Harbury sues CIA

Harbury sues CIA

US lawyer Jennifer Harbury filed suit on July 31 against the US Central Intelligence Agency for failing to respond to her repeated requests for information about her husband, guerilla leader Efrain Bamaca Velasquez, presumed murdered in 1992 while in the custody of the Guatemalan army.

The lawsuit asks the US District Court in Washington to compel the CIA to release its files on Bamaca under the Freedom of Information Act. The CIA has so far denied Harbury any documents on her husband's case, citing "national security".

In the last week of July the CIA released a four-page public summary of a 700-page report on its internal investigation of the Bamaca case and the case of Michael DeVine, a US innkeeper murdered in Guatemala in 1990. The report found that no laws were broken and that no CIA employees were involved in either death.

Harbury plans to argue that laws were clearly broken since, according to the New York Times, US funds continued to flow clandestinely to the Guatemalan military even after Congress cut off military aid.

[From Weekly News Update on the Americas, published by the Nicaragua Solidarity Network of New York.]

From GLW issue 198