John Hudson nabbed an interview with Michael Oreskes, senior managing editor at The Associated Press, about Freedom Of Information Act requests for the bin Laden photos:
[A] journalist's prerogative is to ask questions and find answers, said Oreskes. "It's our job as journalists to seek this material." "We're not deciding in advance to publish this material," he pledged. "We would like our journalists, who are working very hard, to see this material and then we'll decide what's publishable and what's not publishable based on the possibly that it's inflammatory."
Last week John Cook spoke with Daniel Metcalfe, the former chief of the Department of Justice's Office of Information and Privacy, about FOIA's applicability:
One way to avoid the FOIA, Metcalfe says, is to make sure that Obama, or the White House, are the only people who have the images. … It's far better for the White House to treat this photo as sui generis, and even though it was once in Defense Department or CIA hands, for it to simply leave the executive branch and enter the inner White House, where the FOIA does not apply. So if this photo is sitting on Obama's desk and there's no other copy, Defense can say to any FOIA requester, 'We used to have that, but the president has it now and good luck trying to get it.'" …
The trouble with that route is that digital images are sticky. If the photos were delivered digitally from Pakistan or Afghanistan to Langley, Va. and Washington, D.C., there could be any number of government servers or devices that retained copies. It would take a coordinated—and possibly illegal—effort to destroy every digital trace of such images at the Department of Defense and CIA. If any such traces remain, they're FOIAble.
The Dish 