Another detainee subjected to waterboarding and other abuse was Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, the alleged mastermind of the attack on the USS Cole in 2000. Two weeks ago, the Justice Department released 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 the 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 ACLU criticized the Justice Department 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.”

Besides the ACLU’s FOIA lawsuit, 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.

On Wednesday, the ACLU called on Attorney General Eric Holder to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate Bush administration officials who signed off on and approved 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,” Romero said.

The Justice Department’s restrictive handling of the 3,000 documents comes one day after Attorney General 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.  

Holder said 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.”