rssBREAKING: Obama Administration Wants CIA Torture Report Withheld Until August 31
Thursday, July 02, 2009 at 5:28 pm
- 16 Comments
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.
The ACLU replies that the CIA and the Justice Department have already missed three deadlines for the agreed-upon disclosure, and lawyer Amrit Singh writes that she’s “disturbed by the clear trend emerging in the government’s repeated delays in disclosure of documents critical to a complete understanding of the CIA’s interrogation program.” She says that instead of delaying, Judge Alvin Hellerstein should order the “expediting the reprocessing and release of all CIA documents at issue.”
Update 2: This is a statement from ACLU national security chief Jameel Jaffer:
The CIA has already had more than five months to review the inspector general’s report, and the report is only about two hundred pages long. We’re increasingly troubled that the Obama administration is suppressing documents that would provide more evidence that the CIA’s interrogation program was both ineffective and illegal. President Obama should not allow the CIA to determine whether evidence of its own unlawful conduct should be made available to the public. The public has a right to know what took place in the CIA’s secret prisons and on whose authority.
Here’s the Department of Justice letter:
And here’s the ACLU’s letter in response:
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16 Comments
Pingback posted July 2, 2009 @ 5:53 pm
[...] [...]
Pingback posted July 2, 2009 @ 6:14 pm
[...] July 2: At the Washington Independent, Spencer Ackerman reports on the exchange of letters between the Justice Department and the ACLU, [...]
Pingback posted July 2, 2009 @ 8:35 pm
[...] Spencer Ackerman of Washington Independent comes word that the Obama Administration is again delaying release of the 2004 CIA IG report on torture until [...]
Pingback posted July 2, 2009 @ 10:45 pm
[...] case which resulted in the order that the document be released will challenge that request. Spencer has the details, including the documents: The Justice Department argues that the volume of material it needs to go [...]
Comment posted July 3, 2009 @ 12:51 am
Spencer,
Any word of the DOD docs that were due in today, or are they riding the wake?
Pingback posted July 3, 2009 @ 9:18 am
[...] The ACLU’s Jameel Jaffer responds: The CIA has already had more than five months to review the inspector general’s [...]
Comment posted July 3, 2009 @ 12:02 pm
Off point, but what about the “executive order” that Obama’s people were drafting, or had drafted, on indefinite detention?
There was a huge report in the Washington Post last week. Was it true or false?
Pingback posted July 3, 2009 @ 2:38 pm
[...] Visit Source [...]
Comment posted July 3, 2009 @ 5:02 pm
The Wpost reported last week that Obama's people were drafting an executive order on indefinite detention. (or had already actually done it.) What ever happened to that story? Was it true or false and is there now a draft executive order or not?
Pingback posted July 7, 2009 @ 2:43 am
[...] from disclosing it from Judge Alvin Hellerstein, a federal district court judge in New York, and on Thursday requested a fourth. That’s proven too much for the ACLU. On Thursday, its lawyers wrote to Hellerstein to get [...]
Pingback posted July 8, 2009 @ 7:03 am
[...] Obama Administration Wants CIA Torture Report Withheld Until August 31 (includes copies of the letters by the Department of Justice and reply letter from Amrit Singh, staff attorney for the ACLUarticle by Spencer Ackerman 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…. [...]
Comment posted July 9, 2009 @ 4:49 pm
This should be the Final Delay. No more delays. We the people have a right to know how many Federal Laws were broken. Certainly the Federal Anti-Torture Laws were.
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Comment posted July 28, 2009 @ 7:37 am
This should be the Final Delay. No more delays. We the people have a right to know how many Federal Laws were broken. Certainly the Federal Anti-Torture Laws were.
Pingback posted September 4, 2009 @ 3:46 am
[...] requesting and receiving four delays. In July, the U.S. Attorney’s office in New York, arguing that it couldn’t prepare any documents for declassification before Aug. 31, mused about a [...]
Pingback posted August 17, 2010 @ 3:39 pm
[...] Inspector General that aggressively challenged both the legality and efficacy of torture — today announced that it would delay its disclosure by at least another seven weeks, to August 31, 20…. We’re in the New Era of [...]
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