Brief 10: Freedom of Information Act

Blacklisted for filing too many FOIA requests? Sounds crazy, absolutely absurd! It happened, however, to Nick Turse, a journalist for theintercept.com.  Mid-April, the Department of Defense issued its annual "Chief Freedom of Information Act Officer Report to the Department of Justice." Included in said report was the following statement:

"DoD has continued to improve its administration of the FOIA and develop new initiatives to further streamline our FOIA processes and promote opens and transparency. . . Despite their best efforts to provide helpful details, great customer service and efficient responses [components] still overwhelmed by one or two requests who try to monopolize the system by filing a large number of requests or submitting disparate requests in groups which require a great deal of administrative time to adjudicate."

According to Turse, one of the persons aforementioned is him. The report concluded that his requests made up 308 cases for the fiscal year. "Who would do such a thing?" Turse remarks. "What type of monster files this many requests?" He goes on to insinuate the DoD never inquired his reasons for doing so. 

Turse filed 53 of those requests with AFRICOM, inquiring about their "temporary facilities. . . what you and I might refer to as American bases on the African continent." Eric Elliot, a spokesperson for AFRICOM, emailed back to say:

"Let me see what I can give you in response to your request for a complete list of facilities. There will [be] some limits on the details we can provide because of the scope of the request." 

Turse alleges he was given the run around time and time again. After filing the initial request in 2012, and pestering for "answers", he received some feedback in 2013. It wasn't to his satisfaction, and he was told to file again. "After three and a half years of waiting for this information, I received one page of unclassified but still partially redacted (not to mention relatively useless) material about the only official acknowledged U.S. base in Africa." 

His relationship with AFRICOM somehow worsened. When attempting to write a piece on U.S. troops concerning criminality and bad behavior, Turse claims to have been pretty well ignored. "I called Benson, the AFRICOM media chief, 32 times on a single business day from a phone line that identified me by name. He never picked up." Benson obviously, mistakenly answered when Turse mischievously called with a different number immediately after. Because of this behavior, Turse was forced to put the piece together by issuing FOIA request after FOIA request. 

"That didn't win me any friends at AFRICOM." claimed Turse. 

Nick Turse is one of many journalists who go out of their way to get information from the government only to be given the run-around, or receive documents that are often times redacted and classified. It's good to have the FOIA, but unfortunately it doesn't totally insure transparency.

Original Testimony by Nick Turse here