Main Justice:
The Justice Department in a Monday court filing said it can’t find 10 documents that are supposed to be released as part of a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the American Civil Liberties Union, Al Kamen reported in The Washington Post.
The ACLU’s five-year FOIA battle seeks to illuminate the process that led to a policy of harsh interrogations of terrorism suspects during the Bush administration. One of the 10 missing documents is a 59-page exchange in 2002 between the Office of Legal Counsel and the Pentagon on the eve of a decision to increase the intensity of the interrogations, Kamen reported.
The Justice Department was able to find an additional 224 documents relevant to the ACLU’s 2005 request, Kamen said. They were found in three safes and in “the back of a third drawer” inside OLC’s room for highly classified documents. The documents were located by two visiting Assistant U.S. Attorneys from New York and one DOJ attorney.
Acting Assistant Attorney General for the OLC David J. Barron had to explain the loss to a federal judge in New York. He wrote: “Due to their extreme sensitivity at the time,” the relevant document set was not copied and its contents were “intermingled” with other files in the room.
The documents then took the scenic tour of Washington, D.C., first going to another special room at DOJ, then to the CIA in 2007 and stopping at the Office of Professional Responsibility until March.
Kamen reported there is no word on if or when the documents might be made public.
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