secrecy

Notwithstanding Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) impassioned plea, the House this afternoon passed that amendment to alter the Freedom of Information Act and hide detainee abuse photos — and to keep the question of what’s secret and what’s not away from the courts.

Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-N.Y.) today blasted the Obama administration, as well as some of her colleagues in the House and Senate, for including a provision in the Homeland Security Appropriations Bill that would amend the Freedom of Information Act to exempt from disclosure photos depicting the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody.
After the jump, Slaughter’s [...]

This case has dropped a off the radar screen lately, but Bob Egelko at the San Francisco Chronicle today reminds us that the Obama administration is still fighting on three different fronts release of information that would likely show that U.S. officials tortured British former Guantanamo detainee Binyam Mohamed.
Mohamed is one of the plaintiffs in [...]

The Obama Justice Department has asked a judge to dismiss charges against two former American Israel Public Affairs Committee lobbyists accused of receiving classified information from the Bush Pentagon and passing it on to journalists and Israeli government officials. Good.
Put aside whatever you may feel about AIPAC. The case amounted to the criminalization of extremely [...]

On March 11, President Obama issued a signing statement attached to an omnibus spending bill that qualified a small but important provision that would deny a salary to a federal manager who “interferes with or prohibits certain communications between federal employees and Members of Congress.” In his signing statement, the president said that the provision [...]

The U.S. government tried to get Binyam Mohamed — the British resident who was held by the United States at Guantanamo Bay for four years and allegedly tortured in CIA “black sites” — to promise not to speak to the media or sue the United States as a condition of his release, according to documents [...]

Opening today’s House Financial Services Committee hearing on AIG, Chairman Barney Frank (D-Mass) makes a strong case for suing all those executives who got their multi-million dollar bonuses despite their high-risk incompetence that ultimately led the company down the toilet.
Reading from the contracts — which still appear not to be publicly available, though I’m trying [...]

The Pentagon’s report yesterday that the conditions at the Guantanamo Bay prison camp meet all the requirements of the Geneva Conventions, was, not surprisingly, met with a mixture of skepticism and downright hostility.
Adm. Patrick Walsh reported that based on more than 100 interviews over 13 days, inspections of all the camps at the prison and [...]

The Obama administration, under pressure to turn over key memos written by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, has asked the federal judge in New York for another 90 days to consider its position on a Freedom of Information Act case brought by a coalition of civil liberties advocates.  But the judge may not [...]

As I reported earlier, President Obama’s Justice Department today stood up in court and asserted the so-called “state secrets” privilege to argue, like the Bush administration before it, that the case of five victims of the CIA’s “extraordinary rendition” and torture program must be dismissed.
But what is the “state secrets” privilege anyway?