After releasing a heavily censored version of an internally-prepared report on U.S. Nazi-hunting operations, in response a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, the Justice Department now finds that The New York Times has printed the entire unredacted report online.  

The Times released the 600-page document Nov. 13 after the National Security Archive at George Washington University managed to get a hold of just 45 redacted pages earlier this year through a FOIA suit against the Justice Department.

The report, written in 2006, finds that American intelligence officials knowingly created a "safe haven" in the United States for some Nazis following World War II, states a Times article on the report.

The report also says that the Justice Department has "smoking gun" proof that Switzerland bought gold from the Nazis that had been taken from Jewish Holocaust victims and describes the difficulties of convincing one-time Nazi collaborationist countries to prosecute suspected World War II war criminals.

A comparison of the redacted document released under FOIA to the original shows that the Justice Department had no legal grounds for its redactions, said National Security Archive Counsel David Sobel in a statement.

"For an administration--and an Attorney General--supposedly committed to an 'unprecedented' level of transparency, this case provides a troubling example of how far the reality is from the rhetoric," Sobel added. The leaked document came from "former officials" upset with the redacted version, according to the Archive's statement.

Justice FOIA officials denied the archive's first attempt to FOIA the report in a letter (.pdf) dated Nov. 18, 2009, on the grounds that the report "was never finalized," and therefore a draft document protected under the FOIA exception that permits the government to withhold pre-decisional documents.

Justice officials also said the report was protected by personal privacy FOIA exceptions and by language permitting the government to withhold law enforcement documents when disclosure "could reasonably be expected to risk circumvention of the law."

For more:
- go to the full document on The New York Times website
- see a Times side-by-side comparison of the full report to the redacted version
- download the Justice Department's redacted, 45-page version (.pdf)
- download the DOJ's first response to the National Security Archive's FOIA request (.pdf)
- go to the National Security Archive's webpage on the report
- read The New York Times article on the report

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