State Secrets

Doug Ireland writes:

Sunday's New York Times lead front-page story out of Washington is headlined "Rule Change Lets CIA Freely Send Suspects Abroad." It's nice to see the Times finally catching up to the story that the Bush administration has been routinely sending people accused of terrorism to despotic allies of Washington, countries in which physical torture is commonplace and will be visited on those suspected terrorists (although the word "torture" only made it into the subhead in the Times story, not the main headline). A significant number of other major news outlets-- from the WashPost to the Guardian, not to mention the major European dailies and the BBC-- have been reporting this story for months. The San Francisco Chronicle wrote about it a year ago. So did my friend Tom Engelhardt, in a particularly tough and prescient piece. However, better late than never, I suppose, where the arteriosclerotic Times is concerned.

But the Times and its reporters, Doug Jehl and David Johnston, missed a hugely significant aspect of this story that strikes at the very heart of our democracy-- a story which luckily can be found on the front page of the Sunday Baltimore Sun.

Says the Sun::


• "The Bush administration is aggressively wielding a rarely used executive power known as the state-secrets privilege in an attempt to squash hard-hitting court challenges to its anti-terrorism campaign....


• "The government is invoking the privilege in an attempt to wipe out the heart of a lawsuit that seeks to examine rendition, the secretive and controversial practice of sending terrorism suspects to foreign countries where they might be tortured..."


• "Use of the secrets privilege could also eliminate a suit by a former FBI contract linguist who charges that the bureau bungled translations of terrorism intelligence before and after the Sept. 11 attacks..."


• "The secrets privilege is an especially powerful weapon because federal judges, reluctant to challenge the executive branch on national security, almost never refuse the government's claim to confidentiality."


• "That is true even though a growing body of declassified documents suggests that in the past, at least, the privilege has been used to protect presidential power, not national secrets, according to Thomas Blanton, director of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, which works to expand public access to government documents..."


There's a lot more to this enormously significant story.

More: N.Y. Times has a really bad day on torture, the Constitution, & Pentagon mendacity