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CIA Releases Documents in Ghost Detainee FOIA Lawsuit

By Jeralyn

In addition to the CIA's Inspector General report (pdf) released today, the CIA and Justice Department finally released documents in the ongoing FOIA litigation with the Center for Constitutional Rights, Amnesty International and other organizations over ghost detainees. (Background here.)

The first is a 2005 CIA report entitled Detainee Reporting Pivotal in War Against Al-Qa'ida. The second is a 2004 report, Khalid Shaykh Muhammad, Preeminient Source Against Al-Qa'ida.

These are the documents Dick Cheney said would support a case for torture. [More...]

CCR says:

These are the documents Dick Cheney was so excited to see declassified, but they don’t make the case for torture, they only show that the CIA is able to tailor documents to justify its actions after the fact. The descent into torture has made the world a darker and more dangerous place for everyone.”

As an aside, both the Detainee Reporting Pivotal Report and the theOIG report (page 87) contain the names of specific people and activities KSM disclosed in the month of March, 2003.

Many other detainees, including lower-level detainees such as Zubayr and Majid Khan, have provided leads to other terrorists, but probably the most prolific has been Khalid Shaykh Muhammad. He provided information that helped lead to the arrests of terrorists including Sayfullah Paracha and his son Uzair Paracha, businessmen whom Khalid Shaykh Muhammad planned to use to smuggle explosives into the United States; Saleh Almari, a sleeper operative in New York; and Majid Khan, an operative who could enter the United States easily and was tasked to research attacks (blacked out). Khalid Shaykh Muhammad's information also led to the investigation and prosecution of Iyman Faris, the truck driver arrested in early 2003 in Ohio.

The Pivotal report speculates KSM may have figured that Ramzi Binalshibh already gave up the goods. The OIG report has another theory: Maybe it was the 183 times he was water-boarded in March, 2003 -- or the fact that they threatened to kill his children.

Now that we've seen the OIG report and the FOIA documents, all we're waiting for is the ethics report from the Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (the OPR report.) AG Holder keeps pushing back its release date. Sure, what the interrogators did was bad, but it's also deplorable that DOJ lawyers authorized it in memos.

Is Holder throwing the interrogators under the bus while saving the prosecutors? Marcy thinks "maybe."

I hope not. While I'm not joining calls for prosecutions and jail sentences for everyone involved, I do think everyone needs to identified and have their specific actions exposed. Memo to AG Holder: Get it over with. It's like bad medicine. It tastes crappy while it's going down but it cures us. The OPR report will aggravate us to no end, but until we see it, we can't enact the fixes that will prevent it from every happening again. So let us have it in a single dose rather than dragging it out for days or weeks to come.

(Note: According to the AP, the correct spelling is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.)

Full post as published by TalkLeft on August 24, 2009 (boomark / email).