Brief 10 - Freedom of Information Act

The freedom of information act is a law that allows citizens to request information from their governments. And I don't know about you, but the first thing I would want to know about when this law came out is the CIA, and what they're getting up to over in Langley. And as it turns out that the CIA does have to comply with FOIA requests, at least to a certain extent.

The CIA has a page on their website called The Reading Room. This is a searchable catalog where you can read all the declassified documents from the CIA made possible through FOIA. They seem to have an appearance of being very open to FOIA requests, even having a link that explains how to file your very own FOIA request, and with a list of recently declassified documents near the bottom of the page.

Amusingly, they suggest you read their reports on UFOs first. I clicked on over to that, where you find many documents, but most of them are unsubstantiated reports made by random people that the CIA made record of. Of course this raises the question of why they would need to record this. The report I read even said that this report was based off of a second interrogation of the same individual.

Pictured: A diagram of the sighting of a "ball of fire" that the eyewitness claimed to have seen.

If you look through their other reports though, you start to see some of the classic CIA ideas come to the light. I personally read a document  that is writing to the Attorney General to get permission to use what could be considered "Aggressive interrogation techniques"

"Dear Mr. Attorney General:

[Here there is about a page censored]

"Nonetheless, the interrogation team now has concluded, and I agree, that the use of more aggressive methods is required to persuade Abu Zubaydah to provide the critical information we need to safeguard the lives on innumerable innocent men, women, and children within the United States and abroad. These [interrogation methods] include certain activities that normally would appear to be prohibited under the provisions of 18 U.S.C. 2340-2340B (apart from potential reliance upon the doctrines of necessity or of self-defense)" (emphasis not added.) 

[Here there is a few more paragraphs censored out.]

"I respectfully request that you grant a formal declination of prosecution, in advance, for any employees of hte United States, as well as any other personnel acting on behalf of the United States, who may employ methods in the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah that otherwise might subject those individuals to prosecution under Section 2340A of Title 18, United States Code, as well as under any other applicable U.S. law."

Abu Zubaydah is an alleged terrorist currently being held in Guantanomo Bay for connections to Al-

Qaeda. BBC writes...

"The Americans describe [Zubaydah] as "one of al-Qaeda's senior travel facilitators" and credit him with helping to smuggle the former al-Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and some 70 fighters out of Afghanistan into Iran."

This memo was written in the early 2000s during the time where water-boarding was being looked at as a controversial technique, so it doesn't seem unreasonable to assume this is the "aggressive interrogation technique" the document refers to. The CIA can let us know that they're only breaking the rules to protect the innocent children, but they won't tell us what they actually did.

So even though the FOIA does require the agency to cooperate with public requests, they still hold back much information, while pushing less-dangerous historical documents to the forefront, like UFO sightings or Bay of Pigs SNAFU reports. But even though I complain and moan about not knowing the full truth, the FOIA made it possible to get more information than ever before from our government. And that is worth reporting on.