Students at Georgetown University in the US are suing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and other government agencies for information in the death of Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl.
The Washington Post reported Wednesday that the project began in a investigative journalism class at Georgetown in 2007. The students were supposed to find out who killed Pearl. The class has ended, but the efforts have not. The Pearl Project, now housed at the non-profit Centre for Public Integrity, has been trying to figure out what happened to Pearl since 2002. The classes were being conducted by Barbara Feinman Todd and Asra Nomani. Todd is a co-director of the Pearl Project.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday under the Freedom of Information Act, stems from 27 requests for documents made under the guise of the project that have gone unfulfilled or resulted only in heavily redacted information, according to the Washington-based Reporters Committee of the Freedom of the Press (RCFP).
One of the documents at issue is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's confession to the murder. According to the complaint, FBI responded to the FOIA request for the document by saying the requesters needed a privacy waiver from him. FBI also said the requesters needed a privacy waiver from Richard Reid, who was convicted of trying to blow up an airplane in 2002.
“Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and Richard Reid are two foreign nationals that have been designated as Al-Qaeda terrorists with ties to 9/11,” Brad Moss, an attorney handling the suit, said in a release. “The notion that these individuals’ privacy interests somehow outweigh the public’s interest fails to pass the ‘smell test'.”
Defence Department spokesman Bryan Whitman told the Post in an email, “The department strives to strike the right balance between transparency in our operations while at the same time protecting sensitive information critical to the national security. Since the Pearl Project has an active appeal pending with the FOIA office, it would be inappropriate to discuss specifics of the request.”
