A Positive Sign from JusticeBy Daphne Eviatar 2/18/09 6:49 AM
It’s hard to divine the Justice Department’s intentions on almost anything these days, given that Attorney General Eric Holder has barely been in office two weeks and doesn’t even have all of his senior staff yet. But if I were trying to read the tea leaves, I’d say we got a good sign yesterday.
As I
wrote last week, in a particularly
important Freedom of Information Act case, the Justice Department asked for a three-month extension to decide whether it would turn over three particularly critical Office of Legal Counsel memos that the American Civil Liberties Union has been pushing for. (The memos could help determine whether Bush administration officials broke the law.) Never mind that the FOIA case has been pending for more than five years, and with only three memos involved, it’s unlikely that it would really take the department’s lawyers that long to decide whether they fall within the handful of exceptions allowed by FOIA to prevent the release of government documents. So Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court in New York City, who was obviously annoyed, scheduled a hearing Wednesday to set a date certain for the government to respond.
Whether to avoid a public scolding, or just realizing that it will be hard to defend needing 90 days to review three memos, the Justice Department yesterday
agreed to respond within 30 days — a much more reasonable alternative that the ACLU readily agreed to.
So now, the Department of Justice will have to decide by March 16 whether, in keeping with Obama’s promises and in this new spirit of cooperation, it will turn over those OLC memos, which reportedly authorized some of the Bush administration’s most brutal interrogation methods. Then again, the Obama Justice Department is still staffed largely by Bush-era career staff holdovers. And a cynic might read today’s move as their conclusion that 30 days was all they needed to reinforce their fight to keep hiding the evidence.
http://washingtonindependent.com/30520/a-postive-sign-from-justiceLet us hope Mr. Holder really will release these by then, and is just trying to get braced for the Bush/GOP shitstorm, rather than stonewalling 30 days at a time. Because we've known the new DOJ had already appeared to have reviewed these documents and had begin writing up a new internal report as far back as 2/14,
the same time it was reported that they were asking a judge for 90 more days' delay for further study (request filed 2/11) :
That he disturbingly has to preside over such a large
Bush era held-over DOJ still makes it unclear how this will all unfold.
Those beneath him can't be at all happy in the meantime that the UK may be airing
an awful lot of revelations about US torture crimes- during their Bush reign- in the ongoing UK legal/media publicity surrounding Binyam Mohamad. Events ongoing there might just begin to force hands here sooner than imagined.
Congress will not be able to continue to pretend they can't read newspapers anywhere but here in the U.S., and they won't be able to let someone like Leon Panetta get away with statements ever again in the future like the ones he made around his confirmation, when he said he
wasn't aware of any validity to the claims about CIA torture flights.
IF Binyam gets his day in the UK courts, which was effectively denied in the US Courts when the
CIA torture flights case, of which he was a victim got thrown out on 2/9 under the alleged protection of US states secrets.
Previously:
Obama DOJ Delays Responding to Request for Key OLC Memos Re Torture and Interrogation PoliciesBy Daphne Eviatar 2/14/09 6:07 PM
The Obama administration, under pressure to turn over key memos written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, has asked the federal judge in New York for another 90 days to consider its position on a Freedom of Information Act case brought by a coalition of civil liberties advocates. But the judge may not be inclined to grant the request.
As I
reported earlier, the three memos at issue were written by then-OLC director Steven Bradbury and reportedly authorized abusive interrogations of suspected terrorists and decided that such extreme tactics would not violate the law. The Bush administration repeatedly refused to turn them over, but given President Obama’s promises to open government and increase disclosure under FOIA, the Justice Department now is under considerable pressure to change its position and release the documents, which could be critical to any future investigations or prosecutions of Bush officials.
The New York Times
reported in October 2007 that the memos provided “explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.” These did not, the memos concluded, amount to “cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment” — which would have been banned by international law, as well as a bill Congress was then considering.
The American Civil Liberties Union, which sued for the memos along with several other organizations, argues the memos don’t fall under an exception to FOIA because they constitute adopted policy, not confidential legal advice. Although the ACLU agreed to give the Justice Department some additional time to respond to the request, it argued in court this week that 90 days is too long. The case has already been going on for more than five years.
March 16 will tell us something very important.
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