December 29, 2004
C.I.A. Resists Requests for Abuse Data
WASHINGTON -- The CIA is refusing to disclose any information about abuse of detainees in Afghanistan and at the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, invoking a legal precedent that involved a secret project by billionaire Howard Hughes to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the 1970s.
The CIA allegedly oversaw interrogations of top-level detainees, and some investigators think the agency's tactics are at the heart of the question of whether the Bush administration has authorized torture. But nearly all the disclosures concerning abuses have come from other agencies, including the Pentagon and the FBI.
The CIA traditionally has invoked special protections aimed at shielding its intelligence-gathering operations, but the American Civil Liberties Union, which is suing to obtain the records, and some independent observers think the agency's insistence on secrecy is inappropriate in this instance.
Among the records sought in the ongoing Freedom of Information Act case pursued by the ACLU are a Justice Department legal opinion about interrogation techniques and pictures of John Walker Lindh, an American who was detained with Taliban forces in Afghanistan.
In the same suit, the FBI chose to turn over troves of e-mails regarding accusations of prisoner abuse that were made public last week.
"CIA . . . asserts that it is not able to confirm or deny whether it has any records relating to its purported involvement in these specific activities related to the treatment, death, or rendition of detainees in US custody because to do so would tend to reveal classified information and intelligence sources and methods that are protected from disclosure," the agency said in a court filing Oct. 15.
In seeking to keep its role in the detainee-abuse scandal from public view, the CIA has invoked the so-called "Glomar response," named for the Glomar Explorer, the deep-sea mining ship built by a Hughes-owned company for the CIA. The operation was exposed in 1975, leading to a Freedom of Information Act suit that established the precedent.
~Howard Hughes lives!
