Jason Leopold is Truthout’s lead investigative reporter. Freedom of the Press Foundation is crowd-funding in support of his FOIA work and on-the-scenes reporting at the Guantanamo Bay trials. You can fund his work here. A couple of years ago, a friend handed me about 500 pages of documents he obtained through a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request from an educational division of the Air Force that contained some explosive revelations about what our young nuclear missile officers are taught about the ethics and morals of launching nuclear weapons. Buried within these documents were 43 PowerPoint slides that contained disturbing passages from the Bible that aimed to show nuclear missile officers in training that Jesus Christ would have supported the launching of nuclear weapons. Moreover, the PowerPoint slides quoted Werner Von Braun, regarded as the father of the US space program, as a moral authority on using nuclear weapons to annihilate enemies. Braun was a former member of the Nazi Party who used Jews imprisoned in concentration camps, captured French anti-Nazi partisans and civilians, and others to help build the V-2 rocket for Hitler's Third Reich. Threats to press freedom around the world are at an all-time high. Sign up to stay up to date and take action to protect journalists and whistleblowers everywhere. Thanks for signing up for our newsletter. You are not yet subscribed! Please check your email for a message asking you to confirm your subscription. The use of religious imagery in the slides and the Biblical citations appeared to be a violation of the First Amendment establishing a wall of separation between church and state and Clause 3, Article 6 of the Constitution, which specifically prohibits a "religious test." So I wrote up a report. About a day or so after my story was published the Air Force canceled the ethics training, which had been in place for more than two decades. In fact, the Air Force pulled all of its training materials "that address morals, ethics, core values and related character development issues" pending a "comprehensive review." A month later, Air Force Chief of Staff Gen. Norton A. Schwartz issued a rare policy memorandum to Air Force leadership on “religious neutrality,” advising “leaders at all levels” that they must "must balance Constitutional protections for an individual's free exercise of religion or other personal beliefs and its prohibition against governmental establishment of religion." By the time attention surrounding the story, which also included a Republican member of Congress weighing in on the controversy, died down it had gone global and was picked up by more than 100 domestic and international news outlets. I was stunned, to say the least, that the documents I obtained and used as primary source material in the “Jesus Love Nukes” report would elicit a swift response from the Air Force, Congress and the media. I referred to this story because it is the catalyst behind my aggressive use of FOIA over the past two years. Naturally, I was eager to continue this style of reporting and had hoped that I could use FOIA to pry loose documents and reveal government secrets on matters pertaining to civil liberties, human rights, national security and counterterrorism, subjects that I have reported extensively on over the past decade. While I had filed a few dozen FOIA requests in the past, I did not have much success obtaining responsive records due to the classified nature of the materials I sought and the fact that I was not very well educated on how to file appeals to the denials I had received. I also enjoyed access to anonymous sources I cultivated who disclosed information to me on these matters and I felt that a FOIA request was unnecessary as well as burdensome. But, the “Jesus Loves Nukes” story taught me that there’s a huge difference between quoting an anonymous source and publishing the contents of a smoking gun document. For one, a report based on the latter helps build public trust and is bound to attract the attention of other journalists and a wider audience whereas the use of anonymous sources can sometimes result in a story being completely ignored by the media because it can be difficult to confirm the claims leveled by anonymous sources. Immediately after the publication of the “Jesus Loves Nukes” story I asked my friend who turned over the Air Force documents to me and is a “frequent FOIA requester” to give me a crash course on writing good FOIA requests and I went to town, filing dozens of requests for a wide-range of documents with numerous government agencies. I have since learned that a strong FOIA request can make a difference between receiving responsive records and a flat-out denial.