Hamdan v. Department of Justice
Naji Hamdan, a United States citizen currently living in Lebanon, filed FOIA requests with several government agencies seeking information about their role in his detention and torture in the United Arab Emirates. The District Court dismissed the case, and a panel of the Ninth Circuit upheld the dismissal. The Reporters Committee submitted a brief in support of Hamdan’s petition for en banc rehearing, arguing that the District Court and the panel erroneously applied a highly deferential standard of review to the government’s claims that the records requested were exempt from disclosure because they were national security secrets. The amicus brief argued that the plain language of FOIA and the legislative history of the statute require more searching review. Applying the correct standard of review is crucial to ensuring that government claims of national security secrecy do not go unchecked and unscrutinized by the courts.