government secrecy

A military commission judge has ruled that the types of abusive techniques U.S. interrogators used on a suspected 9-11 conspirator are irrelevant to determining his competence to stand trial, the Miami Herald reports.
Ramzi bin al Shibh is one of five men charged by the U.S. military commission with having participated in planning the Sept. 11 [...]

This story, which was reported in The Guardian and confirmed by publicly filed court documents, is one of the stranger means the Obama administration has used thus far to keep quiet the sins of its predecessor.
As I’ve written before, lawyers representing the ex-Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed have been complaining that the U.S. government is forbidding [...]

The Justice Department on Thursday again delayed disclosure of three critical legal memos written by Steven Bradbury, then a lawyer in the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC), that reportedly authorized the the CIA to torture prisoners. This is at least the second time that the government has postponed responding to a federal judge [...]

The Foundation of American Scientists reports today in Secrecy News that in a letter to President Obama, the Public Interest Declassification Board — created by Congress in 2000 to advise the president on declassification of government documents — warned that public access to government information “may be in jeopardy.”
“Our Board was heartened by your early [...]

A heated confrontation is brewing between the Obama administration and the federal judiciary.

A case involving CIA black sites, Boeing and torture victims sets up the first real-world example of the Obama administration’s take on national security.

Some instances of government secrecy are genuinely malign, but most are frivolous. The cardinal example there is the intelligence budget. For reasons no one has ever compellingly explained, the annual budget of the 16-agency intelligence community was for decades a guarded secret.
Yes, this is taxpayer money, but the thinking went that if the figure became [...]