The Abuse of the State Secrets Privilege

If you've kept up with what's happened in the extraordinary rendition cases against the US government filed on behalf of Maher Arar and Khaled El-Masri, you'll know that they were both dismissed on the grounds that the State Secrets Privilege would be violated if they went ahead. Both cases are now being appealed.

The other infamous litigant involved in a similar fight against the use of that privilege is Sibel Edmonds:

The privilege was invoked twice against Sibel Edmonds. The first invocation was to prevent her from testifying that the Federal Government had foreknowledge that Al-Qaeda intended to use airliners to attack the United States in 2001; the case was a $100 trillion action filed in 2002 by six hundred 9/11 victims' families against officials of the Saudi government and prominent Saudi citizens. The second invocation was in an attempt to derail her personal lawsuit regarding her dismissal from the FBI, where she had worked as a post-9/11 translator and had been a whistleblower.

There's a bit more to it than that.

It has been almost five years now since former FBI translator Sibel Edmonds first contacted the Senate Judiciary Committee to reveal the shocking tale of Turkish bribery of high-level U.S. officials.

As noted on that page, a petition has been forwarded to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform requesting hearings on the abuse of the State Secrets Privilege by the Bush administration. Edmonds' allegations in the Turkish bribery case stretch back to 1996 and involves some very familiar names: Richard Perle, Mark Grossman and Douglas Feith (who General Tommy Franks has called "the fucking stupidest guy on the face of the earth" - that one never gets old.)

antiwar.com radio has an interview (mp3 file) with Edmonds and James Bamford about these issues and you can read the transcript here.

If you're at all interested in the abuses of power that go on behind the scenes, don't miss that interview.

Related:
National Security Whistleblowers Coalition
Sibel Edmonds' site