State Secrets?

[G_j]

http://www.counterbias.com/376.html

State Secrets?


August 19 2005
Counterbias.com
by William Fisher


As whistleblower Sibel Edmonds asked the Supreme Court to review her dismissed case against the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), mainstream media continues to refer to the government’s defense – the so-called State Secrets Privilege – as “rarely used”. In fact it has been used over sixty times since its creation in the 1950s.

The State Secrets Privilege is a series of American legal precedents allowing the federal government the ability to dismiss legal cases that it claims would threaten foreign policy, military intelligence or national security.

A relic of the Cold War, it has been invoked several times since the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. Judges have denied the privilege on only five occasions.

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Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the American Federation of Scientists, said in an interview, “Once rarely invoked, the state secrets privilege is now increasingly used by the government as a "get out of jail free" card to block unwanted litigation. The idea that courts cannot handle national security cases involving classified information is simply false. Classified information often figures in criminal espionage cases, and even occasionally in Freedom of Information Act cases. There are procedures for in camera review, protective orders, non-disclosure agreements, and so on.”

He added, “In the same way, sensitive classified information could be protected in the current cases where the state secrets privilege has been invoked -- without shutting down the entire proceeding. As a society we should be seeking to expand the rule of law, not to carve out more areas where the government is immune to judicial review.”