Our Ms. Brooks: The Importance of Being Secretive

The Los Angeles Times has moved Rosa Brooks' column to Thursdays, but the shift hasn't altered Ms. Brooks snarkonic style, I'm pleased to report. Her first Thursday column takes on the subject of the wrong-headed Supreme Court decision involving the mistaken rendition of a German citizen by the CIA.

After nearly five months of secret detention, El-Masri was understandably ticked off. He went to court to seek redress but was rebuffed by the conservative U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals in Richmond, Va., which accepted the government's argument that state secrets might be jeopardized if the case were allowed to move forward. And this week, the Supreme Court declined to overrule the lower court.

This was convenient for an administration obsessed with secrecy, but it lets stand an unfortunate judicial ratification of a very dangerous idea: that government officials can ignore the law with impunity, then stop lawsuits by simply asserting that a court case would jeopardize national security. ...

Still, there's nothing wrong with a narrow state secrets privilege. In principle, the government has a legitimate need to keep certain information out of the public domain. Think nuclear weapons activation codes, details on covert agents, etc.

But there's a big difference between citing the privilege to prevent specific bits of legitimately classified information from getting out and using the privilege to hide government actions that are illegal in and of themselves.

In the El-Masri case, it's hard to imagine any legitimate basis for the government's blanket invocation of the state secrets privilege. For one thing, the actions of the U.S. government agents who allegedly abducted and abused El-Masri would have been illegal. For another, the "extraordinary renditions" program isn't a secret: The president has acknowledged it.

Finally, El-Masri's case has received extensive media coverage, and many elements of his story have already been thoroughly investigated and corroborated by European officials. The German government took up El-Masri's cause, and though the U.S. government has never officially acknowledged his abduction and mistreatment, German Chancellor Angela Merkel says that Condoleezza Rice privately admitted to her that El-Masri had indeed been mistakenly detained by U.S. agents. ...

But this administration is in love with secrecy. Maybe it's because the Bush White House has shown a distinct lack of interest in hewing to the letter of the law, which tends to make the release of any and all details decidedly inconvenient. [Emphasis added]

That, sadly, is a pretty keen analysis of just how the current administration operates. Unfortunately, the Supreme Court (as presently constituted)has decided to buy into the scam, forgetting all of the rules of evidence its members were taught in law school. It's a shame that our Supreme Court Justices have decided that complicity is the better part of valor.