It’s all about state secrets.
There is such a thing as a State Secret. I’m all about transparency in government, but I acknowledge that there is information gathered by our intelligence agencies that cannot be immediately shared with the general populace, and that there is information about our government’s capabilities and activities that needs to be kept from our enemies and therefore may need to be kept from the general populace also. The fact is that some stuff is just Need To Know.
But we do need to balance this somehow, which brings us back to transparency in government. It would be very easy for our government, in its quest to protect us or to protect the interests of our country, to undertake a program of truly evil actions in our name. Some level of vigilance has to be exercised in order to prevent this.
Civil courts are often part of this process of vigilance and transparency.
The state secrets privilege was first recognized by the US Supreme Court in 1953. Family of civilians killed as a result of a crashed B-29 bomber sued the government for information as to the cause of the crash. In recognizing the state secrets privilege, the court allowed the government to withhold evidence from the proceedings.
But the proceedings did continue with whatever evidence was admitted.
Evidently in the following 24 years – between 1953 and 1976, inclusive – the government invoked the state secrets privilege 4 times, including the original case.
After 9/11 the Bush administration invoked the state secrets privilege 23 times.
But wait! There’s more! President Bush’s Department of Justice used the state secrets privilege to have cases entirely thrown out of court. They didn’t just withhold sensitive information.
This is what Obama promised to end. State secrets will continue to exist, and the state secrets privilege may need to be invoked from time to time in the interests of national security, but it should not prevent court cases from proceeding, albeit lacking whatever secret information is withheld.
And yet this policy is what Obama's Department of Justice is inexplicably continuing.
The court case in which this policy is being upheld is one that concerns Extraordinary Rendition – the tendency of our intelligence agencies to transport suspects to fun places like Syria in order to have Syrian intelligence have a go at them, since they use interrogation techniques that we ... do not.
This has evidently been done to innocent people.
And information about the particular case that is slowly making its way through the court system has been reported in the press.
So what remains to be withheld?
There’s only a few possible conclusions I can draw from all this.
- One possibility is that President Obama has gone mad with power.
- Another possibility is that he reserves the right to go mad with power at some point in the next 4 to 8 years.
- And the last possible explanation is that whatever information has not yet come to light about the practice of extraordinary rendition – or related intelligence gathering practices - is amazingly, amazingly horrible.
Between this and Obama’s flip-flop on the FISA legislation, I find that I’m concerned about whatever he knows that I don’t.
I remain an Obama supporter. Fundamentally I believe that Obama is trying to change things for the better. But it appears that he must have become informed of something that our government has done or is doing (in the course of its intelligence gathering) that he has decided must remain unknown, for our safety, and for the safety of our country.
I leave it to the more seasoned conspiracy-theorists out there to go on about Black Sites and Total Information Awareness and whatnot. I personally am hesitant to speculate further about what exactly it is we have done – what it is we are doing – that must remain a state secret. All I can say is that something is being done in the name of our safety, and its something that - in the name of our safety - we evidently can't be allowed to know about.
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