Wednesday, August 03, 2011

The State Has Many Secrets

In February, numerous American Muslims and groups sued the FBI, alleging -- based on the confessions of a former paid FBI informant -- that Muslim individuals and mosques were randomly targeted for surveillance and infiltration in violation of their First Amendment rights and rights to be free from religious discrimination. So extreme was the FBI informant's efforts to lure mosque members into Terrorist plots -- following the FBI's typical pattern of manufacturing its own plots and then touting it success in stopping them -- that members in one of the targeted mosques actually called law enforcement authorities to report the informant for appearing dangerous and unstable.

[...]

Yesterday, the Obama DOJ responded to the lawsuit [...] by demanding dismissal based on the "state secrets" privilege -- claiming that even if they violated these Americans' religious freedoms and discriminated against them, "allowing the [claims] to be litigated would require the disclosure of sensitive national security information."

[...]

Yet again we see the radical perversion of the "state secrets" privilege pioneered by the Bush administration and continued in earnest by the Obama DOJ from what it began as -- a document-specific evidentiary privilege -- into sweeping immunity instrument which literally removes the President and his underlings from the rule of law (even if we broke the law, our actions are too secret to judicially scrutinize).

  Glenn Greenwald

It’s good to be king.

No comments:

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated. There may be some delay before your comment is published. It all depends on how much time M has in the day. But please comment!