The CIA Photos and the Gitmo Lawyers

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Last August, the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had launched an inquiry—later headed by famed leak investigator Patrick Fitzgerald—after Guantanamo defense lawyers allegedly showed pictures of CIA personnel to their clients, a group of high value detainees that included the most notorious terrorism suspects in US custody. Along with their military lawyers, these detainees were represented by civilian defense lawyers affiliated with an ACLU-backed initiative called the John Adams Project. Anthony Romero, the ACLU’s executive director, later acknowledged that the ACLU had indeed retained private investigators to identify CIA officers involved with the so-called “enhanced interrogation” of accused terrorists. And he insisted the John Adams lawyers had violated no laws. But the ACLU refused to comment further on its apparent targeting of CIA personnel.

The controversy has simmered on for almost a year, and there remain a number of unknowns in the case. Today, in a piece that appears in July/August issue of Mother Jones, Daniel Schulman and I shed some light on one of them: The identity of the investigator the ACLU tapped to identify and obtain photographs the CIA personnel. You can read the whole piece here.

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DONALD TRUMP & DEMOCRACY

Mother Jones was founded to do journalism differently. We stand for justice and democracy. We reject false equivalence. We go after stories others don’t. We’re a nonprofit newsroom, because the kind of truth-telling investigations we do doesn’t happen under corporate ownership.

And we need your support like never before, to fight back against the existential threats American democracy faces. Fundraising for nonprofit media is always a challenge, and we need all hands on deck right now. We have no cushion; we leave it all on the field.

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