NEW YORK – For the first time, a federal appeals court has ordered the government to release a crucial legal memo relating to U.S. targeted killing operations, reversing a lower court decision that upheld the government’s secrecy claims despite characterizing them as the stuff of “Alice in Wonderland.”

The American Civil Liberties Union’s Freedom of Information Act lawsuit demands that the CIA and the Departments of Justice and Defense disclose records about the deaths of three U.S. citizens killed in Yemen in 2011: Anwar al-Awlaki, his 16-year-old son Abdulrahman, and Samir Khan. In addition to ordering the release of a legal memo from the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel to the Defense Department, today’s 3-0 ruling by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals also ordered the government to describe other documents relating to the killings about which it has previously refused to release any information. The ruling permits the ACLU to challenge the government’s withholding of those documents in the lower court.