Blogger Sues To See If Government Kept a File on Him

Spencer Ackerman
Wired

The intelligence community may have had a file on a liberal blogger and academic. Now he wants to see what, if anything, was in it.

Danger Room has learned that lawyers for the American Civil Liberties Union* will file a lawsuit Wednesday morning in a federal court in Michigan to compel the government to release any information it collected on Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor who blogs on Mideast issues at Informed Comment.

The suit seeks disclosure of “federal government discussions of, correspondence regarding, inquiries about, and investigations of Professor Cole,” the ACLU’s filing says. That disclosure is ”urgently needed to inform the national debate about U.S. accountability with respect to the unlawful investigation and surveillance of its citizens.”

Cole’s lawsuit comes after a former CIA official, Glenn Carle, told the New York Times that his superiors at the agency asked after Cole, an American citizen, in 2005, seemingly at the instructions of the Bush White House. “What do you think we might know about him, or could find out that could discredit him?” an offended Carle remembered one of his bosses asking.

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