Steve Neavling

 A Tennessee death row inmate has been denied access to FBI records that he says would overturn his 1998 conviction for the murder of a Memphis motel clerk, the Associated Press reports.

A federal appeals court reaffirmed the FBI’s right to redact information under the Freedom of Information Act.

The redacted records, inmate Michael Dale Rimmer argues, contain information from witnesses who said he was the wrong suspect, the AP reported.

But the FBI won its argument that the names of those witnesses aren’t important enough to trump the privacy rights of witnesses, the AP wrote.

secret service photo

 A log of complaints against Secret Service employees shows a variety of misconduct, including an allegation that an agent was intoxicated while he was supposed to be protecting a foreign leader, Bloomberg News reports.

The federal government released the 229-page log this weekend in response to a Freedom of Information Act by news organizations following accusations that federal agents were consorting with prostitutes while preparing for President Barack Obama’s arrival in Columbia in April.

Logs show other cases of prostitution, Bloomberg reports.

By Allan Lengel

The FBI kept a file on the  late outspoken writer Christopher Hitchens, the website Historiographic Anarchy reports.

The website reported that the FBI released through the Freedom of Information Act, 19 pages on Hitchens, some which show he was the subject of an FBI Foreign Counterintelligence probe. He died in December at age 62 after a long fight with cancer.

The site reported that the first two pages involve a check requested by the Immigration and Naturalization in March 2005.

The next five pages reveal that he was the subject of a foreign counterintelligence probe and there is a discussion of his socialist-Trotskyist activities in Oxford and that he was traveling in the U.S. on a student scholarship.

Files also pertained to a Secret Service request for info in 1983 after Hitchens requested a White House press pass.

To read more click here.

After five years of legal wrangling, a federal judge in California ruled Thursday that the FBI must pay the legal fees of Muslim activist groups that sued the agency over a Freedom of Information Act case.

U.S. District Judge Cormac Carney, in a written ruling, said his decision was not based on the merits of the case, but rather to “punish a government that chose to lie to its own judicial system,” reports ABC News. ”The Court must impose monetary sanctions to deter the Government from deceiving the Court again,”

The FBI had denied the existence of files the group was asking for and had claimed that admitting the files in question existed would have compromised national security.  The court refuted that claim.

“And the Court rejects the Government’s suggestion that it initially had to deceive the Court to protect national security. The Government could have availed itself of routine court procedures without compromising national security,” Carney wrote.

The case was decided in favor of the Islamic Shura Council, a group composed of six Muslim-American community organizations and five community leaders.

To read more click here.