begun to advance bold new justifications for classifying information that threaten to erode the principled limits that have existed — in theory, if not always in practice — for decades. The cost of these efforts, if they remain unchecked, may be the American public's ability to hold its government accountable.

The propaganda argument

On Sept. 12, a federal judge endorsed one of these justifications when she ruled that the government need not release photographs and videos of Mohammed al-Qahtani, the so-called 20th hijacker. Al-Qahtani, a Saudi citizen who allegedly tried but failed to enter the United States to participate in the Sept. 11 attacks, has been imprisoned at Guantánamo Bay since 2002. In the early phase of his confinement, interrogators shackled him in stress positions, stripped him naked, led himon a dog leash, doused him in cold water and interrogated him for 20 hours on end. The convening authority for military commissions held that his treatment "met the legal definition of torture." The Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a legal advocacy nonprofit dedicated to protecting human rights, submitted Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests for photos and videos of al-Qahtani taken by the government during his first three years at Guantánamo. The government acknowledged that it possessed mug shots, videos depicting forcible extractions of al-Qahtani from his cell and videos documenting various euphemistically termed "intelligence debriefings of al-Qahtani." It argued that all of these images were properly classified and withheld from the public — but not because they would reveal sensitive intelligence methods, the traditional justification for