On behalf of Mark Fallon, the ACLU sent a letter to Senators Diane Feinstein, Martin Heinrich, John McCain, Jack Reed, Mark Warner and Ron Wyden regarding the seven months of delays in reviewing the ‘Unjustifiable Means’ transcript.

The ACLU wrote that the manuscript was submitted on January 4, 2017 and that more than seven months have passed since then, far exceeding the thirty-day advisory timeline in policy.  The letter cited that the Pentagon has missed every estimate of completion and has refused to provide basic information regarding the status of the review, including a list of the agencies reviewing the book, or even the number of agencies reviewing it.

The Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and the American Civil Liberties Union yesterday sent a letter to six senators asking them to intervene in a stalled Department of Defense review that is blocking publication of a former military criminal investigator’s book on government torture. Mark Fallon, a 27-year veteran of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS), submitted his manuscript, “Unjustifiable Means,” to the Defense Department for review seven months ago, but has been refused basic information about its status.

In the letter, the Knight Institute and the ACLU note that books defending American torture policies do not appear to have faced similar delays: “It is hard to escape the inference that the extended delay in reviewing Mr. Fallon’s book is related to his criticisms of the torture policies. We note that the Defense Department and CIA have authorized (or not stood in the way of) the publication of many books defending those policies.”

A former chief investigator at the Guantanamo Bay detention center is accusing the Pentagon of blocking publication of his book on the use of brutal interrogation techniques and top U.S. officials’ advocacy of what he calls “torture.”

Mark Fallon, a Naval Criminal Investigative Service (NCIS) veteran, said his book “Unjustifiable Means” reveals no classified information or new detainee abuse cases but details internal deliberations about interrogation methods, identifies officials who advocated “torture” and describes how he and others objected.

“This is more of an inside view of the fight to try to stop torture,” he said in an interview this week with Reuters. “There was a tremendous opposition within the government itself believing these were war crimes, and I name names.”

The use of the brutal interrogation methods made the country less safe, he said.

A former NCIS investigator who worked at the wartime prison during the Bush administration has written a book, “Unjustifiable Means.” Now his civil liberties lawyers are asking a bipartisan group of senators for help getting the Pentagon to clear it for publication.

Retired 27-year career federal worker Mark Fallon’s manuscript “has been held up for more than seven months in ‘pre-publication review,’ and we are increasingly concerned that some in the government are committed to suppressing Mr. Fallon’s account,” the lawyers write six senators. They include Republican John McCain, the former Vietnam War prisoner, and Democrat Dianne Feinstein, who chaired the Senate Intelligence Committee when it drew up the so-called Torture Report on the Bush administration’s secret CIA prison network.