Thursday, September 03, 2009
Camp Bondsteel, Kosovo
Documents compiled by the CIA’s inspector general relating to the agency’s secret interrogation program will not be released, according to CIA’s National Clandestine Service office. The agency is refusing to turn over materials to a federal court considering a lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union to learn the full extent of what transpired with detainees held in “black site” prisons.
Among the documents the CIA is withholding are President George W. Bush’s September 2001 authorization for the agency to begin secretly holding terrorism suspects; cables between CIA officers in the secret prisons and their superiors in Washington; and assessments by CIA lawyers about the legality of the detention program.
The CIA’s refusal comes a week after the Obama administration declassified documents about abuses in secret prisons overseas, and the announcement by Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. that he will appoint a special prosecutor to investigate CIA actions in the detention program.
-Noel Brinkerhoff
C.I.A. Resists Disclosure of Records on Detention (by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times)
CIA Will Continue to Withhold Key Bush Era Torture Documents (by Jason Leopold, Public Record)
ACLU v. Department of Defense (U.S. District Court Southern District of New York) (PDF)
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