A U.S. Air Force MQ-1 Predator, unmanned aerial vehicle, armed with AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, performs a low altitude pass during the Aviation Nation 2005 air show at Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada in this November 13, 2005 USAF handout photo obtained by Reuters February 6, 2013.

WASHINGTON | Fri Mar 15, 2013 4:36pm EDT

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A federal judge twice considered by President Barack Obama for the Supreme Court has rebuked the administration over the secrecy surrounding aerial drone strikes abroad, adding to pressure Obama already faces from fellow Democrats.

A ruling on Friday from Judge Merrick Garland in Washington capped a week of mounting calls for the release of more information and follows a drawn-out confirmation process for the new director of the Central Intelligence agency, John Brennan.

The Obama administration defends the attacks as essential to the fight against al Qaeda and other militants in countries such as Pakistan and Yemen. The strikes have at times killed civilians who were not targets, ignited local anger and frayed diplomatic ties.

A Democratic senator confronted Obama about the drone program at a closed-door meeting on Tuesday, the Politico newspaper reported, and on Wednesday a lawyer who led Obama's 2008 presidential transition, John Podesta, wrote an opinion piece accusing the administration of wrongly withholding drone-related legal opinions.

Garland, writing for himself and two other judges on the Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, criticized the Central Intelligence Agency for refusing in a lawsuit even to acknowledge the existence of its drone program. He called the CIA's legal reasoning indefensible and a fiction.

"'There comes a point where... courts should not be ignorant as judges of what (they) know as men' and women," Garland wrote, quoting a 1949 Supreme Court opinion.

"We are at that point with respect to the question of whether the CIA has any documents regarding the subject of drone strikes," he wrote.

The ruling effectively revives a lawsuit in which the American Civil Liberties Union is asking for records from the CIA. Obama administration lawyers have opposed the suit.

TRANSPARENCY DEBATE

In response to the ruling, a National Security Council spokeswoman said the administration had been more transparent than any of its predecessors on the conduct of sensitive counterterrorism operations but would not discuss details of specific operations.

Caitlin Hayden, the spokeswoman, said in a statement: "We will continue to disclose as much as we can - as soon as we can - regarding the framework, the standards, and the process through which we approve such operations."

Justice Department spokeswoman Nanda Chitre said the department was reviewing the decision, while CIA spokesman Todd Ebitz said: "The CIA does not, as a rule, comment on matters before the courts."

Attorney General Eric Holder said in congressional testimony on March 6 that Obama would soon reveal more about the legal rationale for drone strikes.

"We have talked about a need for greater transparency," said Holder, the chief U.S. law enforcement official.

Democrats outside the administration have shown growing impatience with the secrecy. West Virginia Senator Jay Rockefeller, a former Senate Intelligence Committee chairman, urged Obama to be more open during the president's meeting with Senate Democrats on Tuesday, Politico reported.

Podesta, a Democratic insider who oversaw Obama's 2008 transition, wrote in The Washington Post on Wednesday that Obama "is ignoring the system of checks and balances that has governed our country from its earliest days."

Last week, two Democratic senators voiced similar ideas in voting against confirming John Brennan as Obama's CIA director. Brennan was confirmed to the post on March 7, but the confirmation process was delayed for weeks by concerns about the administration's use of drones.

HIGH COURT CANDIDATE

Garland, 60, was a high-level Justice Department official when President Bill Clinton appointed him a judge.

He was on Obama's list of candidates for the Supreme Court when vacancies arose in 2009 and 2010. Obama chose others, but Garland remains a frequently cited judge on the influential appeals court in Washington.

In its efforts to quash the ACLU's records suit, the CIA said it could neither confirm nor deny whether it had drone records because of security concerns.

The ACLU, which sued under the 1966 Freedom of Information Act, countered that government officials had already acknowledged the drone program in public statements from 2009 to 2012.

The question became whether the statements by Obama, former CIA Director Leon Panetta and former counterterrorism adviser Brennan amounted to an official acknowledgment.

Garland ruled that they did, writing, "The president of the United States has himself publicly acknowledged that the United States uses drone strikes against al Qaeda."

However, if the case follows the pattern of similar suits, the ACLU is likely a long way from getting any records. Its suit now heads back to a trial court, where the CIA could invoke other defenses against the records request.

Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said the ruling would make it more difficult for the government to deflect questions about drones.

"The public surely has a right to know who the government is killing, and why, and in which countries, and on whose orders," Jaffer said in a statement.

(Additional reporting by Mark Felsenthal and Tabassum Zakaria; Editing by Howard Goller and David Brunnstrom)

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The facade of the New York Times building is seen in New York, November 29, 2010.

NEW YORK | Wed Jan 2, 2013 5:18pm EST

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A federal judge on Wednesday rejected The New York Times' bid to force the U.S. government to disclose more information about its targeted killing of people it believes have ties to terrorism, including American citizens.

U.S. District Judge Colleen McMahon in Manhattan said the Obama administration did not violate the law by refusing the Times' request for the legal justifications for targeted killings, a strategy the Times said was first contemplated by the Bush administration soon after the attacks of September 11, 2001.

McMahon appeared reluctant to rule as she did, noting in her decision that disclosure could help the public understand the "vast and seemingly ever-growing exercise in which we have been engaged for well over a decade, at great cost in lives, treasure, and (at least in the minds of some) personal liberty."

Nonetheless, she said the government was not obligated to turn over materials the Times had sought under the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), even though it had such materials in its possession.

"The Alice-in-Wonderland nature of this pronouncement is not lost on me," McMahon said in her 68-page decision.

The newspaper and two reporters, Charlie Savage and Scott Shane, had sued the government for details about the government's drone program, including the late 2011 killings of U.S. citizens Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman in separate strikes in Yemen.

Civil liberties groups have attacked the drone program, which deploys pilotless aircraft, as in effect a green light for the government to kill Americans without constitutionally required due process. U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder has rejected that contention.

Among the materials sought by the Times was a memorandum that the newspaper had in early October 2011 reported had been prepared by the U.S. Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. The Times cited people who had read the document.

The Times said this memorandum had authorized the "legal targeting" of Anwar al-Awlaki, a U.S.-born Muslim cleric who joined al Qaeda's Yemen affiliate and directed many attacks.

APPEAL PLANNED

The Times said it plans to appeal McMahon's decision.

"We began this litigation because we believed our readers deserved to know more about the U.S. government's legal position on the use of targeted killings against persons having ties to terrorism, including U.S. citizens," New York Times assistant general counsel David McCraw said in a statement.

He said McMahon, despite ruling for the government, explained "eloquently ... why in a democracy the government should be addressing those questions openly and fully."

McMahon also rejected information requests in a parallel lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union. That group said it will appeal, and also has a lawsuit seeking information about targeted killings pending at the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.

"The public has a right to know more about the circumstances in which the government believes it can lawfully kill people, including U.S. citizens, who are far from any battlefield and have never been charged with a crime," Jameel Jaffer, deputy legal director of the ACLU, said in a statement.

Dean Boyd, a spokesman for the U.S. Department of Justice, said that agency is reviewing the decision.

PROGRAM ON "TIGHT LEASH"

Citing protections envisioned by the Constitution's framers, McMahon said there were "legitimate reasons, historical and legal" to question whether the administration could unilaterally authorize killings taking place outside a "hot" field of battle.

But she rejected the Times' argument that the administration could not rely on exemptions from having to disclose classified or privileged material by virtue of having made at least two dozen public statements about the targeted killing program.

Among these were Obama's statements in an online forum on January 30, 2012, that the government was "judicious" in its use of drones, and that the program was "kept on a very tight leash."

She also cited a speech on March 5, 2012, at Northwestern University School of Law in Chicago where Holder said the government could lawfully use lethal force in a foreign country against U.S. citizens who had senior operational roles in al-Qaeda and were "actively engaged" in efforts to kill Americans.

McMahon dismissed the entire case except for one small issue related to two unclassified memos.

The cases are New York Times Co et al v. U.S. Department of Justice, U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, No. 11-09336; and American Civil Liberties Union et al v. U.S. Department of Justice in the same court, No. 12-00794.

(Reporting by Jonathan Stempel and Jennifer Saba in New York; Editing by Gary Hill, Bernard Orr)

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NEW YORK | Thu Sep 27, 2012 7:58am EDT

NEW YORK (Reuters) - A seven-year old child is torn from a secure and happy life when the Khmer Rouge come to power in Cambodia in 1975 and send her privileged family into the misery of hard labor as the new regime destroys the established order.

"In the Shadow of the Banyan" is the first novel of Vaddey Ratner, 41. While the book is powerful as told through the eyes of seven-year-old Raami, Ratner's own story is more so.

Only five when the Khmer Rouge came to power, the author endured four years of forced labor and starvation before she and her mother were able to flee the country. Arriving in the United States by a tortuous path and unable to speak English, she ultimately graduated from Cornell University and only years later returned to Cambodia.

Ratner now resides in Potomac, Maryland, with her husband and daughter and talked to Reuters about the book and her experiences during a brutal period of Cambodian history.

Q: How much of your story is autobiographical?

A: "The overall narrative follows my family experience, the move from the city, the uprooting, the loss of loved ones, the starvation. I make my father a poet but in real life he was a pilot. The story is a closed narrative and the characters have to move the story forward. I had to collapse some characters into one, the same with villages and towns. I created a lot of fictional villages and towns and used the memories of where we stayed."

Q: Do you want vengeance? Do you feel any bitterness?

A: "I don't want vengeance and I don't feel any bitterness. If I feel anything, I mourn for those I lost and the act of remembering requires so much energy, I feel that is all I have to give. I don't have the energy for anger or vengeance, nor do I want to have it."

Q: Your father was a pilot and member of the Cambodian royal family. Did you reveal who your father was to the Khmer Rouge as the child does in the book?

A: "Yes, I revealed who he was. I said his name. I revealed who he was."

Q: Do you feel guilty?

A: "What I feel is haunted and I will never be free of what happened. I will always reflect on what if I had not said his name."

Q: Mae and Pok, the two peasants who took in the book's main protaganists as family, were very sympathetic characters. Were they based on real people? Did you ever try to find them?

A: "Yes, they were real people. They were the easiest to capture as I felt they just translated into English. I did not need to collapse any other people into them to make them in the book. They were as I remember them as a child. But I would not go back to those various villages. Even now, my heart goes aflutter at the thought of going back to those various villages. I would only be confronted with those various losses. What was redemptive about writing this book was I found something beyond those losses. For me to go back, I fear that."

Q: Is your mother still alive? How does she feel about her life?

A: "My mother is still alive. She is very grateful and fiercely guards the few things she feels she has. The peace and solitude she has now. We have so little left of our family, what she was able to build was out of sheer determination."

Q: How much do you tell your daughter? How old is she?

A: "My daughter is 12. My husband and I have an understanding with each other, maybe an extension of how my father spoke to me, when we are asked something we tell her the truth as much as she wants to know."

Q: Was writing the book an act of personal therapy?

A: "It was a strange kind of therapy. At the end of writing it, I realized the depth of redemption I feel. I had felt apprehension that I would have to relive a lot of the ordeal over again. I did not know for sure whether I would come out of it. But I also felt this was the story I had to write.

Q: What was the one personal anecdote in the book that was hardest to write? Why?

"Gosh, every single one of them. Each one dealt into a different dimension of loss. With the loss of my father, it is founded on loss that is unanswerable to this day. I don't know what happened to him. With my sister I felt even the certainty I felt was so absurd, that a disease such as malaria could have been prevented. I chose all of them (the anecdotes) to find some understanding. They did not appear at random. I struggle with them still."

(Reporting By Nick Olivari; editing by Patricia Reaney and Paul Casciato)

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