Posted on 09/15/2004 5:28:47 PM PDT by TexKat
NEW YORK - Suggesting the government was acting as if it had something to hide, a federal judge Wednesday gave Washington one month to release records related to the treatment of prisoners in Iraq.
U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein chastised officials for moving at a "glacial pace" in responding to nearly year-old Freedom of Information Act requests from the American Civil Liberties Union and four other watchdog organizations.
"If the documents are more of an embarrassment than a secret, the public should know of our government's treatment of individuals captured and held abroad," Hellerstein wrote. "We are a nation that strives to value the dignity of all humanity."
The groups brought a lawsuit in June, saying they wanted to expose the treatment of detainees.
Hellerstein said though the government had raised "important issues" of national security as a reason for the delays, "merely raising national security concerns cannot justify unlimited delay."
Megan L. Gaffney, a spokeswoman for federal prosecutors in New York, declined to comment.
Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU lawyer, was heartened by the action.
"Increasingly, the administration's response to requests has been to stonewall or delay as long as possible until documents are forced out of them by a court," he said.
Judges now run the executive and legislative branches.
Cheney to Judge...
"F--- you and the horse you rode in on." I'd love to hear that, anyway!
Let me take a wild guess, a Clinton appointee?
Yeah, well our security and military operations be damned. What an arrogant jerk.
LOL. I knew a freeper would do the research on this judge.
So now one judge gets to decide if a war was right or wrong, or whatever???
Wow, why bother having Congress, the Senate and a president on the payroll. Just hand it over to one judge. He seems to have all the power anyway.
Presuming this will be appealed...
We are at War tell the Judge to take a Hike.
The judge's wife donated $400 to the DNC between January 1 2003 and July 31 2004. You'd expect a little more from the household of a Clinton appointee.
Those were probably the donations that went into Hizzoner's pockets!
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