeal for D.C. held, however, that the CIA’s refusal to respond was silly, given all that is already known about the drone program.
The Court held that, while the CIA does not have to reveal the details of its drone program (at least for now), it cannot pretend that it has no records. It must, instead, identify the type of records it holds and explain why it has no obligation to reveal them.
Politico summed up the meat of the Appellate Court’s opinion, which revolved around the fact that it was ridiculous, in light of both the President’s and Eric Holder’s statements, to pretend drones don’t exist:

The judges found that public statements about drones from President Barack Obama, former CIA director Leon Panetta and new Central Intelligence Agency Director and former White House counterterrorism adviser John Brennan made it implausible for the CIA to assert that it needed to keep secret the very question of whether it maintains any information on the subject.
“Although these statements do not acknowledge that the CIA itself operates drones, they leave no doubt that some U.S. agency does,” Judge Merrick Garland wrote in an opinion joined by Judges David Tatel and Thomas Griffith. “Given these statements by the Director, the President, and the President’s counterterrorism advisor, the Agency’s declaration that ‘no authorized CIA or Executive Branch official has disclosed whether or not the CIA…has an interest in drone strikes’…is at this point neither logical nor plausible.”
“As it is now clear that the Agency does have an interest in drone strikes, it beggars belief that it does not also have documents relating to the subject,” Garland added.

All reasonable people understand that the CIA is a fundamentally secretive organization and that its effectiveness would be destroyed if it explained in advance its assets and plans. Nevertheless, because ours is a Constitutional democracy, the CIA may not operate entirely outside the parameters of American law, nor may it pretend that it exists in an alternate reality in which drones are only fairy-tales.