Jack Goldsmith's disillusionment

John Podesta, Bill Clinton's former chief of staff, has an op-ed calling on Obama to release the legal memos setting forth the administration's rationale and guidelines for targeted killings. Good for him. As he notes, he has standing to weigh the competing imperatives of national security and public disclosure -- and with respect to the administration's legal deliberations, he comes down firmly on the side of disclosure.

I am more interested, though,  in the thinking of someone with even more standing to address the legal issues arising from the administration's covert operations: Jack Goldsmith, the short-term head of George W. Bush's Office of Legal Counsel who countermanded the insane torture memos that authorized the Bush administration's torture regime.  There's a link to a Feb. 5 Goldsmith op-ed at the bottom of Podesta's. Goldsmith's latest tells a sad story of disillusionment when compared with Goldsmith's 2009 writings.

Goldsmith takes a step back to consider not just the need for disclosure regarding the drone memos but the need to develop a new legal framework for "secret warfare":

Some thoughts about drone strikes and detention

It is high time I sorted out my thinking (and feeling) about U.S. drone killings and other targeted killings of those deemed to be terrorists. It's a duty to myself if no one else. The charge that liberals who were up in arms about Bush's torture and detention policies are unjustifiably silent about Obama's secret and unaccountable killings has some merit in my case, though I have on occasion expressed unease or disapproval of various aspects of Obama's conduct of the ongoing covert war. This will be an essay in the original sense, in that I am figuring out what I think (and recalling what I have thought at various stages) as I go along. The questions: what policies are effective (or likely to cause blowback), what policies are legal (or pose a lasting danger to our civil liberties), what policies are ethical (or likely to save more lives than they take).