FOIA: one of the tools for uncovering Darfur policy

The U.S. has this wonderful piece of legislation called the Freedom of Information Act – commonly known as FOIA. Through it, people can request to have government documents made publicly available – subject to certain exceptions.

Those who assess the requests made under FOIA have discretion to balance the competing interests of transparent government with privacy and national security concerns. However over the past eight years, civil liberties organizations have reported that the  “FOIA exemptions” (through which material is redacted or remains classified) were used not only to protect genuine privacy interests or national security concerns, but also for political purposes.

At the extreme end, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Center for Constitutional Rights and others filed suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, charging the Department of Defense and other government agencies with illegally withholding records concerning the abuse of detainees in U.S. military custody. The District Court Judge ordered the disclosure of the documents sought, and although the decision was appealed, it was ultimately upheld by the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, which rejected the Bush Administration’s (mis)use of FOIA exemptions as  “an all-purpose damper on global controversy.”

I have been submitting FOIA requests on Darfur policy since my final year of grad school. Over the past three years they have been trickling in slowly. It can be a frustrating process – you receive a big yellow envelope full of promise in the mail, only to find that what is inside is a cover letter, explaining that the document you requested could be released “with excisions” – which sounds reasonable enough until you turn to the remaining ten pages and see that they are blank sheets of paper with the word “redacted” on each of them – at which point one wonders why they couldn’t have spared the trees and not bothered writing at all. However it is ultimately worth it for the gems you sometimes come across. And in my case, for being able to confirm or correct the recollections of my interviewees – when dealing with the fallibility of human memory, contemporaneous documentation is an invaluable check.

Obama’s Attorney General, Eric Holder, issued this memo last month, which seems to signal a welcome shift away from the previous Administration’s policy of ‘when in doubt, do not disclose.’ How this translates into practice vis-a-vis issues related to the treatment of detainees is yet to be seen, but yesterday the biggest disclosure of FOIA docs I have ever received arrived in my mailbox. I’m spending the day working through them – hoping that this time the bulk of it is not blank paper.