FOIA Eyes Only

"Over the past month, the biggest scoops in the news business have come from ... an organization that's not in the news business," writes Eric Umansky. "Using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), the American Civil Liberties Union has uncovered thousands of government documents detailing torture of detainees in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay." So how did the ACLU beat the nation's top news organizations to the punch? To begin with, it bothered to file a FOIA request. The only news organization to do so was the Washington Post. For another thing, the government has been stalling on the requests it has received. The Post is still waiting for a response to the request it filed last spring, and the ACLU only got its documents because it took the government to court and won (something that none of the newspapers did). "But even that has been just a partial victory," Umansky notes. "The Pentagon has held onto many documents - 'There are far more documents that haven't been released than have," says the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer - and the CIA insists that it doesn't even need to confirm whether the requested documents exist, let alone release them. Even in the memos and e-mails that have been let loose, there's a generous use of whiteout. One series of e-mails from the Defense Department has the subject header, 're: potential torture involving Iraqi detainees.' The whole thread adds up to four pages, and with the exception of the subject headers, all are now blank."