Turning over such material, the Bush White House argued, would compromise the president's ability to get frank advice and have a "chilling effect" on internal deliberations.
The NSA declined to answer specific questions about the agreement, including whether permission had been sought from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance (Fisa) court for handing over such material.
The ICIJ has declined to show the leaked documents to any government, saying it is not an arm of law enforcement and its policy is not to turn over such material.
However, the report concluded that they could not be prosecuted for criminal contempt of court because the judge had never given a specific order that they turn over such material.
Juan Cole's "Engaging the Muslim World" maps those fault lines, and one can only wish Bush had mulled over such material (in fact, much of it was contained in his briefing papers) before the misadventures of the post-9/11 era began.
But the report said that because the federal judge overseeing the trial, Emmet G. Sullivan, had not specifically ordered the government lawyers to turn over any such materials to the defense, as they are required to do by law, they could not be prosecuted for criminal contempt of court.
An example of such behaviour is creep, a slow, permanent, and continuous deformation occurring under constant load over a long time in such materials as crystals, ice, soil and sediment, and rocks at depth.
Advantage of such materials is their high damping performance over a wide range of excitation frequencies.
The language suggesting that agents could bend the law was contained in 876 pages of training materials about Muslims and Arab-Americans the F.B.I. deemed to be offensive or inaccurate and removed after a review of about 160,000 pages of such material over the past six months, according to aides present at the briefing.
