state secrets protection act

Seven major civil rights and open government organizations today sent a letter to leaders of the House and Senate Judiciary Committees urging them to pass legislation to restrict the government’s ability to use the “state secrets” privilege to dismiss litigation charging government wrongdoing. Although the Obama administration yesterday announced a new policy in which it [...]

Ed Brayton at ScienceBlogs (and also of our sister site, The Michigan Messenger) has a thorough analysis of the Obama administration’s new state secrets policy, which I wrote about yesterday.
Ed sums it up: “All of the changes are to the process by which the administration will determine when to invoke the SSP [State Secrets [...]

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.

After my post yesterday updating the status of the Obama administration’s ongoing efforts to conceal evidence that British resident and former Guantanamo Bay prisoner Binyam Mohamed was tortured, Ed Brayton, a fellow with the Center for Independent Media and author of the blog Dispatches from the Culture Wars, asked me whatever happened to that promise [...]

Testifying before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Attorney General Eric Holder said today that the Justice Department will soon issue its opinion and recommendations regarding the controversial use of the “state secrets” privilege, which the government has been using to conceal information in about 20 pending federal cases.
In three particular cases — Jewel v. NSA, Al [...]