The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) is calling on the Justice Department to release Bush administration documentation pertaining to torture, surveillance and other controversial national security policies.
The civil rights watchdog sent a letter today to the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel, the same office that provided legal advice to the White House under George W. Bush.
The secret memos were essentially the legal foundation for many of the Bush adminstration's questionable practices, says the ACLU in a news release received by Raw Story.
The Bush White House vigorously fought the release of such revealing (some would say, damning) documentation in the interests, it insisted, of protecting national security and other factors.
The ACLU's filing of the Freedom of Information Act request follows President Obama's recent directive to minimize federal secrecy and "usher in a new era of open government."The request is seen as a test of the freshly inaugurated president's transparency policy. "The ACLU now sees a new opening," writes Marisa Taylor of McClatchy Newspapers.
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