So let me get this straight. The Obama administration is fighting Judicial Watch tooth-and-nail to avoid releasing photographs of the capture and killing of Osama bin Laden, citing national security reasons. And at the same time, administration officials allegedly leaked information about the bin Laden raid to a Hollywood film director?

That’s what press reports seem to indicate. And we’re now trying to get to the bottom of this emerging scandal.

On January 13, 2012, JW filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to obtain documents regarding meetings and communications between government agencies and Hollywood director Kathryn Bigelow. If the name sounds familiar, it is because Bigelow is the Academy Award-winning director of the military film “The Hurt Locker.” She is also the ex-wife of Hollywood director James Cameron of “Avatar” fame.

At issue in JW’s lawsuit is the possibility that the Obama administration leaked classified information to Bigelow and Annapurna Pictures as source material for the making of Bigelow’s not-yet-released film, tentatively titled “Killing bin Laden.”

Here’s what we’re after, pursuant to JW FOIA requests filed with the DOD and the CIA on August 9, 2011:

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Hiding behind vague references to “national security,” the Obama administration continues to keep secret photos documenting the death of 9/11 mastermind Osama bin Laden at the hands of Navy Seals last May. But Judicial Watch will not give up its pursuit of these records, which we believe will complete the record on one of the military’s greatest achievements.

Last Wednesday, we filed a new court motion in our Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit against the Department of Defense (DOD) and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) seeking “all photographs and/or video recordings of Osama (Usama) bin Laden taken during and/or after the U.S. military operation in Pakistan on or about May 1, 2011.” (We filed the lawsuit on May 13, 2011.)

Specifically, we filed a “Memorandum of Law in Opposition to Defendants’ Motion for Summary Judgment and in Support of Plaintiff’s Cross-Motion for Summary Judgment.” (In order for a Motion for Summary Judgment to be granted by the court, the moving party must demonstrate that there are “no genuine issues of material fact and that the moving party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law.”) Our lawyers also asked for a court hearing on the matter.

We argue to the court that the Obama administration’s motion for summary judgment “should be denied,” because both the CIA and the DOD have “failed to satisfy even the most basic requirements of FOIA law.” Specifically, they have failed to provide sufficient evidence that they conducted an adequate search for responsive records or demonstrated that the records were properly classified pursuant to President Obama’s Executive Order 13526 signed on December 29, 2009, which provided a “uniform system for classifying, safeguarding, and declassifying national security information.”

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Talking on the CBS show “60 Minutes,” President Obama noted: “It’s going to take some time for us to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site” during the raid in which Osama bin Laden was killed. This information, according to Mr. Obama, gives the U.S. a chance “to…really deliver a fatal blow [to Al Qaeda], if we follow through aggressively in the months to come.”

The United States intelligence agencies reliance on labor-intensive, time-consuming and inefficient methods to decipher the captured electronic devices and paper documents. The delay has allowed al Qaeda operatives and many of its budding affiliates to relocate, change their identity and communication methods, diminishing the U.S. ability to act upon the intelligence contain in the trove, The window of opportunity to destroy the organization and its global metastasizes, has significantly shrunk.

This event demonstrates the need for a more efficient process to mine the tens of millions of documents – electronic and print – which are seized or intercepted annually in different languages by U.S. intelligence, military, and law enforcement agencies. There is an urgent need to extract information of high intelligence value contained in such documents rapidly and efficiently, and to pass the intelligence on for operational exploitation.

The current Document Exploitation (DOCEX) method, including automated translation and categorization technologies, suffers from several major deficiencies: focus on an inefficient key word spotting techniques, long processing times, and a high rate of false negatives and positives. Moreover, the automated translation tools are still unsuitable for the sophisticated language of neo-classical Arabic used by Islamist terrorists such as al-Qaeda. Similarly, categorization technologies do not meet the challenge of analyzing sophisticated, culturally sensitive nuances. Poorly translated and categorized documents of course cause the loss of crucial actionable and preventative intelligence.

To address such problems, IntuView, an Israeli company, has developed revolutionary software that can process large volumes of digital documents related to Islamic terrorism very quickly.

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