National security: When secrecy is a weapon

from The Bellingham Herald:

In a recent interview with Newsweek magazine, former CIA lawyer John Rizzo spoke with surprising candor about the CIA's "targeted killing" program. He discussed the scope of the program (about 30 people are on the "hit list" at any given time), the process by which the CIA selects its targets (Rizzo was "the one who signed off") and the methods the CIA uses to eliminate them ("The Predator is the weapon of choice, but it could also be someone putting a bullet in your head"). In a wide-ranging conversation, Rizzo volunteered details about a highly controversial counterterrorism program that had previously been cloaked in official secrecy.

What was most remarkable about the interview, though, was not what Rizzo said but that it was Rizzo who said it. For more than six years until his retirement in December 2009, Rizzo was the CIA's acting general counsel - the agency's chief lawyer. On his watch the CIA had sought to quash a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit by arguing that national security would be harmed irreparably if the CIA were to acknowledge any detail about the targeted killing program, even the program's mere existence.

Read the rest here.

Court rules government can continue to suppress detainee statements describing torture and abuse

from the ACLU:

WASHINGTON – A federal appeals court ruled that the government can continue suppressing transcripts in which former CIA prisoners now held at Guantánamo Bay describe abuse and torture they suffered in CIA custody. The ruling came in an ACLU Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit to obtain uncensored transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) used to determine if Guantánamo detainees qualify as "enemy combatants."

“The American people have a right to know what the government has done in their name, and these transcripts, which include the direct testimony of the victims themselves, are essential to a full understanding of the Bush administration’s torture program,” said Ben Wizner, Litigation Director of the ACLU National Security Project, who argued the appeal for the ACLU. “The court’s decision undermines the Freedom of Information Act and condones a cover-up. These transcripts are being suppressed not to protect national security, but to shield former government officials from accountability.”

The ACLU lawsuit sought transcripts of statements made by Guantánamo prisoners concerning the abuse they allegedly suffered while in U.S. custody. While the CIA released heavily-redacted versions of the documents in June 2009, it continues to suppress major portions of the documents, including detainees' allegations of torture.

Read the rest here.

EFF compares documents from similar FOIA requests

from the Electronic Frontier Foundation:

EFF recently received documents in response to one of our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests that demonstrate a disturbing trend: the FBI's arbitrary application of FOIA exemptions to hide, or in some instances, reveal, its unlawful activities.

Through a careful comparison of thousands of pages of documents we received from this FOIA request with the same documents we received from an earlier FOIA request, we found that redactions in many of these duplicated documents were strikingly different. In several cases, the FBI redacted more information in later-produced documents than it did in earlier-produced documents. In other cases, the FBI redacted differing amounts of information when it produced two copies of the same report in response to the same FOIA request.

Sometimes the agency blocked out whole paragraphs, while at other times it blocked out only the key words that explain the details of its acts. What is interesting is that the FBI claimed the same FOIA exemptions in each version; it just applied them differently.

Read the rest here.

CIA faces second probe over videotape destruction

from msnbc.com:

The legal inquiries into the CIA’s destruction of videotapes showing the brutal interrogation of terror suspects may not be over after all.

A day after the Justice Department announced that a special counsel had concluded his investigation into the matter without bringing criminal charges, officials of the National Archives and Records Administration signaled Wednesday that they plan to reopen their own long delayed probe into whether the agency’s actions constituted an improper destruction of federal records.

“We’re not going to let this drop,” Susan Cooper, a spokeswoman for the National Archives told NBC.

Read the rest here.

Loud Music as an Interrogation Technique

On behalf of the National Campaign to Close Guantanamo, the National Security Archive in Washington is filing a FOI request seeking classified records that detail the use of loud music as an interrogation device. 

The Associated Press reports that documents and interviews with former detainees reveal that music from AC/DC, Britney Spears, the Bee Gees, and Marilyn Manson was used to block communication between detainees.  Critics say the music was also used to humiliate, terrify, punish, disorient and deprive detainees of sleep, violating international law.  

Get more information here. 

Justice Department argues for protection of Cheney's interview

The Justice Department is arguing that the release of Dick Cheney's interview with prosecutors concerning the CIA leak case could create a chilling effect, Politico reported. Department attorney Jeffrey Smith argued his case in front of Judge Emmet Sullivan in an FOIA lawsuit, which seeks the release of Cheney's interview records. Smith asked that the records be kept secret for five to 10 years so that it would be more likely for the information to be used "for historical purposes and not for political embarrassment." Sullivan has not stated his opinion on the case but did say at one point that the Justice Department seemed to be asking him to create a new vice presidents' exemption to the FOIA.

President Barack Obama’s Justice Department is arguing that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s interview with prosecutors in the CIA leak case should remain secret for five to 10 years to persuade high-level government officials to cooperate in future investigations.

“In making public the vice pesident’s interview, you will chill them,” Justice Department attorney Jeffrey Smith told Judge Emmet Sullivan during a two-hour hearing Tuesday on a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit seeking release of records about the Cheney interview, which took place in 2004.

Sullivan sounded highly skeptical of the government’s arguments, but he said he had not decided how he would rule in the case. "Where do I draw the line? This happened five years ago,” the judge said. “Would there be impediments to putting this information in a time capsule?”

More here.

Also, My Take On the DOJ Argument To Withhold Cheney Interview from The FOIA Blog: "The government has stated that Cheney did not ask for confidentiality when interviewed, meaning exemption 7(D) of the FOIA doesn't apply."

And, Saving Dick Cheney from 'The Daily Show'? from Politico: “The government doesn’t want to have what’s in these documents end up on a late-night comedy show,” Sullivan said.

Release of CIA torture report delayed

The ACLU is challenging the delayed release of the CIA's 2004 inspector-general report, The Washington Independent reported. The 200-page report, which is supposed to be declassified as part of an FOIA lawsuit agreement, will not be released before Aug. 31, according to the Justice Department. The ACLU says that the CIA and Justice Department have missed three deadlines already for the disclosure during the five months they've had to review the report.

Word’s coming now that the Obama administration is seeking to withhold the CIA’s 2004 inspector-general report on the implementation of its former “enhanced interrogation regime” until August 31. The ACLU, which had an agreement with the administration to declassify the report as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, is going to challenge the administration’s efforts. More soon.

Update: Just got a hold of the court documents. Check them out after the jump.

The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go through in the CIA’s 2004 inspector general report is just too great to meet any pre-August 31 timetable. Not only is the IG report itself 200 pages, that’s just one of 319 documents under review as part of the case.

More here.

The war on transparency

Glenn Greenwald for Salon.com describes the removal of the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment from the war supplemental spending bill as "a potentially temporary though still quite significant victory." The amendment is "nothing but a pure manifestation of the Bush mentality," he wrote. Without the amendment, war crimes photos are likely to be released. Supporting the suppression of information that might increase anti-American sentiment implies that "we should conceal or even outright lie about all the bad things we do that might reflect poorly on us." The Washington Post reports that the Obama administration is also urging the federal court to keep concealed all evidence relating to CIA's destruction of interrogation videotapes.

Yesterday, there was a potentially temporary though still quite significant victory for those who believe in open government and transparency: as Jane Hamsher first reported, House leaders and the White House were forced to remove the Graham-Lieberman photo suppression amendment from the war supplemental spending bill, because widespread opposition to that amendment among progressive House Democrats was jeopardizing passage of the spending bill. Readers here and those of various blogs who bombarded House members with opposition calls on Friday obviously played an important role in forcing the withdrawal of this pernicious amendment. Successes of this sort are rare enough that -- even if fleeting -- they warrant some celebration.

More here.

Latest Torture Memo Released Under FOIA

In the Washington Post and a host of other papers came stories today of a 2002 memo, or bits and pieces of it anyway...

The American Civil Liberties Union yesterday released three heavily blacked-out documents it received as a result of its ongoing, four-year-old Freedom of Information Act lawsuit. One document is a previously undisclosed August 2002 memo to the CIA from the Justice Department Office of Legal Counsel, which essentially offers a guide to how to torture and get away with it.

Here's an excerpt:

"To violate the statute, an individual must have the specific intent to inflict severe pain or suffering. Because specific intent is an element of the offense, the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. As we previously opined, to have the required specific intent, an individual must expressly intend to cause such severe pain or suffering. . . . We have further found that if a defendant acts with the good faith belief that his actions will not cause such suffering, he has not acted with specific intent. . . . A defendant acts in good faith when he has an honest belief that his actions will not result in severe pain and suffering. . . . Although an honest belief need not be reasonable, such a belief is easier to establish where there is a reasonable basis for it.

"Based on the information you have provided us, we believe that those carrying out these procedures would not have the specific intent to inflict severe physical pain or suffering. . . .

More here.

Now THAT is some redacton....

From the ACLU's excellent work on the CIA files comes this gem:

After CIA Director Michael Hayden publicly admitted that the CIA has, in fact, waterboarded detainees, the agency could no longer cling to its last excuses for covering up the use of the very word “waterboarding” in CIA records. As a result, yesterday we obtained several heavily redacted documents in response to an ongoing Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit brought by the ACLU and other organizations seeking documents related to the treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas.

While the documents do, in fact, reveal the word “waterboarding” or some variation, they leave pretty much everything else to the imagination. The pages that haven’t been completely withheld (many of them contain the words “Denied in Full” instead of any actual content) have the clandestine blacked-out look that’s become a sort of trademark of this administration. This is my favorite: