Fedral government abuses state secrets privilege

A federal district judge ordered the Justice Department to provide “in camera” review of documents on the no-fly list that the government claims are protected by the state secrets privilege. “…the Court has a particularly strong and heightened institutional responsibility in these circumstances to review and assess the propriety of such executive branch activity since to dismiss this case as the defendants request would, in essence, judicially sanction conduct that has far-reaching implications,” wrote Judge Anthony J. Trenga. The case was Gulet Mohamed v. Eric Holder. Trega also posted a footnote that the government’s citation of the state secrets privilege has sometimes been shown after declassification to fail the test of  state secrets. (Secrecy News, September 16, 2014, by Steven Aftergood)

Louis Fisher, The National Law Journal, March 10, 2014, wrote that the federal government has abused the state secrets privilege to cover its errors, avoiding transparency and undermining public trust. He cited the case of Malaysian citizen Rahinah Ibrahim studying at Stanford who was removed from an airplane at the San Francisco airport and taken into custody. She was released two hours later, but when she attempted to fly back from Malaysia to resume her studies at Stanford she found that her student visa had been revoked. When she contested her treatment in federal court, the government invoked the state secret privilege to deny open court access to records on Ibrahim and refused to make it known, even under court order why Ibrahim was denied a visa. The government never showed that Ibrahim was a security risk or involved with terrorists.