In Key FOIA Case Judge Grants Agency Broad Discretion in Leaking Info to Select Journalists, News Organizations
Washington – The CIA can selectively divulge classified information to selected reporters in emails yet withhold that information from other journalists or members of the public when they seek the same information under the Freedom of Information Act, a federal judge in New York has ruled.
The decision appeared in the court record on Friday but became more widely disseminated Monday.
The ruling comes amid vigorous national debate over leaks to the media and the use of anonymous sources in covering national security news, including an ongoing FBI investigation into Russian attempts to influence the 2016 presidential election.
Judge Colleen McMahon of the Southern District of New York ruled that the CIA does not have to release parts of five emails senior CIA officials sent to journalists from the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and The Washington Post in 2012. At the time, the CIA was facing pressure over links it may have had to a Pakistani doctor who helped American forces hunt down Osama bin Laden.
“The Director of Central Intelligence is free to disclose classified information about CIA sources and methods selectively, if he concludes that it is necessary to do so in order to protect those intelligence sources and methods, and no court can second guess his decision,” McMahon ruled.
The U.S. today is little more than any garden variety totalitarian government around the world. All this is because the word “secrecy” was not addressed in the original Constitution or an Amendment. The ends do not justify the means. All the good efforts to create a new and different type of government are lost if we then allow the arguments that for our “national security” we can now allow an “anything goes” attitude toward law making by corrupt whores in Congress based on any flimsy excuses which include this worn out obscene phrase “national security”. What a joke.
Why shouldn’t the U.S. be instantly dissolved the first time it falls off the wagon and violates the dictates and demands of its own Constitution in treatment of its subjects? These disgusting mentally impaired lawmakers, judges and others abridge our Constitution every day with the flimsy vague phrase “national security”. Therefore the U.S. is not the government it purports to be so let it be dissolved and abolished forever since it fails to comply with and honor the intentions of its own rules. The biggest hypocrites are the worthless elected cowards who have sold out the country. They love adopting totalitarian means to sell out the Constitution. And the coward lying lawyers in the courts aid and abet them in the process. What a shameful disgrace. Even if the totally corrupt, lying, cheating, totalitarian so called “Central Intelligence Agency” were abolished by Congress this morning, all they would do is invent a new one with a different name which would engage in the same criminal evil illegal unconstitutional secret activities and begin this charade all over again. Our country and its Constitution have been rendered a total farce by the very people with the responsibility to protect and defend it. Is it any wonder the country is quickly descending into the former abyss of the dark ages it was created to overcome? Mark Twain was correct: Man evolved down from the higher animals. The fool man loves the tyranny of the dark ages and yearns to return to them despite the best efforts of the Founders to foster a system of government which might rise above the inhumane brutality of the dark ages, all in the phony name of “national security”! The fool man deserves his plight into oblivion from whence he came and will and should return to. Inherently ignorant man is not worth defending on Earth. Let the higher animals inherit the Earth. They have the intelligence to protect it. Man does not. Man has learned nothing from history.
Here is Mark Twain’s proof that man evolved down from the higher animals: “He placed one Anaconda Snake with a herd of 500 sheep; it took one for its meal. He placed two hunters with a herd of 500 buffalo; they slaughtered the whole herd. He therefore concluded that man evolved DOWN from the higher animals.” “Letters from the Earth” by Mark Twain, 1938.