Appeals Court Says CIA Can Hide Torture Evidence from Public

http://www.aclu.org/blog/human-rights-national-security/appeals-court-says-cia-can-hide-torture-evidence-public

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that the CIA can effectively decide for itself what Americans are allowed to learn about the torture committed in their name. At issue in the ACLU’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was the agency’s right to withhold secret cables describing waterboarding; a photograph of a detainee, Abu Zubaydah, taken around the time that he was subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques”; and a short phrase that appears in several Justice Department memos referring to a “source of authority.”

The CIA argued that the cables could be kept hidden because waterboarding is an “intelligence method” exempt from disclosure under FOIA; that the photograph should remain secret because it depicted a detainee in custody during the timeframe of his interrogation; and that the “source of authority” was in fact an “intelligence source or method.”
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A three-judge panel of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals agreed with the CIA on all three counts, allowing the CIA to keep secret precisely the sort of information that FOIA was designed to expose: evidence of illegal government conduct. The court also granted the government the Orwellian authority to censor a photograph of a detainee because the photograph might reveal the detainee’s “condition” after being tortured.