[JURIST] The US Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit [official website] on Monday ruled [opinion, PDF] that the US Department of Defense (DOD) [official website] may withhold from the Associated Press (AP) [website] certain documents relating to investigations of detainee abuse at the Guantanamo Bay [JURIST news archive] military prison. Monday's decision reverses an earlier decision by the US District Court for the Southern District of New York [official website] that granted partial summary judgment to the AP and and ordered the DOD to disclose certain records under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) [text]. In his opinion, Judge Peter Hall held that the detainees have a privacy interest in their identifying information and that the AP failed to show how the
disclosure of the information would serve the public interest:

We find that disclosing the family members' names and addresses to the AP, and consequently to the public at large, involves a measurable privacy interest because the information that would be revealed by disclosure is the type of information that a person would ordinarily not wish to make known about himself or herself. ...

We conclude that the public interest in evaluating whether DOD properly followed-up on the detainees' claims of mistaken identity have been adequately served by the disclosure of the redacted information and that disclosing names and addresses of the family members would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of the family members' privacy interest because such disclosure would not shed any light on DOD's action in connection with the detainees’ claims at issue here.