By Jason Leopold

The Justice Department disclosed in a letter late Friday that the CIA has about 3,000 documents, including e-mails, transcripts and cables to officials in Washington, related to the videotaped interrogations of alleged “high-value” prisoners that the agency destroyed.

The disclosure was made as part of an ongoing lawsuit between the CIA and the American Civil Liberties Union. The Justice Department faced a Friday deadline in turning over an inventory of documents in its possession related to the videotaped interrogations. In a previous court filing, the Justice Department said “the CIA is not aware of any transcripts of the destroyed videotapes.” But that assumption was undercut by the Friday’s court filing which said otherwise. 

The civil liberties organization had filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the CIA to gain access to documents and other materials regarding the interrogation and treatment of detainees. In December 2007, shortly after news broke that the CIA destroyed its library of videotaped interrogations of two detainees, the ACLU filed a contempt motion against the spy agency.

Last August, the judge presiding over the case ordered the CIA to produce “a list of any summaries, transcripts, or memoranda regarding the [destroyed tapes] and of any reconstruction of the records’ contents” as well as a list of witnesses who may have viewed the videotapes or retained custody of the videotapes before their destruction.”

The ACLU’s lawsuit against the CIA has thus far revealed that a dozen of the 92 videotapes the CIA had destroyed showed interrogators torturing two “high-value” prisoners. CIA officials had said the videotapes were destroyed to prevent disclosure of evidence revealing how the agency’s interrogators subjected “war on terror” detainees to waterboarding and other brutal methods.

In a one-page letter sent Friday to U.S. District Court Judge Alvin Hellerstein, Led Dassin, acting U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, said the 3,000 documents includes “cables, memoranda, notes and emails.” However, Dassin refused to disclose the documents publicly and told Judge Hellerstein that unredacted versions of the materials would only be available for “in-camera” review on March 26.

Additionally, a list of individuals who viewed the videotapes prior to its destruction “is either classified or otherwise protected by statute.”

“Accordingly, the CIA is not producing either list to plaintiffs in redacted form,” Dassin wrote.

The Justice Department’s position on the documents comes one day after Attorney General Eric Holder issued sweeping new Freedom of Information guidelines for all executive branch agencies to “apply a presumption of openness when administering the FOIA.”

“The American people have the right to information about their government’s activities, and these new guidelines will ensure they are able to obtain that information under principles of openness and transparency,” Holder said Thursday.  

However, Holder added that FOIA requests would be denied and records withheld “only if the agency reasonably foresees that disclosure would harm an interest protected by one of the statutory exemptions, or disclosure is prohibited by law.” But even then, all federal agencies were directed to at least “release records in part whenever they cannot be released in full.”

The ACLU criticized the Justice Department Thursday for continuing to withhold documents related to the destruction of the torture tapes.

“The government is still needlessly withholding information about these tapes from the public, despite the fact that the CIA’s use of torture is well known,” said Amrit Singh, staff attorney with the ACLU. “Full disclosure of the CIA’s illegal interrogation methods is long overdue and the agency must be held accountable for flouting the rule of law.”

Two weeks ago, the Justice Department turned over to the ACLU a heavily censored page of what appears to be a CIA internal report about the torture of “war on terror” detainees, which read: “Interrogators administered [redacted] waterboard to Al-Nashiri.”

The same page indicated that a dozen of 92 destroyed videotapes of the CIA’s interrogations were of detainees undergoing brutal treatment. “There are 92 videotapes, 12 of which include EIT [enhanced interrogation techniques] applications,” the page says.

The destruction of the CIA tapes has been the subject of a year-long criminal investigation by John Durham, the acting U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia who was appointed special prosecutor last year by Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

According to New Yorker reporter Jane Mayer, it is also believed that the tapes were destroyed because Democratic members of Congress who were briefed about the tapes began asking questions about whether the interrogations were illegal.

“Further rattling the CIA was a request in May 2005 from Senator Jay Rockefeller, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, to see over a hundred documents referred to in the earlier Inspector General’s report on detention inside the black prison sites,” Mayer wrote in her book The Dark Side. “Among the items Rockefeller specifically sought was a legal analysis of the CIA’s interrogation videotapes.

“Rockefeller wanted to know if the intelligence agency’s top lawyer believed that the waterboarding of [alleged al-Qaeda operative Abu] Zubayda and [alleged 9/11 mastermind] Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, as captured on the secret videotapes, was entirely legal. The CIA refused to provide the requested documents to Rockefeller.

“But the Democratic senator’s mention of the videotapes undoubtedly sent a shiver through the Agency, as did a second request the made for these documents to [former CIA Director Porter] Goss in September 2005.”

Last weekend, author Mark Danner wrote in the New York Review of Books about a report prepared by the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) that concluded that the abuse of 14 “high-value” detainees “constituted torture.”

“In addition, many other elements of the ill treatment, either singly or in combination, constituted cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment,” according to the ICRC report cited by Danner. Since the ICRC’s responsibilities involve ensuring compliance with the Geneva Conventions and supervising the treatment of prisoners of war, the organization’s findings carry legal weight.

The ICRC report also found that there was a consistency in many details from the detainees who were interviewed separately and that the first “high-value” detainee to be captured, Abu Zubaydah, appeared to have been used as something of a test case by his interrogators. Zubaydah, as it turns out, was one of the prisoners whose interrogations were videotaped by the CIA.

Before leaving office, Vice President Dick Cheney admitted in several interviews that he “signed off” on the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah and two other terrorist detainees and approved the “enhanced interrogation” of 33 detainees. President Bush also indicated that he endorsed the use of harsh interrogations.

On Wednesday, the ACLU called on Attorney General Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Bush administration officials who signed off on and approved of the torture of prisoners.

“The fact that such crimes have been committed can no longer be doubted or debated, nor can the need for an independent prosecutor be ignored by a new Justice Department committed to restoring the rule of law,” said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero. “Given the increasing evidence of deliberate and widespread use of torture and abuse, and that such conduct was the predictable result of policy changes made at the highest levels of government, an independent prosecutor is clearly in the public interest.”