http://www.cjr.org/transparency/report_card.php?page=allTransparency — January 05, 2010 12:00 AM
Report Card
Obama’s marks at Transparency U.By Clint Hendler
In the year since President Obama took office, he has made significant progress on transparency and access issues. Still, there have been plenty of missed opportunities and much work still to be done.
State SecretsBackground: Since it was formally recognized in a controversial 1953 Supreme Court case, the state secrets privilege allows the executive branch to exclude, usually without judicial review, pieces of evidence that, they assert, might jeopardize national security from litigation. Not only did the Bush administration make greater use of the privilege than its predecessors, his administration also asserted that it could use the privilege to exempt entire categories of government action out of the bounds of litigation.
What Obama’s done: During his presidential campaign, Obama expressed reservations with the Bush administration’s application of the privilege. When asked about the issue at a spring press conference, Obama said that “the state secret doctrine should be modified.” In the fall, his Justice Department issued a new internal policy that would require greater internal review before making a state secrets claim. The guidelines, which are not judicially enforceable nor binding on any future administration, fell far short of what civil libertarians and transparency advocates had hoped for. Meanwhile, the Obama administration has held the Bush line on state secrets in a series of cases dealing with the previous administration’s interrogation and intelligence practices. The administration has declined to endorse one popular fix, the State Secrets Protection Act. Vice President Joe Biden and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton were co-sponsors of the bill while they were senators.
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