NEW YORK, March 9 (Reuters) - The CIA must disclose records of interrogation techniques used against terrorism suspects in 2002, a lawyer for the American Civil Liberties Union told an appeals court on Friday.

The techniques were declared illegal in 2009, so the agency cannot claim the records are still protected from a long-standing Freedom of Information Act request brought by the civil liberties group, the lawyer said.

The argument, made before the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in New York, was the latest round in the legal battle over the FOIA request.

The ACLU sued the CIA in 2004 for documents relating to its treatment of prisoners in U.S. custody overseas seeking details of the agency's secret detention and interrogation program.

As part of the litigation, the CIA in 2007 admitted that in 2005 it had destroyed tapes of an interrogation of alleged al Qaeda members Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri. The men were detained and questioned under a special program begun after the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The judge overseeing the case in Manhattan federal court, Alvin Hellerstein, subsequently sided with the CIA when the ACLU asked the agency to release documents related to the destroyed videotapes. The ACLU appealed in 2010.

ACLU lawyer Alexander Abdo told the judges on Friday that since the interrogation techniques, which include waterboarding, had been declared illegal by President Barack Obama, the CIA could no longer justify keeping the documents secret.

"The CIA concedes the techniques were illegal, we don't think that conduct can be properly characterized as an intelligence method," Abdo told appeals court judges Susan Carney and Richard Wesley. District court judge Miriam Cedarbaum was also on the panel.

A lawyer representing the CIA said the documents are shielded from the ACLU's FOIA request because they relate to classified information as well as the CIA's intelligence gathering methods.

"Waterboarding was a technique used overseas in connection with intelligence gathering," said Assistant United States Attorney Tara La Morte.

That the president subsequently declared the techniques illegal did not change the nature of the documents, she said.

In addition, the ACLU asked the appeals panel to force the CIA to release a photograph of Zubaydah taken while he was under the agency's custody. The CIA argues the photo can be withheld because it relates to intelligence gathering.

The case is American Civil Liberties Union v. Department of Defense, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, No. 10-4290.

(Reporting By Basil Katz)

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