SECRECY NEWS
from the FAS Project on Government Secrecy
Volume 2015, Issue No. 4
January 21, 2015

Secrecy News Blog: http://fas.org/blogs/secrecy/

US TO DETAINEE: THE GOVT "REGRETS ANY HARDSHIP"

In an unusual gesture, the U.S. Government last week apologized to Abdullah al-Kidd, a U.S. citizen who was arrested in 2003 and detained as a material witness in connection with a terrorism-related case.

Mr. Al-Kidd, represented by American Civil Liberties Union attorney Lee Gelernt, challenged his detention as unconstitutional and inhumane. Now the case has been settled, with an official apology and a payment of $385,000.

"The government acknowledges that your arrest and detention as a witness was a difficult experience for you and regrets any hardship or disruption to your life that may have resulted from your arrest and detention," wrote U.S. Attorney Wendy J. Olson in a January 15 letter.

This sort of admission of regret is rare. The government apologizes much less frequently than it perpetrates injuries that are inappropriate or unwarranted. So, for example, the recent Senate report on post-9/11 CIA interrogation practices noted that at least 26 individuals had been "wrongfully detained." But legal attempts to recover damages are typically foreclosed by courts based on "separation of powers, national security, and the risk of interfering with military decisions."

Why not apologize and compensate those who have been abused and mistreated, starting with those individuals who by all accounts are innocent of any wrongdoing? It would be the just and honorable thing to do, both for the intelligence community and for the country. And it would be most powerful (and most "therapeutic") if the IC undertook this step at its own initiative, rather than waiting to be compelled by others.

"Personally I agree," a senior U.S. intelligence community legal official said privately, "for the reasons you say and some others. [But] getting it done is a lot harder."

And so it is. Even as it apologized to Abdullah al-Kidd, the U.S. Government insisted on a stipulation that the settlement of the case "is not, is in no way intended to be, and should not be construed as, an admission of liability or fault on the part of the United States."

SSCI WANTS COPIES OF FULL TORTURE REPORT RETURNED

There is a new sheriff in town. Is that the message that Senator Richard Burr, the new chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, is trying to send?

Senator Burr reportedly wrote to President Obama last week to ask that all copies of the classified 6,700 page Committee report on CIA interrogation practices be returned immediately to the Committee. While the redacted summary of the report has been publicly released and is even something of a bestseller for the Government Printing Office as well as a commercial publisher, the full report has not been made public. And Senator Burr seems determined to keep it that way.

Senator Burr's letter was reported in C.I.A. Report Found Value of Brutal Interrogation Was Inflated by Mark Mazzetti, New York Times, January 20:

See related coverage in the Washington Post and the Huffington Post.

Senator Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Committee while the report was produced, scorned the request for its return.

"I strongly disagree that the administration should relinquish copies of the full committee study, which contains far more detailed records than the public executive summary. Doing so would limit the ability to learn lessons from this sad chapter in America's history and omit from the record two years of work, including changes made to the committee's 2012 report following extensive discussion with the CIA," she said in a statement.

Among other things, the proposed return of the full report may be intended to prevent its potential future accessibility through the Freedom of Information Act, since the FOIA does not apply to records in congressional custody.

But if so, this seems short-sighted and probably futile, given that all of the evidentiary material on which the report is based originated and remains in the executive branch anyway. Moreover, the Committee report has spawned an entire literature of agency evaluations and responses (such as the so-called Panetta Review). That literature also belongs to the agencies, and sooner or later it should be subject to public disclosure regardless of the fate of the SSCI report.

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Secrecy News is written by Steven Aftergood and published by the Federation of American Scientists.

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