Evidentiary rule in the US
The state secrets privilege is an evidentiary rule created by United States legal precedent. Application of the privilege results in exclusion of evidence from a legal case based solely on affidavits submitted by the government stating that court proceedings might disclose sensitive information which might endanger national security. "United States v. Reynolds", which involved alleged military secrets, was the first case that saw formal recognition of the privilege.
Following a claim of "state secrets privilege", the court rarely conducts an "in camera" examination of the evidence to evaluate whether there is sufficient cause to support the use of this doctrine. This results in court rulings in which even the judge has not verified the veracity of the assertion. The privileged material is completely removed from the litigation, and the court must determine how the unavailability of the privileged information affects the case.
Function.
The purpose of the state secrets privilege is to prevent courts from revealing state secrets in the course of civil litigation. The government may intervene in any civil suit, including when it is not a party to the litigation, to ask the court to exclude state secrets evidence. While the courts may examine such evidence closely, in practice they generally defer to the Executive Branch. Once the court has agreed that evidence is subject to the state secrets privilege, it is excluded from the litigation. Often, as a practical matter, the plaintiff cannot continue the suit without the privileged information, and drops the case.
Distinguished from other legal doctrines.
The state secrets privilege is related to, but distinct from, several other legal doctrines: the principle of non-justiciability in certain cases involving state secrets (the so-called "Totten Rule"); certain prohibitions on the publication of classified information (as in "New York Times Co. v. United States", the Pentagon Papers case); and the use of classified information in criminal cases (governed by the Classified Information Procedures Act).
History.
Origins.
The doctrine was effectively imported from English common law which has the similar public-interest immunity. It is debatable whether the state secrets privilege is based upon the President's powers as commander-in-chief and leader of foreign policy (as suggested in "United States v. Nixon") or derived from the idea of separation of powers (as suggested in "United States v. Reynolds"). It seems that the US privilege "has its initial roots in Aaron Burr's trial for treason". In this case, it was alleged that a letter from General James Wilkinson to President Thomas Jefferson might contain state secrets and could therefore not be divulged without risk to national security.
Supreme Court recognition in "United States v. Reynolds".
The privilege was first officially recognized by the Supreme Court of the United States in "United States v. Reynolds", 345 U.S. 1 (1953). A military airplane crashed. The widows of three civilian crew members sought accident reports on the crash but were told that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber's top-secret mission. The court held that only the government can claim or waive the privilege, but that it “is not to be lightly invoked” and that there “must be a formal claim of privilege, lodged by the head of the department which has control over the matter, after actual personal consideration by that officer.” The court stressed that the decision to withhold evidence is to be made by the presiding judge and not the executive.
In 2000, the accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that the assertion that they contained secret information was untrue.
Recent use.
According to former White House Counsel, John Dean:
While precise numbers are hard to come by (because not all cases are reported), a recent study reports that the "Bush administration has invoked the state secrets privilege in 23 cases since 2001." By way of comparison, "between 1953 and 1976, the government invoked the privilege in only four cases."
These figures were later retracted, as they were based on erroneous information:
Correction: In this article, we incorrectly reported that the government invoked the state secrets privilege in 23 cases since 2001. The figure came from the 2005 Secrecy Report Card published by OpenTheGovernment.org. The privilege was actually invoked seven times from 2001 to 2005, according to the corrected 2005 report card, which is not an increase from previous decades.
Following the September 11, 2001 attacks, the privilege is increasingly used to dismiss entire court cases, instead of only withholding the sensitive information from a case. Also in 2001, George W. Bush issued Executive Order 13233 extending the accessibility of the state secrets privilege to also allow "former" presidents, their designated representatives, or representatives designated by their families, to invoke it to bar records from their tenure. An article in the "New York Times" in August 2007, regarding a lawsuit involving Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication, concluded that judges were more willing to ask the government to validate its claims.
Criticism.
Since 2001, there has been mounting criticism of the state secrets privilege. Such criticism generally falls into four categories:
Weak external validation of executive assertion of privilege.
Many commentators have expressed concern that the courts never effectively scrutinize executive claims of privilege. Lacking independent national security expertise, judges frequently defer to the judgment of the executive and never subject executive claims to meaningful scrutiny.
Executive abuse of the privilege to conceal embarrassing facts.
Commentators have suggested that the state secrets privilege might be used to prevent disclosure of embarrassing facts as often as it is invoked to protect legitimate secrets. In the words of Professors William G. Weaver and Robert M. Pallitto in a Political Science Quarterly article:[T]he incentive on the part of administrators is to use the privilege to avoid embarrassment, handicap political enemies, and to prevent criminal investigation of administrative action.
In several prominent cases, the evidence that the government successfully excluded was later revealed to contain no state secrets: "United States v. Reynolds", "Sterling v. Tenet", "Edmonds v. Department of Justice", and the "Pentagon Papers".
Expansion into a justiciability doctrine.
Some academics and practitioners have criticized the expansion of the state secrets privilege from an evidentiary privilege (designed to exclude certain pieces of evidence) to a justiciability doctrine (designed to exclude entire lawsuits). Under its original formulation, the state secrets privilege was meant only to exclude a very narrow class of evidence whose revelation would harm national security. However, in a large percentage of recent cases, courts have gone a step further, dismissing entire cases in which the government asserts the privilege, in essence converting an evidentiary rule into a justiciability rule. The government response has been that in certain cases, the subject of the case is itself privileged. In these cases, the government argues, there is no plausible way to respond to a complaint without revealing state secrets.
Elimination of judicial check on executive power.
Glenn Greenwald alleges that the Bush administration attempted to expand executive power, as evidenced by the unitary executive theory propagated by John Yoo. The theory suggests that the President, as Commander-in-Chief, cannot be bound by Congress or any law, national or international. By invoking the state secrets privilege in cases involving actions taken in the war on terror (e.g. extraordinary rendition, cases of torture, NSA warrantless surveillance), Greenwald opines the administration tried to evade judicial review of these claims of exceptional war powers. In effect, this is preventing a judicial ruling determining whether there is a legal basis for such expansive executive power.
Calls for reform.
In recent years, a number of commentators have called for legislative reforms to the state secrets privilege. These reforms center around several ideas:
On January 22, 2008, Senators Edward Kennedy, Patrick Leahy and Arlen Specter introduced , the State Secrets Protection Act.
Court cases.
"United States v. Reynolds".
In "United States v. Reynolds" (1953), the widows of three crew members of a B-29 Superfortress bomber that had crashed in 1948 sought accident reports on the crash, but were told the release of such details would threaten national security by revealing the nature of the bomber's top-secret mission. The Supreme Court ruled that the executive branch could bar evidence from the court if it deemed that its release would impair national security. In 1996, the accident reports in question were declassified and released, and when discovered in 2000 were found to contain no secret information. They did, however, contain information about the poor condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force's case. Many legal experts have alleged government abuse of secrecy in this landmark case.
Richard Horn.
Former DEA agent Richard Horn brought a suit against the CIA for bugging his home. The case was dismissed because of the privilege.
Richard Horn's case was reinstated on July 20, 2009, by U.S. District Court Judge Royce C. Lamberth on the basis that the CIA had engaged in fraud on the court.
On March 30, 2010, as a result of a multimillion-dollar settlement agreement between Horn and the government, Lamberth dismissed the underlying case with prejudice. Subsequently, later that same year, in a September 22 order, Lamberth issued a final order vacating his earlier opinions and orders finding that Arthur Brown, the former CIA station chief in Burma, and George Tenet had committed fraud on the court. Lamberth also specifically ordered that a sentence be removed from his March 30, 2010 Memorandum. The removed sentence had stated that "allegations of wrongdoing by the government attorneys in this case are not only credible, they are admitted".
Notra Trulock.
In February 2002, it was invoked in the case of Notra Trulock, who launched a defamation suit against Los Alamos scientist Wen Ho Lee, falsely charged with stealing nuclear secrets; President Bush stated that national security would be compromised if Trulock were allowed to seek damages from Lee; though it resulted in the case being dismissed, another suit was launched directly attacking then-FBI Director Louis Freeh for interfering and falsely invoking the state secrets privilege.
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 on September 11, 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.
Thomas Burnett.
The privilege was invoked in "Thomas Burnett vs. Al Barka Investment &amp; Development Corporation" (Civil No. 04ms203) a motion to quash a subpoena for the testimony of Sibel Edmonds. The government's motion to quash based on state secrets privilege was granted in part.
"Sterling v. Tenet".
Jeffrey Sterling was an African-American CIA agent who started a racial discrimination suit. It was thrown out on account of this privilege.
Nira Schwartz.
The privilege was invoked in "Schwartz vs. TRW" (Civil No. 96-3065, Central District, California) a qui tam claim by Schwartz. Intervention and assertion of the state secrets privilege, by the government, resulted in case dismissal.
Crater Corporation.
The privilege was invoked in the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit case of "Crater Corporation vs. Lucent Technologies Inc." and AT&amp;T Company, in September 2005. Crater was prevented from proceeding with discovery in its patent infringement case (U.S. Patent No. 5,286,129) by the United States' assertion that discovery could cause "extremely grave damage to national security". The infringement case centered on wet-mate underwater fiber optic coupling devices beneath the sea.
"ACLU vs. NSA".
On May 26, 2006, the U.S. Justice Department filed a motion to dismiss "ACLU v. NSA", the ACLU's lawsuit against the NSA by invoking the state secrets privilege. On July 26, 2006, the case was dismissed. In a different case in Michigan, brought by the ACLU against the NSA on behalf of various scholars, journalists, attorneys, and national non-profit organizations, Judge Anna Diggs Taylor ruled on August 17, 2006, that the program was unconstitutional and should be halted. She upheld the doctrine but ruled that the government's public statements concerning the operation were admissible and constituted sufficient proof for the case to continue without any privileged evidence or discovery. On July 6, 2007, the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals threw out Taylor's decision, ruling 2-1 that the ACLU could not produce evidence to prove that the ACLU had been wrongfully wiretapped by the NSA and therefore did not have the standing to