Wondering If It's Worth Following Up w/US Central Command Regarding Their Transfer of My Request to State Department
Asked by Muira McCammon on October 31, 2016.
1 answer from Jack R-W.
Hi FOIA folks and friends: I received the following message from CENTCOM re: my FOIA request related to the Detention Facility in Parwan: “While processing your request, we located information that fall under the Department of State purview. Therefore, we referred the information to DOS for processing and a direct response to you.” At this point, my FOIA request asked for four different chunks of information (the request is called “Records Pertaining to the Library at the Detention Facility in Parwan” on my MuckRock profile if anyone wants to check out my phrasing), and I’m assuming that they’ve just sent the whole file over to DOS. Interestingly CENTCOM has released hundreds of pages related to the Parwan Detention Facility before, and that’s how I learned that there was material that I would want to FOIA. Would it be wise attempting to ask CENTCOM to release the information that did NOT fall the under the DOS purview to me? I’m assuming that not all of it falls under DOS’s purview, but it sounds as if they’ve just referred the entire request to DOS…
Sorry again for my ignorance on this front. Any help/guidance is greatly appreciated!
They don’t stop processing a request, they will just request the other department process the material that came from that other department. As far as I understand the process, they are basically sending a perfected request on your behalf. If you think that CENTCOM may have stopped processing your request, you should touch base with the person assigned to your request just to make sure that they haven’t, but I wouldn’t worry about it.