The American Civil Liberties Union sued the administration on Tuesday to force disclosure of the Justice Department opinion that provides the legal backing for President Trump to carry out attacks on vessels he says are carrying drugs toward the U.S.
The lawsuit also wants to see the July directive that Mr. Trump signed authorizing the strikes.
Opponents of the strikes have questioned the slim public justification that government officials have given, and they filed an open-records request in October asking for the documents.
The deadline for a response has passed with no documents produced, the ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights said in the lawsuit.
“The public deserves to know how our government is justifying the cold-blooded murder of civilians as lawful and why it believes it can hand out get-out-of-jail-free cards to people committing these crimes,” said Jeffrey Stein, a lawyer with the ACLU’s National Security Project.
The Justice Department declined to comment.
More than 20 strikes have been publicly acknowledged, with more than 80 deaths of crew members attributed to them.
Administration officials recently confirmed reports that in one early September strike, U.S. forces mounted a second attack at a boat to eliminate people who survived the initial American strike.
The Office of Legal Counsel, the Justice Department’s internal division that offers legal advice for the federal government, has reportedly produced an opinion defending the legality of the strikes. That opinion, according to the reports, says the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” with “drug cartels.”
The ACLU said that isn’t true under international law.
It said armed conflict with a nonstate actor can occur only when the opponent is structured similarly to a military and is carrying out an armed campaign against the U.S.
Members of Congress have been briefed on the legal justification and on the double-tap strike from September.
Many Republicans have walked away from those briefings saying their questions were answered. Democrats, however, emerged to say they were troubled by what they saw and heard.
