A federal district judge in Manhattan told the Central Intelligence Agency yesterday that it could not invoke any blanket exemption from requirements to disclose internal documents under the Freedom of Information Act. He ordered the agency to move toward releasing documents about its interrogation of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan and at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. The judge, Alvin K. Hellerstein, was impatient with the C.I.A.'s contention that it enjoyed such protections from the act, known as FOIA. Judge Hellerstein also rejected the agency's argument that it could not handle the administrative burden of searching for prisoner documents. The ruling was the latest by the judge to favor the American Civil Liberties Union in its suit, filed in October 2003, to force the C.I.A., the Pentagon and other agencies to release internal documents about abuse of prisoners by American forces in Iraq and elsewhere. So far the civil liberties union has received more than 25,000 pages of documents, mainly from the Federal Bureau of Investigation, other branches of the Justice Department, and the State Department, said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer for the group. Most of the material has been organized by the A.C.L.U. and released, and shows efforts to suppress investigations of prisoner abuse in Iraq and the use of "torture techniques" at Guantánamo. The Defense Department and the C.I.A. have been far more resistant to disclosing their documents, Mr. Jaffer said. He said the civil liberties union was still waiting for thousands of pages from the Pentagon, which he said had engaged in "every kind of obfuscation and delay tactic." [more] and [more]
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- All About Gathering Information? Charles Graner (Pictured above), who is facing a court martial, and another American soldier pose for a photograph behind a pyramid of naked Iraqi detainees at Abu Ghraib prison.