The the Rights group asks Obama to release Bush-era memos
AP - Wednesday, January 28, 2009 6:40:10 PM
By PAMELA HESS
Civil libertarians urged the Obama administration to release dozens of memos under its control that could shed light on secret Bush-era interrogation, detention and surveillance activities.
The American Civil Liberties Union's list of at least 41 such undisclosed documents is the most exhaustive produced so far. These memos are a wish list for civil rights, privacy and human rights groups, as well as members of Congress, seeking more information about the legal reasoning that underpinned the Bush administration's secret programs.
In one of his first acts in office, President Barack Obama said he would increase the amount of information More Politics
the government makes available to the public.
"The government should not keep information confidential merely because public officials might be embarrassed by disclosure, because errors and failures might be revealed, or because of speculative or abstract fears," Obama said in a Jan. 21 memo to his agency heads.
The ACLU's list of memos was culled from documents filed in two lawsuits by the group against the departments of Defense and Justice. There are potentially dozens more memos, but ACLU cannot get enough identifying details to include them on the list.
"The truth is these are a small subset of the memos that we know something about, where we had the author's name or the substances of the memo," said Jameel Jaffer, director of the ACLU's national security project.
The known memos include one from October 2001 that said the Fourth Amendment's protections against unreasonable searches and seizures did not apply to domestic military operations. It was later withdrawn.
That was subpoenaed by the Senate Judiciary Committee in October. It is unclassified but has been made available to the committee on a "read only" basis and remains at the Justice Department, according to a committee official who spoke on condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of the matter.
The ACLU lists 54 known documents. Of that time, 12 have been made public; one, dated Aug. 1, 2002, was released but it was heavily censored. It described "alternative interrogation methods" that were being considered for use on CIA prisoners. Among the techniques the CIA is known to have used is waterboarding, which simulates drowning. Eric Holder, in line to be attorney general, has called the method torture. |
