He joined Fox News in View the discussion thread. Skip to main content. Don't miss a brief. Sign up for our daily email. Your Email. Contributors Become a Contributor. All Rights Reserved. Since the creation of this privilege, the feds have employed it dozens of times to block folks suing the government. They have even employed it in such a way as to block themselves from completing criminal prosecutions, which let free some defendants whom the feds told courts were dangerous and guilty of serious felonies.
Last week, in a military courtroom at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and in the Supreme Court, the government's passion for secrecy and compulsion to escape embarrassment and accountability reached new lows. In pretrial proceedings, lawyers often argue to the court over the admissibility of documents in the case. In the Gitmo case, the judge ordered the government to release thousands of pages of documents — many about the torture of the defendants -- with redactions of the state secrets.
A redacted document blocks out the redacted words, with the remainder of the document generally readable. At the end of the pretrial oral argument in this criminal conspiracy case, defense counsel walked over to the government's table and showed the prosecutors more than 1, pages of documents in the case marked classified, but with no redactions.
These were the same identical documents that the prosecutors had insisted bear redactions because the redacted materials — according to the government — constituted state secrets, the revelation of which would harm national security. The judge ordered the government lawyers to review all redacted documents and justify all redactions.
According to the CIA, which authored and released the documents, none of the redactions in the government version of the documents defense counsel brought into the courtroom contained any secrets. As well last week, in a lawsuit in which a group of Muslim men sued the FBI for warrantless spying, the government claimed it could not defend the case without revealing state secrets and so the case should be dismissed.
The government's argument is absurd, as the undercover FBI informant who joined and was spying on the group was so violently provocative that the defendants themselves reported him to the FBI, his bosses! And two Supreme Court justices during oral argument, knowledgeable of the fraudulent origins of the state secrets privilege, suggested that the government cannot have it both ways — either reveal the so-called secrets to a jury or pay for the unlawful surveillance.
Lawyers who pull fast ones on their adversaries and who lie to the court are supposed to pay dearly. They can be disciplined to the point of the loss of their licenses to practice law, or their case can even be dismissed or the case against their clients won by an adversary due to their misconduct.
But the government rarely punishes its own. Because this is a government that recognizes no limits to its powers, we have come to expect its excesses. When the government uses the resources it has taken from us to lie, cheat, steal, torture and kill — and there is no outrage — we have reached a new moral low.
The sensitivity of our collective consciences has been dulled by the repetitive behavior of a government whose officials and agents work without discerning right from wrong, and in utter disregard of the laws they have sworn to uphold.
Why do we tolerate this? Andrew P.
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