I am not going to re-visit the many-times-repeated details of the SSP invocation in my case. The legal outline of SSP abuse by the Bush Administration invoked to cover up ‘criminal’ activities and subsequent cover up of these criminal activities can be found on the ACLU site. According to Ann Beeson, former legal director at the ACLU:
“The state secrets privilege should be used as a shield for sensitive evidence, not a sword the government can use at will to cut off argument in a case before the evidence can be presented. We are urging the Supreme Court, which has not directly addressed this issue in 50 years, to rein in the government's misuse of this privilege."
In my case the government also used the privilege to exclude members of the press from covering the court proceedings:
“The ACLU is also asking the Supreme Court to reverse the D.C. appeals court's decision to exclude the press and public from the court hearing of Edmonds' case in April. The appeals court closed the hearing at the eleventh hour without any specific findings that secrecy was necessary.”
How does this case fit the Congress’ criteria to exclude?
-On ‘Executive criminality & Covering it Up by invocation of SSP & abuses of classification:
In addition to the Dickerson Case, which was characterized by Senator Grassley as “a very major internal security breach, and a potential espionage breach," and later confirmed by the DOJ-IG (investigation [PDF]), my case also involves espionage activities by several high-level U.S. officials, both elected and appointed. Several elected officials, an official at the State Department, and a few high-level officials in the Pentagon were involved in passing highly classified information to foreign entities connected to Turkey, Pakistan and Israel. Along with the confirmed Dickerson case involving Lt. Colonel Douglas Dickerson - who worked for Douglas Feith and Marc Grossman - other connected officials’ espionage activities were also covered up by invoking SSP.
-On Partisan Focus & Excluding other Administrations’ abuses:
· The information involved in my case covered the time period 1996-2002. It involved two administrations and two political parties.
· Similarly, information implicating several elected officials in major corruption cases also involved both parties.
-On Congress’ bigoted view of Public Sympathy
· My case does not fit the ‘War on Terror’ excuse.
· The case didn’t involve a ‘mistaken’ suspect terrorist or suspect organization.
· I, as the plaintiff, was and am a United States Citizen, thus my constitutional rights were directly violated by invocation of SSP.
I believe providing background on and an overview of these two relevant and major SSP cases will suffice to establish the reasons behind the intentional sanitization of SSP media coverage and other reports - so far successfully achieved by the executive branch and the Congress.
The recent ‘supposed’ leak of a report by the Congressional Research Service on SSP under the title of “The State Secrets Privilege and Other Limits on Litigation Involving Classified Information” is a very appropriate example:
