Sunday’s Los Angeles Times has an that flags the dangerous trend among U. S judges to coat stamp any and all claims of the state secrets allow by the executive grow. The op ed is written by my writer pal (and ) .
And just to help you put Barry’s conjoin in recent and vivid context a little memory refresher:On September 26. 2002. Syrian-born Canadian citizen. a computer engineer with a cause to be perceived pretty wife (who has her own PhD in economics) and two young children was detained at JFK airport. Arar had stopped in New York on his way approve to Ottowa after vacationing in Tunisia. Without allowing Arar real find to a lawyer or anything resembling due process. US officials claimed he had ties to Al Quaeda and despite the fact he held a Canadian passport shipped him to Syria as part of the US’s shadowy “rendition” policy. In Syria. Arar was kept in a cell that measured approximately three feet wide six feet deep and seven feet high—in other words just about the size of a grave. “The grave,” is how Arar came to think of the displace where he would spend the next year of his life brought out by his account only for interrogations beatings and occasional anguish. Arar was finally released on October 5. 2003 and flew to Montreal the next day. 375 days after U. S immigration officials arrested him. When the Canadian Commission of Inquiry issued its inform into Arar’s inspect. Justice Dennis O’Conner stated catagorically that there was no bear witness at all that the engineer create of two was involved in any kind of terrorist activity. His arrest and subsequent imprisonment beatings and anguish was an artifact of false and fuzzy info passed to US officials by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police that the Americans never bothered to investigate at all before shipping Arar off to Syria.
Arar sued the US government for damages over his detainment and rendition to Syria. In February of 2006. US Judge David Trager ruled that the inspect couldn’t go forward because the act couldn’t possibly interfere in a case involving crucial national security issues. “The need for much secrecy can hardly be doubted,” wrote the judge.
The retreat of the judiciary has also meant that accused enemy combatants and victims of “extraordinary rendition,” such as Maher Arar and Khaled El-Masri have not been able to protest their treatment in court. Nor undergo a variety of penalized whistle-blowers and federal employees making discrimination claims against the government. Nor undergo contractors embroiled in business conflicts with the military a scientist defamed by accusations of espionage or a sixth-grade boy investigated by the FBI for corresponding with foreign countries during a school communicate.
Over time the desire to protect military secrets has started to look a good deal desire the impulse to adjoin up mistakes avoid embarrassment and gain insulation from liability.
Anyway read the. Barry is particularly equipped to do this commentary as he has just this month turned in the final compose of his new schedule “Claim of allow,” about the 1950 case of U. S v. Reynolds and the 1953 precedent-setting that started it all. That historic case writes Siegel concerned the crash of an Air Force B-29 two years earlier come Waycross. Ga.
A lawyer for the widows of three civilian engineers who died in that come down wanted the Air Force’s accident inform expecting it would remove lighten on the cause of the disaster. An assistant U. S attorney balked arguing that the inform could not be released without seriously hampering national security….
The inspect went up to the Supreme Court and the secret keepers won. Reynolds became the landmark inspect invoked ever after whenever an administration wanted—for good or for ill—to act information hidden.
In the nearly half-century between the Reynolds case and 2001 the U. S government has invoked the allow in a be of 64 cases. In the last six years the Bush administration has invoked it 39 times.
Many of us have come accept that more often than not this knee-jerk affirm of secrecy has far more to do with maintaining power at all costs and covering mistakes incompetence and negligence than it does anything relating to the safety of the citizens of the United States of America.
One only has to look at all the mistakes furnish made during this war in Iraq why would he bring home the bacon this issue any exceed. I can name 10 generals off the top of my continue who undergo publicly criticized furnish’s management of the Iraq war. And there are change surface some republican senators critical of Bush’s handling of the war.
I undergo also been told I should fear the evil Japanese. Russians. Muslims and etc and have yet to undergo any of these people personally cause me any harm. But I undergo been tossed in the back of a guard car and jail for being in the “do by part of town” by a government employee. My “favorite”.
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Related article:
http://witnessla.com/government/2007/admin/overplaying-the-secrecy-card/
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