Speaking at a panel at George Washington Law School this morning, Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) indicated that his struggle with the Obama administration for more transparency on national security matters is just beginning.

Wyden was the opening speaker at a Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington event on drones, in which he laid out his position on the secrecy surrounding the Obama administration’s counterterrorism targeted killing program.

Wyden made clear during his talk that he believed that there are “certainly legitimate reasons” for the government to keep some matters secret, including the details of covert operations. Sources and methods — or the precise ways that intelligence is collected — are in a very different basket than keeping the law secret, Wyden explained. “Secret operations are different than secret laws,” Wyden said. What Wyden is firmly opposed to is secret interpretations of public laws by the Executive Branch without the conclusions being disclosed:

WYDEN: [W]e aren’t going to take a backseat to anybody — not anybody — on the question of protecting genuinely sensitive sources and operations. But I am also not going to take a backseat to anybody in the effort to try to make sure our public laws stay public. And that’s what this is, in effect, discussion is all about.

At the forefront of Wyden’s concerns is a set of classified memos from the Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel laying out the justifications for when force can be used against American citizens overseas. An unclassified white paper summarizing those memos leaked to the press last month, stirring up the current debate.

Wyden indicated that he had spent the last two years asking the administration for access to the DOJ memos on targeting Americans abroad. As part of its deal to have John Brennan confirmed as CIA Director, the White House has turned over those memos to the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, but has not declassified them as of yet. These memos, Wyden believes, as the official interpretation of the Executive Branch on how it reads current laws need to be made public. At present, there is no one place within the law that Americans can go to see what the standard is with regard to targeting Americans, Wyden said.

“I don’t buy that,” Wyden said when asked about whether the memos reveal too much in the way of operational details to be declassified. “That’s what we have redaction for.” Wyden was the only member of the Democratic Caucus to join Rand Paul’s nearly thirteen-hour long filibuster of John Brennan last week, though he disagreed with Paul on the forthrightness of the administration.

House Democrats earlier this week wrote to the White House also demanding the declassification of the DOJ memos, as well as answers related to the broader use of drones in warfare.

Two editorials by major American newspapers on Friday highlight the need for increased oversight and transparency over the United States’ counter-terror targeted killing programs. The editorials, in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times, are responding to a recent court ruling that the Obama administration was not required to disclose a document outlining its legal justification for killing American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki in Yemen in 2011. Though the judge in the case, Colleen MacMahon, called for greater transparency with respect to the drone program, she also concluded she was legally incapable of ordering it, a point the New York Times — one of the plaintiffs challenging the government in the suit — took issue with:

For starters, various government officials have spoken publicly about the American role in killing Mr. Awlaki and the circumstances under which the government considers targeted killings, including of American citizens. At President Obama’s nominating convention last summer, a video prepared by his campaign listed the killing of Mr. Awlaki prominently among Mr. Obama’s national security achievements.

Such a selective and self-serving “public relations campaign,” as the judge termed it, should have been deemed a waiver of the government’s right to withhold its legal rationale from public scrutiny. Moreover, disclosing the document would not have jeopardized national security or revealed any properly classified operational details. The ruling, which is inconsistent with the purpose and history of the information disclosure law, richly deserves overturning on appeal.

While the Los Angeles Times is more sympathetic to MacMahon’s legal reasoning, it also believes more transparency is needed on the legal justification for killing Awlaki, writing that “If [the Obama administration] is going to act as judge, jury and executioner, the least it can do is divulge its legal reasoning.”

Some of the arguments in the government’s 50-page memo justifying the strike on al-Awaki have been released publicly. It appears to argue that since al-Awlaki was waging war on the United States as a member of al-Qaeda, it would be lawful to kill him despite his citizenship if and only if he cannot also be captured. CAP’s Ken Gude agrees with this reasoning, writing that the al-Awlaki case “was an airstrike that resulted in the death of a legitimate military target based on the power Congress granted the president in the 2001 AUMF [Authorization to use military force].” Critics charge, for example, that such reasoning would only apply if al-Awlaki were on a battlefield in active combat with American forces. It is hard to assess this debate without access the government’s full legal justification for the strike.

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The number of pages of classified government documents that were declassified, as well as the number reviewed for declassification, declined from the year before, according to the Information Security Oversight Office’s (ISOO) Report for Fiscal Year 2011 [PDF].

The report found that 26.7 million pages were declassified through automatic, systematic, and discretionary declassification reviews, the lowest number of declassified pages since the 1980-1994 period. See the chart below:

Trendlines in the ISOO report indicate that President Obama’s 2009 goal of reviewing 400 million pages of classified records of historical importance by December 2013 “is not likely to be met,” says a response by the Federation of American Scientists (FAS).

While the total volume of declassified documents per year appears to be slowing, the ISOO report shows that in 2011, as in past years, the majority of classification decisions that were appealed to the Interagency Security Classification Appeals Panel were overturned in whole or in part, resulting in the declassification and release of records which government agencies had sought to classify. FAS observes:

Because this pattern has persisted for 15 years (since the Panel was established), it represents empirical proof that overclassification has been and still remains pervasive, even by internal executive branch standards. In fact, there are indications that the Panel itself is too conservative in its handling of classification disputes. Recently, even the hyper-retentive National Security Agency decided to fully release a document despite a Panel finding that it should remain partly classified.

The ISOO report doesn’t address the implications that over-classification remains rife in federal agencies but ISOO Director John P. Fitzpatrick, in a letter addressed to the President at the beginning of the report, emphasized that 2011 would mark the launch of the first executive branch-wide Fundamental Classification Guidance Review.

“Agencies with original classification authority began comprehensive reviews of their classification guidance, particularly classification guides, to ensure the guidance reflects current circumstances and to identify classified information that no longer requires protection and can be declassified,” wrote Fitzpatrick. “We believe that significant results will be obtained from this program.”