American Civil Liberties Union:
One week after the American Civil Liberties Union moved to quash an unprecedented government grand jury subpoena demanding "any and all copies" of a previously "secret" memorandum, the government today backed down from the fight, asking a judge to withdraw the subpoena and saying that the document in question has been declassified.
So what was the document -- plans for a doomsday device, the missing strategy for Iraq, photos of Dick Cheney in bed with a hooker? Turns out, it's almost literally nothing.
Wired's 27B Stroke 6:
...Many wondered what the document could be and it turns out to be simply a memo regarding news rules about how the media and the military can photograph detainees.
There's nothing at all secret in here. Nothing. It could have been sent to every reporter and grunt and insurgent in the world and nothing would have been compromised. Hell, it probably would have been good public relations. But this administration is so utterly in love with secrecy, the Justice Department attempted to abuse the grand jury process to keep Americans from knowing that the media and military need to follow Geneva Convention rules on not shaming detainees. The only thing embarrassing in here is that there's no protections for a soldier who photographs Abu Ghraib-like torture in order to stop the practices.
Actually, the Bush administration fights these kind of fights all the time. The point of it is to create legal precedent for govt. secrecy. It doesn't matter so much what the memo actually says, what matters is that the Bush administration discover some new way to recover documents.
Had the administration won this fight, they'd have a way to keep something that was actually embarrassing secret in the future. It's not about this document, but potential documents in the future. Eventually, someone's going to get a hold of something other than rules for photography or new regulations on the size of envelopes in the Pentagon mail room and the administration wants to be ready.
Too bad this much forethought wasn't put into the Iraq war. Instead, it's put into keeping you ignorant.
Tags: news | politics | law | Bush | ACLU | censorship | bullshit
