Still No Coverage of ACLU/CCR Arguments

In my initial post on the ACLU/CCR brief in Al Aulaqi, I promised to return to several of the themes I sketched out. In this post, I want to focus on the first: The total absence of press coverage of the substance of the arguments the groups are making. The briefs were filed on Friday. It is now Monday. I have yet to see a single article in a major media outlet discuss the brief or what positions the groups are taking. The New York Times on Sunday ran a lengthy editorial on the subject of drones--which contained not a word on brief. While I could have missed some converage somewhere (please send me any you've seen of which I should be aware), the absence of coverage seems to me remarkable. It is particularly remarkable because the press so dramatically miscovered the government's motion to dismiss--treating it largely as an invocation of the state secrets privilege, when it was instead almost the opposite. The result is that we have a case that everyone concedes to be important, in which one side's arguments have been pervasively misrepresented and the other side's arguments have been almost entirely ignored. Other than by reading 120 pages of briefs--or by reading Lawfare, which seems just as improbable--how is the public supposed to know what is actually going on here? Just how the press should cover briefing like this is a hard question. The substance of these briefs involves some dense doctrine on matters of standing and justiciability; it involves the proper reading the Alien Tort Statute (a matter which only Jack and a very few others really understands). A good news story on this brief is not an easy task. That said, the groups here--agree with them or disagree--are making fateful, important, and consequential arguments. It deeply matters whether they can get a court to review the legality of the targeted killing of a U.S. national oversease. It deeply matters whether the courts regard such killings as a political question. And it deeply matters, if they do not abstain, how they treat the substantive question. It cannot be that the right amount of coverage of the law at issue here is zero.