Legal organizations on Tuesday sued the Justice Department and other government agencies for the release of a secret memo offering formal justification for the Trump administration’s boat strikes in international waters, which have killed close to 90 people.
The organizations — the American Civil Liberties Union, the New York Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights — filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in federal court in Manhattan, asking a judge to order the release of the memo and any other relevant records.
The Trump administration has referred to the memo, which was written by lawyers from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, in its defense of the strikes even as experts have questioned their legality.
“The public deserves to know how the Trump administration has justified the outright murder of civilians as lawful, and the grounds on which it purports to provide immunity from prosecution for personnel who carried out these crimes,” the organizations said in their suit.
A White House spokeswoman and a Justice Department spokesman did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the suit.
The New York Times has reported that the more than 40-page memo is based on the notion that the United States and its allies are in the midst of armed conflict with drug cartels in South America and that the strikes are part of that conflict. The memo also argues that the members of the U.S. military involved in the killings have “battlefield immunity” from prosecution, according to people who have read it.
The A.C.L.U. and its partner organizations first sought the release of the memo in October, appealing directly to the Trump administration. They said in their complaint that the Defense Department, the State Department and the Justice Department had all failed to release relevant records.
President Trump has ordered 22 strikes on boats in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean since September, killing a total of 87 people, his administration has said.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has stated that the operations are legal under both domestic and international law, “with all actions in compliance with the law of armed conflict — and approved by the best military and civilian lawyers.”
But Congress has not authorized an armed conflict, and experts interviewed by The Times have said that it is difficult to argue that the United States is in one. Furthermore they have said that Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth are ordering their subordinates to commit crimes.
The administration has referred to the secret memo directly — the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, spoke about it in a press briefing this month — which could make it more difficult to fight the organizations’ request that it be released.
The first of the strikes, on Sept. 2, has come under particular scrutiny in recent weeks after The Washington Post reported that the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, ordered a second strike on a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea that killed two survivors who were clinging to the boat after an initial blast.
The Post’s report said that Admiral Bradley was fulfilling a spoken order from Mr. Hegseth to kill everyone on the boat, which has spurred questions from both parties about whether the military had committed war crimes.
Jack Goldsmith, the head of the Office of Legal Counsel under President George W. Bush, wrote that “there can be no conceivable legal justification” for the strike, in part because the Defense Department forbids conducting hostilities with the goal of ensuring that there are no survivors.
A bill expected to clear Congress in the coming days would compel the Defense Department to provide more information to lawmakers about the attacks, which have frustrated both Democrats and Republicans.
Senator Jack Reed, the top Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week that the administration’s reluctance to release more information “suggests they know this operation and the tortured legal rationale they use to justify it cannot withstand scrutiny.”
Jonah E. Bromwich covers criminal justice in the New York region for The Times. He is focused on political influence and its effect on the rule of law in the area’s federal and state courts.
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