Motion for reconsideration denied, 396 F. Supp. 2d459 (S.D.N.Y. 2005); relief denied, 406 F. Supp. 2d330 (S.D.N.Y. 2005); additional photographs ordered released (S.D.N.Y. June 9, 2006 and June 21, 2006); affirmed, 543 F.3d59 (2d Cir. 2008); vacated and remanded, DOD v. American Civil Liberties Union, 558U.S. 1042(2009)
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is "to defend and preserve the individual rights and liberties guaranteed to every person in this country by the Constitution and laws of the United States." Officially nonpartisan, the organization has been supported and criticized by liberal and conservative organizations alike. The ACLU works through litigation and lobbying and it has over 1,200,000 members and an annual budget of over $100 million. Local affiliates of the ACLU are active in almost all 50 states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico. The ACLU provides legal assistance in cases when it considers civil liberties to be at risk. Legal support from the ACLU can take the form of direct legal representation or preparation of amicus curiae briefs expressing legal arguments when another law firm is already providing representation.
The Department of Defense is an executive branch department of the federal government charged with coordinating and supervising all agencies and functions of the government concerned directly with national security and the United States Armed Forces. The department is the largest employer in the world, with nearly 1.3 million active duty servicemen and women as of 2016. Adding to its employees are over 826,000 National Guardsmen and Reservists from the four services, and over 732,000 civilians bringing the total to over 2.8 million employees. Headquartered at the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia, just outside Washington, D.C., the DoD's stated mission is to provide "the military forces needed to deter war and ensure our nation's security".
The Central Intelligence Agency is a civilian foreign intelligence service of the federal government of the United States, tasked with gathering, processing, and analyzing national security information from around the world, primarily through the use of human intelligence (HUMINT). As one of the principal members of the United States Intelligence Community (IC), the CIA reports to the Director of National Intelligence and is primarily focused on providing intelligence for the President and Cabinet of the United States.
Since 2003, the government has released more than 100,000 pages. These documents show both that hundreds of prisoners were tortured in the custody of the CIA and Department of Defense, and that the torture policies were devised and developed at the highest levels of the Bush administration.[2]
In late September, 2005, Federal Judge Alvin Hellerstein, though affirming the Glomar response ("can neither confirm nor deny") for some documents, found that the ACLU case for FOIA disclosure was stronger, and that the Glomar application to certain documents was not valid.[3]
Alvin Kenneth Hellerstein is a Senior United States District Judge of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York, and has been involved in several high-profile cases.
In United States law, the term Glomar response, also known as Glomarization or Glomar denial, refers to a response to a request for information that will "neither confirm nor deny" (NCND) the existence of the information sought. For example, in response to a request for police reports relating to a certain individual, the police agency may respond with the following: "We can neither confirm nor deny that our agency has any records matching your request." Such a response is invariably a false statement, regardless of whether the entity actually possesses the information requested, as they actually can confirm or deny it, but simply chose not to. Accordingly, Glomar responses are favored for their ability to reject a request for information without claiming the information does not exist. There are two common situations in which Glomarization is used. The first is in a national security context, where to reject a request on security grounds would implicitly suggest that the documents or programs that the requester is seeking indeed exist, but to confirm their existence would mandate their disclosure. The second instance is in the case of privacy, in which a response as to whether a person is or is not mentioned in an entity's files may have a stigmatizing connotation. Glomar responses are commonly associated with Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), 5 U.S.C. § 552, is a federal freedom of information law that requires the full or partial disclosure of previously unreleased information and documents controlled by the United States government upon request. The Act defines agency records subject to disclosure, outlines mandatory disclosure procedures, and defines nine exemptions to the statute. President Lyndon B. Johnson, despite his misgivings, signed the Freedom of Information Act into law on July 4, 1966, and it went into effect the following year.
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Related Research Articles
During the war in Iraq that began in March 2003, personnel of the United States Army and the Central Intelligence Agency committed a series of human rights violations against detainees in the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. These violations included physical and sexual abuse, torture, rape, sodomy, and murder. The abuses came to widespread public attention with the publication of photographs of the abuse by CBS News in April 2004. The incidents received widespread condemnation both within the United States and abroad, although the soldiers received support from some conservative media within the United States.
About six months after the United States invasion of Iraq of 2003, rumors of Iraq prison abuse scandals started to emerge.
The Salt Pit and Cobalt are the code names of an isolated clandestine CIA black site prison and interrogation center in Afghanistan. It is located north of Kabul and was the location of a brick factory prior to the Afghanistan War. The CIA adapted it for extrajudicial detention.
Anthony D. Romero is the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He assumed the position in 2001 as the first Latino and openly gay man to do so.
Bisher Amin Khalil Al-Rawi is an Iraqi citizen, who became a resident of the United Kingdom in the 1980s.
Arrested in Gambia on a business trip in November 2002, he was transferred to United States military custody and held until March 30, 2007, in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantanamo Bay detention camp at its naval base in Cuba.
His Guantanamo Internment Serial Number was 906. The Department of Defense reports that Al Rawi was born on December 23, 1960, in Baghdad, Iraq.
Khaled El-Masri is a German and Lebanese citizen who was mistakenly abducted by the Macedonian police in 2003, and handed over to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). While in CIA custody, he was flown to Afghanistan, where he was held at a black site and routinely interrogated, beaten, strip-searched, sodomized, and subjected to other cruel forms of inhumane and degrading treatment and torture. After El-Masri held hunger strikes, and was detained for four months in the "Salt Pit", the CIA finally admitted his arrest and torture were a mistake and released him. He is believed to be among an estimated 3,000 detainees whom the CIA abducted from 2001–2005.
American Civil Liberties Union of New Jersey v. Schundler, 168 F.3d 92 is a United States federal case establishing standards for a government-sponsored holiday display to contain religious symbols. It was decided by the Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit on February 16, 1999.
Estate of Rodriquez v. Drummond Co., 256 F. Supp. 2d 1250, was a lawsuit filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Alabama by relatives of dead relatives that were employees of Drummond Company.
Mohamed Farag Ahmad Bashmilah is a citizen of Yemen who is reported to have been a subject of the United States' controversial extraordinary rendition program.
The American Civil Liberties Union states that he was apprehended by the Jordanian General Intelligence Department and tortured and interrogated for days, in Jordan, where he was: "turned over to agents who beat, kicked, diapered, hooded and handcuffed him before secretly transporting him to the U.S. Air Force base in Bagram, Afghanistan."
They report that Bashmillah was held in extrajudicial detention in the United States' Bagram Theater Internment Facility, and the CIA network of black sites.
John Doe v. Alberto R. Gonzales was a case in which the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Library Connection, and several then-pseudonymous librarians, challenged Section 2709 of the Patriot Act; it was consolidated on appeal with a separate case, Doe v. Ashcroft.
Bank Julius Baer & Co. v. WikiLeaks, 535 F. Supp. 2d 980, was a lawsuit filed by Bank Julius Baer against the website WikiLeaks.
The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 would have authorized funding levels for the 13 government intelligence agencies and increased oversight for the U.S. intelligence community. The bill would have also applied the standards in the U.S. Army Field Manual to the entire government, effectively barring the CIA and other agencies from using tactics like waterboarding in their interrogations. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Silvestre Reyes.
Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., is a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) on behalf of five victims of extraordinary renditions against Jeppesen Dataplan, Inc., which had provided services that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) used to perform renditions.
Human rights in the United States comprise a series of rights which are legally protected by the Constitution of the United States, including the amendments, state constitutions, conferred by treaty and customary international law, and enacted legislatively through Congress, state legislatures, and state referenda and citizen's initiatives. Federal courts in the United States have jurisdiction over international human rights laws as a federal question, arising under international law, which is part of the law of the United States.
Jameel Jaffer is a human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age.
American Civil Liberties Union v. James Clapper, No. 13-3994, 959 F.Supp.2d 724 was a lawsuit by the civil liberties promoting nonprofit organization the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and its affiliate, the New York Civil Liberties Union, against the United States federal government that challenged the legality of the National Security Agency (NSA)'s bulk phone metadata collection program. On December 27, 2013, the court dismissed the case, finding that metadata collection did not violate the Fourth Amendment. On January 2, 2014, the ACLU appealed the ruling to the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. On May 7, 2015, the appeals court ruled that Section 215 of the Patriot Act did not authorize the bulk collection of metadata, which judge Gerard E. Lynch called a "staggering" amount of information.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts (ACLUM) is a civil rights organization in the United States, and it is the Massachusetts affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union.
