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The Amer­i­can Civ­il Lib­er­ties Union (ACLU) has joined the Cen­ter for Con­sti­tu­tion­al Rights in fil­ing a Free­dom of In­for­ma­tion Act (FOIA) re­quest seek­ing the Of­fice of Le­gal Coun­sel’s (OLC) guid­ance and oth­er re­lat­ed doc­u­ments re­gard­ing lethal strikes on al­leged drug smug­glers in the Caribbean.

The ACLU not­ed that, in tes­ti­fy­ing last week be­fore the U.S. Sen­ate Ju­di­cia­ry Com­mit­tee, U.S. At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Pam Bon­di re­fused to con­firm the ex­is­tence (or nonex­is­tence) of such guid­ance.

But the ACLU said on the same day, in a dif­fer­ent hear­ing, Charles Young, who is nom­i­nat­ed to serve as the US Army’s gen­er­al coun­sel, ac­knowl­edged the ex­is­tence of this opin­ion in an ex­change with Sen­a­tor Jeanne Sha­heen, ex­plain­ing that the “opin­ion was de­rived through an in­ter­a­gency lawyers work­ing group” in­clud­ing rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the White House and sev­er­al ex­ec­u­tive branch agen­cies.