The State Department and the Cuban Five
September 17, 2014
Arresting the Messengers
The State Department and the Cuban Five
by STEPHEN KIMBER
When I arrived back in Halifax on September 14, 2014 from talks in Washington about the case of the Cuban Five, there was an envelope waiting for me. It was from the “U.S. Department of State” and there was a sticker on the manila envelope that warned: “To be opened by addressee ONLY.”
The envelope contained the State Department’s response to an almost forgotten Freedom of Information Act request I’d filed four years earlier, on September 9, 2010 (not “2004” as the accompanying letter declared; even the State Department — one hopes — doesn’t take that long to respond to a simple request for information).
Since I’d filed the original request — Case #201005562 — four years ago, I’d periodically emailed the Department for progress reports. On July 12, 2013, a Chris Barnes responded: “I checked the electronic notes on this case. The case is still open. The case notes indicate documents from a search are currently under review. Each case is different and the time it takes depends on the complexity of information requested and the time it takes to review the material.”
Given the time it was taking, I began to hope State Department minions, in their diligent search among musty basement documents and back-room records from more than 15 years before, must have struck the motherlode and were now busily assembling it for me.
So when the Department wrote again on April 1, 2013 — humour unintentional, I’m sure — to “determine if you are still interested” in the files, I immediately responded that I was. “Can you tell me when I can expect a response?”
More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/2014/09/17/the-state-department-and-the-cuban-five/
