al haramain

As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both pointed out over the weekend, Eric Holder on Friday once again declared that a case charging government lawbreaking must be dismissed because to let it continue would reveal important “state secrets.” That’s despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder not long ago announced that he’d be asserting [...]

Last week I wrote about the serious limitations on President Obama’s new policy on the administration’s use of the “state secrets privilege” to dismiss cases charging the government with torture, warrantless wiretapping and other egregious abuses of executive power. Although the government has said it promises to invoke the privilege more sparingly, it’s still notably [...]

Although the Obama administration’s much-anticipated new policy on the use of the so-called “state secrets” privilege, announced this morning, has drawn some praise, civil liberties lawyers and other critics of the use of the privilege don’t think it solves the problem.

A long-awaited filing Thursday in the al-Haramain case presents a dare to the Obama administration.

A federal district court judge in California yesterday dismissed a slew of lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies that allegedly helped the U.S. government engage in warrantless wiretapping.
Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco dismissed the cases because Congress explicitly gave the telecom companies immunity from civil suits in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance [...]

Ratcheting up the showdown between the Obama administration and the judiciary that began in March, the Justice Department on Friday insisted to a federal judge (pdf)    in San Francisco that it had no right to sanction the government for repeatedly defying the court’s order.
The government brief was filed in the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation [...]

Among the many subjects President Obama addressed at his news conference last night, he gave a brief nod to the increasingly controversial problem of his administration’s broad use of the “state secrets privilege,” which we’ve been following since January.
Here’s last night’s Q & A on the subject:
Q During the campaign you criticized [...]

Despite the Obama administration’s surprisingly vigorous arguments that the case had to be dismissed to prevent disclosure of “state secrets,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit today reinstated the case of Mohamed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, in which five victims of the CIA’s notorious “extraordinary rendition” (transfer to torture) program sued Jeppesen, a [...]

While most of us were still reading or recovering from the latest batch of gruesome torture memos released by the Justice Department last week, bmaz at Emptywheel learned and reported that U.S. District Court Judge Vaughn Walker issued his ruling in the al-Haramain warrantless wiretapping case.  In his order, Judge Walker rejects the government’s latest [...]

After my last post about the Columbia Journalism Review’s post on Friday lamenting that most of the media was missing the story on Obama’s disturbing reliance on the so-called “state secrets privilege”, CJR staff writer Clint Hendler, who wrote that Friday post, wrote me to tell me that I’d actually mis-read his story. He wasn’t [...]