ACLU Sues State Department to Declassify WikiLeaks’ Already-Published Cables

[Hissyspit]

Source: Forbes

SECURITY

ACLU Sues The State Department To Declassify WikiLeaks’ Already-Published Cables
Jun. 9 2011 - 6:05 pm |
Andy Greenberg

The American Civil Liberties Union just filed an unusual lawsuit: One that aims to make publicly published documents public.

On Thursday the ACLU sued the State Department for failing to respond for the last two months to its Freedom of Information Act request for 23 memos that have already been released by WikiLeaks. Despite having been published last year by the secret-spilling group, those documents remain classified.

The State Department cables expose, for instance, secret drone strikes by U.S. forces in Yemen, and American pressure on Spain and German to comply with CIA extraordinary rendition of terrorist suspects. The ACLU says it selected the 23 cables out of the thousands already published because they were kept secret to avoid government embarrassment rather classified for purposes of national security, and because they show human rights violations.

Given that all those memos have already been covered by the news media, why bother to declassify them anyway? “The point is to expose the legal fiction that the secrecy system rests on,” says Ben Wizner, a staff attorney for the ACLU. “The government uses this formality of secrecy to avoid having to answer for real violations of the law.”

Read more: http://blogs.forbes.com/andygreenberg/2011/06/09/aclu-sues-the-state-department-to-declassify-wikileaks-already-published-cables/

[earcandle]

1. Makes sense.... they probably don't want to declassify because they are using them to put Assange in

jail?  

[JDPriestly]

2. Remember the Plame case. Didn't the Bush administration argue

somehow that no one in the Bush administration did anything wrong by outing Plame because someone else, Armitage I think, had already inadvertently outed her without realizing that her status was classified. I vaguely remember an argument like that.

This would be a parallel argument. Might work. It will be interesting to find out what the courts say.

[Vidar]

3. Good for the ACLU.

[wingzeroday]

4. A light shines

In the darkness...and the darkness shall never overcome it

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G7T7wsX5BH0

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/story/2011/06/10/cyberattacks-spain.html