U.S. District Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein ruled Wednesday that the government must respond by October 15, 2004, to a FOIA request by the American Civil Liberties Union for documents regarding detainee treatment and casualties at U.S. detention facilities worldwide. The ACLU's FOIA request has been pending for nearly one year, and absent the Southern District's intervention, there was no indication that the U.S. intended to produce the documents in the near future. Noting that a timely response is part of the government's FOIA obligations, Judge Hellerstein said, "If the documents are more of an embarassment than a secret, the public should know of our government's treatment of individuals captured and held abroad."
Behind the Homefront
The Associated Press reported late today [Sept. 16] that the Department of Defense has one week to release any files about President Bush's service in the Air National Guard that have not previously been released. Federal District Judge Harold Baer Jr. this afternoon ordered the records released to AP in response to its Freedom of Information Act request by Sept. 24. The department must also provide a written statement of the steps it has taken to locate the records, according to the order.
Behind the Homefront
Homeland Security
Section 2l4 of the Homeland Security Act makes it possible for a company to tell Homeland Security about an eroding chemical tank on the bank of a river, but DHS could not disclose this information publicly or, for that matter, even report it to the Environmental Protection Agency. And if there were a spill and people were injured, the information given DHS could not be used in court!
Secrecy is contagious – and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years a judicial committee acting in private has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.
Bill Moyers
Secrecy is contagious – and scandalous. The Washington Post reports that nearly 600 times in recent years a judicial committee acting in private has stripped information from reports intended to alert the public to conflicts of interest involving federal judges.
Silencing the soldiers
Military officials are cracking down on blogs written by soldiers and Marines in Iraq, saying some of them reveal sensitive information. Critics say it's an attempt to suppress unflattering truths about the U.S. occupation. NPR's Eric Niiler reports.
A blogger with the pen name CBFTW, stationed near Mosul with the First Battallion, 23rd Regiment, says he began his My War Web log to help combat boredom. "I'm just writing about my experiences," the soldier says. "I'm pretty much putting my diary on the Internet -- that's all it is."
CBFTW says he has avoided describing sensitive information, such as U.S. weapons capabilities, weaknesses and scheduling. But earlier this month, CBFTW was lectured by commanders about violating operational security. Two other popular blogs run by soldiers have been shut down recently.
NPR article
A blogger with the pen name CBFTW, stationed near Mosul with the First Battallion, 23rd Regiment, says he began his My War Web log to help combat boredom. "I'm just writing about my experiences," the soldier says. "I'm pretty much putting my diary on the Internet -- that's all it is."
CBFTW says he has avoided describing sensitive information, such as U.S. weapons capabilities, weaknesses and scheduling. But earlier this month, CBFTW was lectured by commanders about violating operational security. Two other popular blogs run by soldiers have been shut down recently.
On secrecy itself
Now we are buying into the very paradigm of a “war on terror” that our government – with staggering banality, soaring hubris, and stunning bravado -- employs to elicit public acquiescence while offering no criterion of success or failure, no knowledge of the cost, and no measure of democratic accountability...I am reminded of that line from the news photographer in Tom Stoppard’s play Night and Day: “People do terrible things to each other, but its worse in places where everybody is kept in the dark.”
I have become a nuisance on this issue – if not a fanatic -- because I grew up in the South, where for so long truth tellers were driven from the pulpit, the classroom, and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another hundred of years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by that war finally achieved equal rights under the law. Not only did I grow up in the South, which had paid such a high price for denial, but I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that did not confirm to the official view of reality, with tragic consequences for America and Vietnam.
...The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from l977 to l997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen.
What difference does it make? Well, its government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our back yard, or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.”
Bill Moyers
I have become a nuisance on this issue – if not a fanatic -- because I grew up in the South, where for so long truth tellers were driven from the pulpit, the classroom, and the newsroom; it took a bloody civil war to drive home the truth of slavery, and still it took another hundred of years of cruel segregation and oppression before the people freed by that war finally achieved equal rights under the law. Not only did I grow up in the South, which had paid such a high price for denial, but I served in the Johnson White House during the early escalation of the Vietnam War. We circled the wagons and grew intolerant of news that did not confirm to the official view of reality, with tragic consequences for America and Vietnam.
...The Project for Excellence in Journalism, reporting on the front pages of the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times, on the ABC, CBS, and NBC Nightly news programs, and on Time and Newsweek, showed that from l977 to l997 the number of stories about government dropped from one in three to one in five, while the number of stories about celebrities rose from one in every fifty stories to one in every fourteen.
What difference does it make? Well, its government that can pick our pockets, slap us into jail, run a highway through our back yard, or send us to war. Knowing what government does is “the news we need to keep our freedoms.”
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