From Talking Points Memo:
Earlier this week, we flagged an interesting piece in the New York Times about the U.S. government invoking the state secrets privilege to block evidence in lawsuits against a contractor who had duped the U.S. government into spending millions on what many now consider to be fake counterterrorism technology.
According to another recent report, the U.S. invoked state secrets to block a personal injury lawsuit by a CIA employee who alleged that environmental contamination in his home made his family sick. That got us wondering about what else the U.S. has invoked state secrets for--particularly under the Obama administration, which had pledged to end abuses of the privilege.
"Numbers aside, there is a great deal of continuity between the Bush and Obama administrations," Steven Aftergood, a government secrecy expert with the Federation of American Scientists, told us. "And there is no case where the Obama administration has rescinded a claim of state secrets privilege that was advanced by the Bush [administration]."
