Rep. Keith Ellison (D-MN) on Thursday stressed the need for more openness surrounding the Obama administration’s targeted killing program and the drones used to carry it out.

During an appearance on MSNBC, Ellison highlighted the need to set up an open legal architecture surrounding the program currently in operation in Yemen and Pakistan. That position falls in-line with both the sentiments of Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR) and CAP Chair John Podesta’s recent op-ed in the Washington Post.

Ellison said he agreed with Podesta that the administration needs to go further to help set norms for the use of drones around the world:

JANSING: We should say the President did allow some members of the intelligence committee to see those memos, are you satisfied with that? Is it enough?

ELLISON: No, it’s not enough. I think Podesta is absolutely right on this issue. I don’t think the president has anything to fear. He’s the one who said let’s have a legal architecture. This is a chance for the United States to really lead the world. [...] We should lead the way. The President should not allow himself to be coming up on the backside of this. He should be helping to lead this effort.

Watch Ellison’s full interview here:

At present, the program’s full legal justification — including the administration’s interpretation of when Americans can be targeted overseas — is being held closely by the White House, which has so far ignored calls to declassify the Justice Department’s memos. While it allowed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence view the memos as part of the deal to confirm CIA Director John Brennan, the White House sent staffers to sit with the committee members during their review, a move that Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D-WV) strongly objected to. “There was a minder who was sent in. I was unaware that that person was going to have to be there. It was an insult to me,” he said.

Speaking behind closed doors with the Senate Democratic Caucus, Obama indicated that he were he still in the Senate he would have “probably objected” to the White House’s continued secrecy as well.

Earlier this week, Ellison in his role as co-chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus signed onto a letter from House Democrats to President Obama calling for the release of those documents to the full Congress. Ellison also expressed wariness surrounding the use of armed drones in combat in general, stating that there are legitimate and illegitimate ways in which they can be utilized. “We should only use this sort of technology in the circumstances to protect American lives to do so,” Ellison said. “But I think that the technology has outrun the rules.” Calling back to his previously published op-ed on the matter, Ellison said that he was glad that the conversation in Washington had finally shifted to oversight over the targeted killing program.

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.

Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has long demanded a national conversation about President Obama’s claimed power to kill American citizens. On Wednesday, he took a big step towards starting one, using a rare “talking filibuster” to hold up the nomination of John Brennan to head the CIA and deliver an extended critique of the targeted killing of Americans on American soil.

Brennan played a critical role in the development and codification of the Obama Administration’s targeted killing program, so his nomination has become a flashpoint for Paul and others worried about the scope of the powers claimed in it. Publicly released documents, particularly the infamous CIA white paper outlining the legal thinking behind the strike on American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki, have not provided specific guidance on the territorial limits of the Presidential power to kill citizens. A more recent document, submitted to Congress by Attorney General Eric Holder, suggested that under “extraordinary” circumstances, such as Pearl Harbor or 9/11, the president could kill an American citizen on American soil. In testimony before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Wednesday, Holder specifically admitted that killing an American in the United States would be inappropriate and unconstitutional if the individual did not pose an imminent threat.

Throughout his filibuster, Paul repeatedly said that he would be willing to move to a vote on Brennan’s nomination if the Obama administration translated Holder’s reply into a written response and stated that it did not believe that the executive branch could target and kill Americans on American soil in most instances.

Paul acknowledged that it was unlikely that Obama would launch a drone strike against someone sleeping in their bed, but demanded clarification of what criteria the administration had for conducting targeted killing. While he initially questioned the principles behind so-called “signature strikes” against suspected terrorists not currently fighting,” Paul later shifted his focus to whether tactics used overseas could be transferred to American citizens within the U.S.
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The White House cleared a huge hurdle for John Brennan’s path to becoming CIA Director on Tuesday, agreeing to provide Congress with classified memos on the administration’s targeted killing program.

Brennan received approval to move forward to the full Senate this afternoon in a closed session of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence in the aftermath of the White House decision. The Obama administration had previously provided an unclassified white paper summarizing the classified Department of Justice memos that laid out the legal justification for the targeted killing of an American citizen, while only allowing access to briefly view some of the memos themselves. The white paper leaked to the press several weeks ago, kicking off debate about the extent to which the administration viewed its powers to execute suspected terrorists without trial.

That withholding of full access to the classified memos had been a major snag in Brennan’s confirmation process. Today’s agreement between the White House and Senate allowed for Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), chair of the Intelligence Committee, to bring Brennan’s nomination to a vote. The memos released to Congress are only those memos related to the killing of Americans. Other legal opinions related to the use of drone strikes and other methods to target suspected terrorists for killing were not provided. Likewise, only one member of each committee member’s staff will be granted access to view the memos provided along with the Senators themselves.

Sens. Ron Wyden (D-OR), Mark Udall (D-CO) and Susan Collins (R-ME) in a joint statement praised the administration for releasing the memos and agreeing to provide unclassified answers on when the President can use “lethal authorities” within the United States. “In our view, the appropriate next step should be to bring the American people into this debate and for Congress to consider ways to ensure that the President’s sweeping authorities are subject to appropriate limitations, oversight, and safeguards,” the statement said, reflecting Wyden’s commitment to further declassification of the drone program.

Despite clearing the Intelligence Committee by a vote of 12-3, several Senate Republicans still are insisting that they may tie up Brennan’s nomination further. Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) believes that the administration has yet to clearly answer his question on whether the Executive Branch can launch a strike against a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil, citing discrepancies in letters from Brennan and Attorney-General Eric Holder. Sens. Lindsay Graham (R-SC) and John McCain (R-AZ), meanwhile, have been using the Brennan nomination as a platform to receive more information about the Sept. 2012 attack on a U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi.