The following editorial appeared in the Dallas Morning News on Tuesday, March 19:

Even in this now-now-now social media/Internet age, let’s agree that some national security functions should remain secret. A tweet alerting a terrorist target to tomorrow’s attack, for instance, almost certainly isn’t what any reasonable American would want.

Still, this doesn’t mean a U.S. government agency – even one as culturally secretive as the CIA – can drape a blanket denial over the plainly obvious. Especially not when the president, his top counterterrorism adviser (and future CIA director) and the now-former CIA director have discussed the program in public.

A three-judge appeals court panel so ruled last week in unanimously overturning a lower-court decision that would have allowed the CIA to maintain its official silence on whether it employed armed drones in war-fighting or even whether it had so much as an “intelligence interest” in them.

Merrick Garland, chief judge for the D.C. Circuit, appears to share this newspaper’s astonishment that the CIA insisted on perpetuating this level of fiction. The CIA, trying to stiff-arm a freedom of information request from the American Civil Liberties Union, cited overly broad privilege to assert that it was not able to confirm or deny whether documents related to drone strikes even existed.

Nonsense, Garland wrote. The CIA’s position was “neither logical nor plausible,” given that President Barack Obama had acknowledged such strikes; adviser John Brennan had spoken of drawing on the “full range of intelligence capabilities” in selecting targets; and CIA Director Leon Panetta had discussed the precision and effectiveness of using drones to eliminate top al-Qaida leadership.

With Panetta’s comments especially, the judge wrote, it would be “implausible that the CIA does not possess a single document on the subject of drone strikes.”

The appeals ruling sends the D.C. case back to district court to consider CIA arguments against releasing specific documents that we now know exist. That may seem a small step forward on the road to transparency in the drone battle, but it’s something.

As Garland notes, the CIA’s blanket no-comment stifled any legitimate examination of what should be revealed to the ACLU — and ultimately, the American taxpayers who fund all of this high-tech fighting. His panel’s ruling doesn’t mean open season on all CIA files, just a more targeted examination of what it can and can’t withhold.

Given the Obama administration’s reluctance to spell out its legal rationale for when and where it might employ missile-equipped drones — whether under CIA or Defense Department direction — it’s significant that a court stepped in and at least made sure that we acknowledged the obvious.

Newsletter