Thread by @JasonLeopold

Chipping away at government secrecy one sentence at a time, even if it takes 7 years. A #FOIA 🧵

In April 2015, I filed a #FOIA request w/CIA & then sued the agency for all docs footnoted in the Senate Intel Committee's report on the CIA torture program

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CIA turned over 1000s of pages to me. But there were many CIA withheld related to Abu Zubaydah, the agency's 1st high value detainee and the guinea pig for the post 9/11 program

Last Dec, CIA finally relented & turned over some of those docs to me

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documentcloud.org/documents/2227…

Having waited nearly 7 years for these records I was outraged that CIA continued to withhold a bunch of records I requested even though much about Abu Zubaydah's torture had been disclosed publicly.

So I appealed (ALWAYS APPEAL)

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Over the weekend, CIA responded to the #FOIA appeal I filed last December.

The agency decided to release one more page of the Abu Zubaydah docs to me -- an email, which is heavily redacted.

Still, this is an important email.

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This email is dated March 29, 2002, one day after Abu Zubaydah was captured in Pakistan

The person cc'd on it is John Rizzo, a CIA lawyer who died in August 2021.

The CFR 2340 ref in the single unredacted sentence is related to the legal definition of torture

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This shows the very early origins of the interrogation/torture plan for Abu Zubaydah that CIA lawyers and contractors cooked up.

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This will be meaningless to the vast majority of people who follow me but this is a missing puzzle piece & much of the work I do around the FOIA & docs is about solving puzzles and putting pieces back together

So I'm extremely happy I appealed & won the release of more info

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FOIAing the intel agencies is painstaking and tedious work that requires a tremendous amount of patience.

For decades, CIA kept changing the timeline around it's discussions about torture & whether what Abu Zubaydah was subjected to met the legal definition of it

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This single sentence in an email that is more than 20 years old that took me more than 7 years to pry loose is one more piece to the puzzle I have been trying to put together

I'll continue to chip away at the secrecy

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