The American Civil Liberties Union is publicizing its acquisition of a large volume of data relating to civilian casualties in Iraq and Afghanistan, which it has made available on its Web site.

The files, obtained by Freedom of Information Act request, detail hundreds of cases in which families of the dead filed for compensation after their loved ones were killed by or as a result of coalition forces.

“The files made public today comprise over 800 claims for compensation or condolence payments submitted to the U.S. Foreign Claims Commissions and the Commander’s Emergency Response Program by surviving family members of Afghan and Iraqi civilians said to have been killed or injured or to have suffered property damages due to actions by Coalition Forces,” the group announced in a media advisory. “Many of the claims were denied under the so-called “combat exemption” to the Foreign Claims Act (FCA), which provides that harm inflicted on residents of foreign countries by U.S. soldiers during combat cannot be compensated under the FCA, even if the victims had no involvement whatsoever in the combat. The documents reveal that, due to the claim denials, many innocent civilians were not compensated for their harm or were referred to the Commander’s Emergency Response Program for a discretionary condolence payment that is subject to an automatic $2,500 limit per death.”

The complete log of documents is available in two parts: here and here.

The ACLU has also built a search function where users can query the data based on keywords, dates and locations. That page is available here.

via ACLU publishes volumes of data on civilian casualties in Iraq, Afghanistan | Raw Story.

The Justice Department has quietly recanted nearly every major claim the Bush administration had made about “high-value” detainee Abu Zubaydah, a Guantanamo prisoner who at one time was said to have planned the 9/11 attacks and was the No. 2 and 3 person in al-Qaeda.

Additionally, Justice has backed away from claims intelligence officials working in the Clinton administration had also leveled against Zubaydah, specifically, that he was directly involved in the planning of the 1998 embassy bombings in East Africa.

[...]

For the first time, the government now officially admits that Zubaydah did not have “any direct role in or advance knowledge of the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001,” and was neither a “member” of al-Qaeda nor “formally” identified with the terrorist organization.

The government now has a new set of charges it is leveling against Zubaydah and claims he is being detained by the United States based on his “actions” as an “affiliate” of al-Qaeda that may have included the planning of a counterattack against US forces after the US invaded Afghanistan in November 2001 and a “thwarted” attack at the time of his arrest.

[...]

The Justice Department, in its factual return, has since abandoned every major claim that the Bush administration made about Zubaydah being a high-level al-Qaeda official and no longer believes or contends that he was ever connected to the terrorist organization or was involved in the planning of any terrorist plots, according to Mickum.

via t r u t h o u t | US Recants Claims on “High-Value” Detainee Abu Zubaydah.

Leopold doesn’t link to any of the unclassified documents, possibly because they’re not yet available… or those documents are already listed somewhere in the long list of documents obtained by the ACLU under the FOIA on this page. At any rate, it now appears that we subjected a detainee who was not a “high value” member of Al Qaeda to torture innumerable times and waterboarded him at least 83 times, contrary to all legal justifications the Bush Administration’s lawyers made in defense of torture.

Over the past several years, WikiLeaks — which aptly calls itself “the intelligence agency of the people” — has obtained and then published a wide array of secret, incriminating documents (similar to this CIA Report) that expose the activities of numerous governments and corporations.  Among many others, they posted the Standard Operating Manual for Guantanamo, documents showing how corrupt offshore loans precipitated the economic collapse in Iceland, the notorious emails between climate scientists, documents showing toxic dumping off the coast of Africa, and many others. They have recently come into possession of classified videos relating to civilian causalities under the command of Gen. David Petraeus, as well as documentation relating to civilian-slaughtering airstrikes in Afghanistan which the U.S. military had agreed to release, only to change their mind.

All of this has made WikiLeaks an increasingly hated target of numerous government and economic elites around the world, including the U.S. Government. As The New York Times put it last week: ”To the list of the enemies threatening the security of the United States, the Pentagon has added WikiLeaks.org, a tiny online source of information and documents that governments and corporations around the world would prefer to keep secret.” In 2008, the U.S. Army Counterintelligence Center prepared a secret report — obtained and posted by WikiLeaks — devoted to this website and detailing, in a section entitled “Is it Free Speech or Illegal Speech?”, ways it would seek to destroy the organization. It discusses the possibility that, for some governments, not merely contributing to WikiLeaks, but “even accessing the website itself is a crime,” and outlines its proposal for WikiLeaks’ destruction …

via The war on WikiLeaks and why it matters – Glenn Greenwald – Salon.com.

Additional Reading:

• Leaks Illumine CIA AgitProp Plans for European Public Opinion by Tom Burkhardt, Pacific Free Press, 28 March 2010

Icelandic members of parliament have plans to transform their crisis-ridden North-Atlantic nation into a sanctuary for publishers, production companies and information technology firms from around the world.

“It would free the press from fear,” says Thor Saari, one of the members of parliament spearheading the proposal, which is known as the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI). Iceland’s Parliament, the Althingi, is expected to support the effort.

To craft their bill, members of parliament (MPs) drew on existing laws in the United States and European countries. “We tried to find the best [laws] in each country and merge it all into one proposal that the government will enact as legislation,” Saari says. A draft of the initiative proposes strengthening protection for whistleblowers, ensuring the anonymity of journalists’ sources, liberalizing the country’s freedom of information regulations, and creating Iceland’s first international award, which would honor freedom of expression.

The energy behind IMMI comes from the three MPs who belong to a protest party called the Movement and from members of the ruling Social Democrat/Left-Green coalition. They have received help from Julian Assange and Daniel Schmitt, the founders of the website Wikileaks. Assange and Schmitt became heroes in Iceland after publishing details of corporate loans issued by Kaupthing, a failed Icelandic bank. State television was forbidden by a court order to reveal the information due to banking secrecy laws. It appeared instead on Wikileaks.

An opportunity to propose the changes arose when Icelandic lawmakers recently decided to bring the country’s media laws up to speed with new technology. With a cool climate kind to computer servers and abundant, clean-burning geothermal energy, Iceland is already considered an ideal host for data centers from all over the globe. “‘The Switzerland of Bits’ is what they’re calling us,” Saari says.

Organizers are hoping that IMMI will give journalists the world over the legal confidence they need to publish investigations without being threatened by lawyers and politicians. “Newspapers in places like Africa and countries in the former Soviet Union, where you have fear of oppressive governments, can just move operations to Iceland where they couldn’t be touched,” Saari says. “We just have to be more specific about what constitutes hate speech and slander.”

But it isn’t just Zimbabwean and Belarusian journalists who are suffering. Britain is notorious for its allowance of “libel tourism.” Practically anything published online by anyone can be challenged in a British courtroom, and the threat of an expensive lawsuit alone is enough to convince journalists to cease and desist.

British libel law also allows judges to impose secret gag orders on the media, preventing the details of an investigation from being discussed publicly. Recently, on the talk show of prominent Icelandic journalist Egil Helgason, Assange said that there were 200 to 300 so-called “superinjunctions” in the United Kingdom as of late November. A recent example involved executives from the British oil-trading company Trafigura, who covered-up the disposal of toxic waste near Abidhan, the former capital of the Ivory Coast. The Guardian was set to publish incontrovertible evidence of the conspiracy, but a judge forbade it from doing so. The superinjunction was lifted, eventually, and Trafigura was ordered to compensate surviving victims.

British journalists, Saari says, have taken a keen interest in IMMI. “The BBC has sent two correspondents here to keep track of what we’re doing.”

Icelanders need not look any further than home to know the hazards of neglecting investigative journalism. During the boom years, the country’s bankers and investors engaged in shady financial practices that precipitated the current crisis. A reporter might have exposed the subterfuge that allowed banks to borrow 10 times the country’s GDP to finance corporate takeovers abroad, but mainstream journalists in Iceland were disinterested. They had — and still have — close ties to the country’s political and financial elites.

“What is there to do when the whole media apparatus fails to perform its tasks?” asks Saari. “It’s a bizarre situation, and the only journalists who are trying to do something are the people who work for the state broadcaster. But they are being laid off left and right.”

Saari isn’t betting that IMMI — assuming it is approved by the Althingi — will turn Reykjavik into a publishing mecca. Instead, he hopes — and believes — it will spark a journalistic renaissance. “If Iceland was to enact the legislation, … probably other countries would be forced to follow suit. If this turns out well, why wouldn’t the public in other countries demand it?”

via Free Press Haven by Samuel Knight — In These Times.

A federal judge in New York City on Wednesday denied for the second time the American Civil Liberties Union’s request for access to CIA documents about interrogation techniques, the Associated Press reported.

The ACLU has waged a three-year battle for the release of nearly 600 different documents from the CIA that describe the use of enhanced interrogation methods. Judge Alvin Hellerstein reviewed a sample of the documents in October and said he would defer to the judgment of the CIA. The ACLU asked Hellerstein to rehear the case because its attorneys had not been present during a portion of the CIA’s argument.

Hellerstein said after he heard arguments from CIA and ACLU attorneys on Wednesday that he had not changed his mind that releasing unredacted versions of the documents — the ACLU had previously obtained heavily redacted copies — was a decision best left to the CIA.

“I was not appointed to be the director of central intelligence,” Hellerstein said.

Hellerstein was reviewing the documents as part of an investigation into the destruction of 92 videos by the CIA that contained detainee interrogations. The Bush administration said the destruction was necessary to prevent the identities of interrogators from being revealed.

The ACLU says it plans to appeal the decision once Hellerstein releases his written ruling.

via RCFP: Federal judge again denies ACLU request for torture documents.

Recently released FBI documents prove the existence of highly sensitive National Security and criminal investigations of “Turkish Activities” in Chicago prior to September 11, 2001. These documents add further support to many of the allegations that former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds has claimed, in public and in Congress, since 2002. The documents were released under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request into an organization called the Turkish American Cultural Alliance (TACA), an organization repeatedly named by Ms. Edmonds as being complicit in the crimes that she became aware of when she was a translator at the FBI.

The documents released under FOIA are almost completely redacted, but they do support many of Edmonds’ claims, including:

There were a number of very serious FBI investigations into “Turkish activity in Chicago” involving a number of targets, including TACA

These investigations were related to “National Security” among other things.

These investigations were regarded as so sensitive that no files were to be uploaded to FBI’s computer system.

Congressional corruption was involved.

The FBI repeatedly conducted actual “physical surveillance” against Turkish and American targets.

Some of these investigations were shut down in 2001.

via Sibel Edmonds’ Boiling Frogs Post | Home of the Irate Minority.

The Obama administration has asserted a legal position on the use of drone aircraft to kill suspected terrorists and militants, and officials plan to share the details “at an appropriate moment,” according to Harold Koh, the State Department’s legal adviser.

National Journal asked Koh, the senior official responsible for international legal issues, to share his views after his public remarks at an American Bar Association speech Wednesday. “I have studied this question,” Koh said. “I think that the legal objections that are being put on the table are ones that we are taking into account. I am comfortable with the legal position of the administration, and at an appropriate moment we will set forth that in some detail.”

The administration has made drone strikes the centerpiece of its fight against terrorists, but officials have never said why they believe the program complies with international law. A number of legal scholars and international officials have said the killings could violate certain laws of armed conflict, particularly when they’re carried out in countries where the United States is not at war, such as Pakistan and Yemen.

via U.S. Will Explain Drone Position In Due Time, Adviser Says – Burn After Reading – Burn After Reading.

I interpret that to mean that there’s a couple of high level lawyers even now scrambling to legally justify the use of predator drones in countries we’re not at war with… kind of like Yoo and Bybee did with the torture justifications. And the ACLU’s pressure for information has turned up the burner a few notches on those lawyers.

The American Civil Liberties Union filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit today demanding that the government disclose the legal basis for its use of unmanned drones to conduct targeted killings overseas. In particular, the lawsuit asks for information on when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, the number and rate of civilian casualties and other basic information essential for assessing the wisdom and legality of using armed drones to conduct targeted killings.

“The public has a right to know whether the targeted killings being carried out in its name are consistent with international law and with the country’s interests and values,” said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project. “The Obama administration should disclose basic information about the program, including its legal basis and limits, and the civilian casualty toll thus far.”

via ACLU Seeks Information On Predator Drone Program | CommonDreams.org.

I think we’re entitled to know at least the legal basis for using predator drone attacks, particularly in countries we are not officially at war with, and keeping in mind that only Congress has the power to declare war. The use of predatory drones to kill alleged terrorists precludes their ever being permitted to view the evidence against them or even to defend themselves in a court of law. Terrorism is a tool of criminals. Terrorism is a crime which should be treated the same as any other life-taking crime.

• The ACLU’s complaint can be found here.
• The ACLU’s FOIA request can be found here.

After a long public records fight, MSNBC finally got the goods on Todd Palin’s role in the Alaska state government when his wife was governor. About 3,000 pages of e-mails just released show that Todd was more than a sounding board. He regularly got deeply involved in state official business, participating in matters such as a judicial appointment and contract negotiations with state employees. Todd was so involved, in fact, that the state withheld 243 e-mails on the grounds that, according to MSNBC, “executive privilege extends to Todd Palin as an unpaid adviser to the government.” The e-mails reveal quite a bit about Sarah Palin as well, including how she wanted her staff to handle installation of a tanning bed in the governor’s mansion and how she could get the state to foot the bill for her family’s air travel.

Much of what’s contained within the e-mails is not completely new information, but the correspondence is still worth perusing if only to check out Sarah Palin the governor in her own often Blackberry-generated words.

Also, kudos to NBC and the other news organizations that kept fighting to get these e-mails released. These documents may serve mostly as juicy tidbits for Sarah Palin critics, while other successful public records request have had far more impact. (Here, for example.) But every time journalists or citizens get documents under the power of the Freedom of Information Act, there’s a tiny ripple effect that backs up the public’s right to know. Getting information this way is usually a long, arduous and incredibly frustrating experience. It’s very tempting to give up; public officials often give insane reasons why they can’t provide information. (In this case, the state of Alaska initially said it would cost $15 million to retrieve these e-mails, for instance.)

via E-mails Reveal Todd Palin’s Role as First Dude – Swampland – TIME.com.

There may be more Sarah stuff coming, such as the recent news about her vacation cabins that weren’t declared for property taxes.

The practice that Sher Khan describes here, first used in classical antiquity and later by American soldiers battling the Filipino insurgency around the turn of the last century, is called the “water cure.” One of the JAG School textbook cases of prosecution for torture involves this procedure. The case became notorious in the United States in 1902-04, and Theodore Roosevelt personally insisted on being briefed about it, and on rigorous enforcement of the prohibition of torture. If Gopal’s account holds, then the rules that bound the military under Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Reagan really are dead, notwithstanding President Obama’s protestations that he has put an end to torture. Nearly all of the techniques that Gopal describes appear to violate the current Defense Department guidelines (with some lingering questions concerning Appendix M), but the guidelines themselves seem to have been rewritten in a way that allows the Secretary of Defense to dispense with them at will. Historically, transparency, Red Cross monitoring, and a duty to report violations have been an essential part of the system that assures fidelity to legal commitments. That has clearly changed. As Gopal notes, the United States has maintained rigorous secrecy surrounding its detention operations in Afghanistan, and Congress has created exemptions from the Freedom of Information Act for information concerning the treatment of prisoners. Gopal aims to give us a peek behind that curtain.

via Obama’s Secret Afghan Prisons—By Scott Horton (Harper’s Magazine).

Elsewhere:

• Audiocast: A Conversation with Anand Gopal on America’s Secret Afghan Prisons – via The Nation

It’s a question that rarely gets asked: from where does the Obama administration locate the legal authority to launch missiles from the CIA’s unmanned drones into Pakistani (and, this week, Afghan) territory? The ACLU wants to know.

The civil liberties group today filed a Freedom of Information Act request with the CIA and the Departments of State, Justice and Defense for documentation establishing the legal basis for the drone strikes. Drone strikes in Pakistan have risen substantially during the first year of the Obama administration.

Additionally, the civil liberties group wants to see the government’s estimates for how many civilians the drone program is responsible for killing. A recent New America Foundation report arguing that most drone critics overstate overstate civilian casualties still found that one in every three Pakistanis killed by the drones is a civilian, not a combatant.

via ACLU Wants to Know the Legal Basis for CIA Drone Strikes « The Washington Independent.

In a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed today, the American Civil Liberties Union asked the government to disclose the legal basis for its use of predator drones to conduct “targeted killings” overseas. In particular, the ACLU seeks to find out when, where and against whom drone strikes can be authorized, and how the United States ensures compliance with international laws relating to extrajudicial killings.

“The American public has a right to know whether the drone program is consistent with international law, and that all efforts are made to minimize the loss of innocent lives,” said Jonathan Manes, a legal fellow with the ACLU National Security Project. “The Obama administration has reportedly expanded the drone program, but it has not explained publicly what the legal basis for the program is, what limitations it recognizes on the use of drones outside active theaters of war and what the civilian casualty toll has been thus far. We’re hopeful that the request we’ve filed today will encourage the Obama administration to disclose information about the basis, scope and implementation of the program.”

The administration has used unmanned drones to target and kill individuals not only in Afghanistan and Iraq but also in Pakistan and Yemen. The technology allows U.S. personnel to observe targeted individuals and launch missiles intended to kill them from control centers located thousands of miles away.

Today’s FOIA request was filed with the Department of Defense, the Department of Justice (including the Office of Legal Counsel), the Department of State and the CIA.

via ACLU.org

A federal appeals court in New York ruled on Wednesday that US government agencies may refuse to confirm or deny the existence of records when faced with a Freedom of Information Act request that might disclose sensitive intelligence activities, sources, or methods.

The ruling by a three-judge panel of the Second US Circuit Court of Appeals was in connection with a lawsuit seeking information about whether the US conducted secret surveillance of lawyer communications with detainees at the Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, prison camp.

The FOIA request was submitted in 2006 by 23 lawyers who represent individuals being held as terror suspects at Guantánamo. The request sought records from the National Security Agency (NSA) and Justice Department “obtained or relating to ongoing or completed warrantless electronic surveillance or physical searches regarding, referencing, or concerning…” any of the 23 lawyers.

via Court says US can stay mum about Guantánamo surveillance / The Christian Science Monitor – CSMonitor.com.

Excessive government secrecy is an enemy of human rights and the rule of law. President Obama deserves praise for rejecting the underlying policies that caused the United States so much harm during the Bush years. But in withholding photos of detainee abuse, preventing legal challenges to torture and warrantless surveillance, and thwarting impartial hearings into suspicious deaths at Guantanamo, his administration has so far failed to pull down the veil of secrecy hiding the extent of Bush administration transgressions.

The Obama administration needs to build public confidence in the institutions of American government, especially now that new and credible allegations of recent detainee abuse have surfaced in Afghanistan. The early promise of the Obama administration can still be fulfilled if it rejects excessive secrecy and recalls its pledge on transparency.

via Excessive Secrecy Undermining Obama’s Human Rights Achievements.

“These are new tools. There hasn’t been a lot of discussion about how law enforcement can use them and what’s appropriate, what’s ethical,” said attorney Marcia Hofmann of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit this week against the Defense Department, the Justice Department, the CIA and other federal agencies with intelligence-gathering arms.

The suit, in U.S. District Court in San Francisco, seeks each agency’s policies and guidelines on using social networking sites and its safeguards for preventing abuses. The Electronic Frontier Foundation says the government has ignored requests since October to disclose the information voluntarily.

“There are a lot of very appropriate law enforcement uses of social networking sites,” said Shane Witnov, a UC Berkeley law student working on the case for the school’s Samuelson Law, Technology and Public Policy Clinic. But, he said, “The American people have a right to know if they’re being surveilled.”

Hofmann said what is known about police using interactive Web sites to nab suspects comes from media accounts. She said there are few court records or laws that directly address such surveillance.

via Suit wants details about cops’ online probes.

Destruction of the CIA tapes revealing the torture of detainees came immediately after news accounts reported the existence of secret prisons overseas, according to documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union. The ACLU says CIA cables dated November 8 and 9, 2005, show field agents asking permission from CIA headquarters in Washington to destroy the 92 tapes, and another dated November 9 confirms their destruction. On November 2, The Washington Post had first reported the existence of CIA “black sites” where suspected terrorists were interrogated. On November 9, The New York Times wrote that the CIA’s inspector general had questioned the legality of the torture program.

The ACLU is presently suing the CIA to force it to disclose all documents related to its torture program, and it is asking a federal court to find the agency in contempt for destroying the tapes. The CIA reportedly has 3,000 summaries, transcripts, reconstructions and memoranda relating to the tapes that have not been released on grounds of national security.

via AllGov – News – Release of Documents Showing Timing of CIA Destruction of Torture Tapes.

• Selected Chronology of the CIA’s Destruction of 92 Videotapes (ACLU)

Want to know how much phone companies and internet service providers charge to funnel your private communications or records to U.S. law enforcement and spy agencies?

That’s the question muckraker and Indiana University graduate student Christopher Soghoian asked all agencies within the Department of Justice, under a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request filed a few months ago. But before the agencies could provide the data, Verizon and Yahoo intervened and filed an objection on grounds that, among other things, they would be ridiculed and publicly shamed were their surveillance price sheets made public.

Yahoo writes in its 12-page objection letter (.pdf), that if its pricing information were disclosed to Soghoian, he would use it “to ’shame’ Yahoo! and other companies — and to ’shock’ their customers.”

via Yahoo, Verizon: Our Spy Capabilities Would ‘Shock’, ‘Confuse’ Consumers | Threat Level | Wired.com.

Records obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit reveal new information about the CIA’s destruction of videotapes depicting the brutal interrogation of prisoners at CIA black sites, including the precise date the tapes were destroyed and evidence that the White House was involved in early discussions about the proposed destruction. The new records, obtained by the ACLU late last week, consist principally of an index of CIA documents relating to the destruction of the tapes. The documents themselves have been withheld in their entirety, purportedly for reasons relating to national security.

“The chronology outlined in this new index supplies further evidence that the CIA destroyed the videotapes in order to prevent the public from learning the full scope of the CIA’s torture program, and further evidence that the Bush White House was on notice that the CIA intended to destroy the tapes” said Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU National Security Project. “We continue to believe that the CIA’s destruction of the tapes constituted contempt of court, and we intend to press that case over the next few weeks”

via ACLU Obtains New Information About Destruction Of Torture Tapes.

The Obama administration may be on the verge of a major concession in a long-running legal battle over records about so-called telecom immunity.

An email obtained by POLITICO shows that the Obama Administration is preparing for the possible release of some details of the Bush Administration’s lobbying for legislation giving telecommunications companies immunity from lawsuits over their involvement in warrantless domestic wiretapping.

But even if they do release those details, the administration may press on with a legal battle to keep secret the identities of the companies involved in the program.

via White House readies phone-tap case concession – Josh Gerstein and John Bresnahan – POLITICO.com.

“The judge deferred wholesale to the CIA’s determinations that information that is very similar to what the CIA has already released should remain secret,” he said. “We think the history of this case makes clear that the CIA has continually used national security as a pretext for keeping secret embarrassing information and information about illegal government activity. “

via VOA News – New York Federal Judge Denies Request For CIA Secret Documents.

A federal court on Thursday ruled the FBI must release most of its interview with Vice President Dick Cheney about the 2003 leak of a CIA operative’s identity.

Cheney agreed to the 2004 interview with Special Counsel Patrick Fitzgerald in the aftermath of CIA agent Valerie Plame‘s public outing. That investigation has long since concluded, but both Bush and Obama administration officials have since requested that the interview remain sealed, arguing that its publication would only deter future presidents and vice presidents from cooperating with criminal investigators.

via Cheney interview with FBI to be made public – The Hill’s Blog Briefing Room.

Correct me if I’m wrong but shouldn’t we expect that future presidents and vice presidents will be honest and forthright and cooperate with investigations? If an average citizen failed to cooperate, they’d be charged with Obstruction of Justice and tossed in jail.

Or are they going on the assumption that future presidents and vice presidents will be uncooperative criminals?

Transparency, anyone?