This is DAY TO DAY. I'm Madeleine Brand.
President Bush continues appealing to Europeans to get behind the war in Iraq, but tales of prisoner abuse may be undermining that effort. The American Civil Liberties Union has internal Army documents about alleged abuses, and the ACLU got the material by filing Freedom of Information Act requests. As DAY TO DAY's Mike Pesca reports, these latest FOIA requests have been unusual in that they've yielded a lot of information.
MIKE PESCA reporting:
`Freedom of information'--the phrase makes it sound as if information exists in a natural state, like maple syrup, and the tree of government is just there waiting to be tapped. That was at least the intention of the Freedom of Information Act, passed in the '60s but given teeth in the backlash from Watergate and Vietnam.
The current administration has worked to defang the Freedom of Information Act to some degree. Shortly after the attacks of September 11th, 2001, then-Attorney General Ashcroft issued an order which tightened the standards by which FOIA requests would be granted.
Mr. STEVEN AFTERGOOD (Project on Government Secrecy): We are now in a period where government is closing doors.
PESCA: Steven Aftergood is the director of the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists. He was surprised, to say the least, to find that the ACLU had gotten thousands of pages of documents which detailed numerous instances where the Army investigated abuse but never brought charges.
Mr. AFTERGOOD: The ACLU has done a spectacular job, and their litigation, I think, is a milestone in the history of FOIA.
PESCA: Already concerned with the Pentagon's detention camps in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the ACLU submitted a FOIA request in October of 2003. They asked for information from the Pentagon, CIA and FBI about prisons and detention centers that the US had set up around the world. As often happens, the government said `no.' The ACLU got a court order compelling the government to disclose, but still, nothing. Then the ACLU caught a break. The FBI would comply.
Jameel Jaffer, ACLU staff attorney, says the crack in the stone wall came from the one agency which disagreed with the rest of the government.
Mr. JAMEEL JAFFER (ACLU Attorney): The FBI has given us a whole slew of e-mails that show a rift between the FBI and the Defense Department on the interrogation tactics that were used at Guantanamo, so the FBI would object to the interrogation tactics that were being used by the Defense Department, and the Defense Department would then defend the tactics. But the e-mails we've got are the only the FBI's side of the story.
PESCA: When one arm of the government disagrees with another, the public often gets information. The usual method is a leak to a reporter, a reporter like Newsweek's Michael Isikoff. He says the ACLU's most recent success comes from their diligence, yes, but he also surmises that intragovernment squabbling played a role.
Mr. MICHAEL ISIKOFF (Newsweek): Lawyers and officials inside the FBI who wanted this stuff out, who thought it made them look good, covered them from allegations of abuses at Guantanamo, showing that it was FBI agents who were protesting the way military interrogators were handling detainees at Guantanamo, and so for their own internal bureaucratic reasons, they processed and turned over documents that perhaps in another context they might not have.
PESCA: Isikoff, not used to being scooped by the ACLU, is impressed with their work here. But while it was a FOIA request that yielded the information, there are a number of reasons to doubt that FOIA will become any more common in newsrooms than it is today. Though Isikoff has used FOIA requests with stories that have a long time to simmer, they're useless on a tight deadline. Like most journalists, he'd rather cultivate sources to get unofficial leaks.
Also, according to Paul McMasters, the ombudsman of the First Amendment Center, journalists just aren't that well-versed about how to use FOIA. But even if they were, as the ACLU's Jameel Jaffer points out, it takes a room of lawyers, not reporters, to really make FOIA requests stick.
Mr. JAFFER: Even with litigation, you don't get everything you want. Without litigation, you get nothing at all.
PESCA: Of course, it might be the litigators who make FOIA work, but it's the reporters who decide what's news. Michael Isikoff says that if a news organization, not the ACLU, had unearthed these documents, there probably would have been more news coverage. The Freedom of Information Act just deals with releasing information, not what you do with it afterwards. Mike Pesca, NPR News, New York.
BRAND: More coming up on DAY TO DAY from NPR News.
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