State secrets privilege

A federal court dismissed nearly all of the claims in a lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FBI spying on Muslim Americans, ruling that the government could invoke the “state secrets” privilege to avoid almost all litigation.

The Obama administration invoked the state secrets privilege last weekend in an effort to dismiss a federal lawsuit challenging the government's alleged plan to kill a U.S. citizen abroad.

Experts collaborated and debated “the state of the state secrets privilege” at a forum hosted by American University Washington College of Law on Wednesday.

The school's Collaboration on Government Secrecy brought together scholars, government specialists and policy practitioners to discuss the history of the privilege, its place in the Obama administration, how it would ideally be reformed and how it is likely to be reformed.

A group of plaintiffs on Friday asked a judge to deny the government's request to vacate his rulings in a recently-settled state secrets case, The BLT: The Blog of Legal Times reported.

Attorney General Eric Holder announced today that the Justice Department will move to restrict use of the state secrets privilege and laid out new procedures that will “provide greater accountability and ensure the state secrets privilege is invoked only when necessary and in the narrowest way possible.”

The Obama Administration’s approach to transparency in government is, thus far, only a slight improvement over the Bush Administration’s policies, reports OpenTheGovernment.org in its annual Secrecy Report Card.

The Obama administration argued in a Supreme Court filing last month that the "state secrets privilege" is rooted in the constitution, The New York Times reported. Writer Adam Liptak also points out that the history of the privilege shows how "problematic" it can be, because the case that established the privilege turned out years later to have hidden proof of negligence, not national security secrets.

Attorney General Eric Holder told senators Wednesday that the Department of Justice would support a media shield law as long as it did not hamper government's efforts to protect national security and to discover the identities of people who leak classified information.

President Obama said today in a speech on the Guantanamo Bay detainees and national security that he remains committed to transparency in government despite his recent about-face on the release of photos documenting torture.

After discussing the decision to release the controversial Office of Legal Counsel opinions on torture, Obama spoke about the photos taken of detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan between 2002 and 2004.

The U.S. Court of Appeals in San Francisco (9th Cir.) yesterday reinstated a lawsuit brought by former detainees who claim they were tortured as part of the Central Intelligence Agency’s “extraordinary rendition" program.