A.C.L.U. lawyers dig info out of the government, mine it for truth
Amrit Singh and Jameel Jaffer
In the spring of 2003, long before Abu Ghraib or secret prisons became part of the American vocabulary, a pair of recently hired lawyers at the American Civil Liberties Union noticed a handful of news reports about allegations of abuse of prisoners in American custody.
The lawyers, Jameel Jaffer and Amrit Singh, wondered: Was there a broader pattern of abuse, and could a Freedom of Information Act request uncover it? Some of their colleagues, more experienced with the frustrations of such document demands, were skeptical. One made a tongue-in-cheek offer of $1 for every page they turned up.
Six years later, the detention document request and subsequent lawsuit are among the most successful in the history of public disclosure, with 130,000 pages of previously secret documents released to date and the prospect of more.
The case has produced revelation after revelation: battles between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over the treatment of detainees at the Guantánamo Bay prison camp; autopsy reports on prisoners who died in custody in Afghanistan and Iraq; the Justice Department’s long-secret memorandums justifying harsh interrogation methods; and day-by-day descriptions of what happened inside the Central Intelligence Agency’s overseas prisons…
But Mr. Aftergood said the case also illustrated how costly litigation was often necessary to unearth documents the government preferred to protect. “The law gives you standing to fight,” he said. “It doesn’t guarantee victory.”
Nor, in reality, does it guarantee the American people an open and trustworthy government. The months and years of stonewalling by the Republican administration and the bureaucrats loyal to obfuscation rather than the Constitution they were sworn to uphold – leave us with only a few lawyers dedicated to the task.
RTFA. Think about it. We’re supposed to be the freedom-loving nation that shines the light for the rest of the world – if you accept the propaganda. Then why should we even need a Freedom Of Information Act – and why do we have to sue our elected officials to wring out the truth of what they do in office?
