reports 2011 and 2015 and in the six years since the department of justice failed to provide such reports. just to come to the point, i am respectfully asking for commitment that you will provide these periodic reports to congress and review the department s policies with respect to its invoking the state secret privilege so to comply with 2009 memo that may have gone too quickly over the various actions of the department, i m referring to the 2009 memo, requires periodic reportss. in eight seconds i have left. answer to both, yes, we are reviewing that memo and if anything, we will strengthen it and intend to make periodic reports and it is not periodic
my reaction is he s the president of the united states and he will come to the memorial that stand and pay his respects as he should but the release of the documents, this is a declassification review process of these documents, the department of justice to go back and review these documents they overly abused the state secret privilege and classification process and withheld documents so he really took a very strong step forward for the families. that is what we asked him to do, introduced legislation on august 5th, with all these requirements, bring it to your desk and sign it. he turned it into an executive order and now it is going forward. we will get a review of these documents. the first test is coming. by september 11th, the doj will do the declassification process
one thing, people are not giving enough credit for the idea there would be an advasary. they are doing more than approving warrants. they are making bodies of law. you have chief justice roberts appointing people to the court that become the national security lawmakers with no sense of a process. i think it can be done in a way that would uphold the basic tenants. the new york times called them a parallel version of the u.s. supreme court in terms of the precedent they have laid down. there s no transparency around it. they invoked the state secret privilege. you have to wonder, how much power is that going to have? is there going to be more decision making? by the way, alex, they did that in the news column. right. that was on the front page. not an editorial. it was a lead piece saying
go out with yemeni troops in noncombat rolls. a u.s. official says there s no doubt he needs to be dealt with, he doesn t belong on the battlefie battlefield, on the street or anywhere else he could do bad things. but even though he may be hiding in yemen, he s an american who s been put on a hit list to be captured or killed. president obama evoked a state secret privilege which says targeting american citizens outside a battlefield is unconstitution unconstitutional. the government says it s not going to tell an active terrorist how it fights. the aclu says the government leaked information about him as part of a coordinated political press strategy, to prove to the american people that it was going after terrorists. they want to see this published on the front page of the washington post, it s not a state secret, when we want to put some legal limits on what
that guy. separate from this state secret privilege, how lawful do you believe it is that there would be this possible cia hit list. some u.s. officials are acknowledging that there is such a thing and al awlaki is on it. that is the case of the aclu which is saying, on behalf of the father of this man, he shouldn t be on a hit list, he shouldn t be targeted especially when he s a u.s. citizen. what kind of argument is that to make? this is part of that disconnect we ve seen in other cases, where we have officials talking about things like the waterboarding or torture program, and other national security programs. but once they go into court, they say, that s top secret, you can t even venture into this area. and so there s a disconnect. and it s really clear in this case, where you have officials saying, yeah, we have a hit list, and yeah it has this individual on it, and, yes, the president does claim the right to be able to kill a u.s.