Shortly before Christmas in 2011, I called a lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union and told him I was thinking about filing a suit on behalf of The New York Times against the U.S. Department of Justice. My plan was to ask the court to compel DOJ to reveal its secret legal memoranda justifying targeted killings of Americans and others abroad. I wanted to know whether he thought we had a chance of winning.
“It’s not completely hopeless,” he said. That is how these things go in Freedom of Information Act world. “Not completely hopeless” qualifies as an occasion for optimism.
