Congressional Quarterly: State Secret Abuses Come To A Boil (Sibel Edmonds Referenced)

[Hissyspit]

http://cqpolitics.com/wmspage.cfm?parm1=5&docID=hsnews-000002665089

State Secret Abuses Come to a Boil
By Jeff Stein, CQ National Security Editor

Imagine members of a Mission Impossible team listening to their assignment. They get the usual warning about the government disowning them if they’re caught. Then the voice on the tape casually adds, “If we screw up, don’t even think of complaining, much less suing. If you do, you’ll be crushed.” It’s not so far-fetched.

Our secret warriors silently put their lives on the line without complaint. And it’s in their nature to blow the whistle on the slackers, nincompoops, bigots, idiots and cheats in their business, especially in the executive suites.

Such due diligence is seldom rewarded. In fact, it’s often punished. Often they leave, a few stay on to fight. They rarely succeed. Eventually they’re forced out, or quit in disgust,

Some turn to the courts for redress. And that’s when they encounter the judicial version of a neutron bomb, the state secrets privilege.

For more than 50 years, it’s allowed the spy agencies to pre-empt troublesome suits by declaring a matter so sensitive that mere mention of any of its elements in court, no matter how oblique, would cause “grave damage” to U.S. national security. The judges usually go along, the record shows, sometimes without even examining the documents themselves.

Big surprise: Sometimes the spy agencies don’t tell the truth.

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The law journals are filled with treatises on the misuse and inequities of the state secrets privilege established in Reynolds.

It’s easy to forget there are real people involved. Gag orders prohibit them from talking.

Shrouded in Secrecy
There’s Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA operative who filed a suit in 2001 accusing the spy agency of tolerating racist behavior that sabotages the advancement of African-Americans such as himself.

Maybe Sterling was mistaken, but we’ll never really know.

George Tenet, who headed the CIA at the time, invoked the state secrets privilege to get the case thrown out.

- snip -

Case closed.

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There’s former Special Agent Mike German, forced out of the FBI after 16 years when he wouldn’t put up with superiors falsifying documents in a domestic terrorism case. Internal investigations have proven him right, but his odds of getting a fair shake in court are slim with the government throwing a cloak of secrecy over the case.

Similarly, FBI translator Sibel Edmonds was forced out after she blew the whistle on irregularities and security problems in the translations unit, including evidence of high-level corruption involving U.S. and Turkish officials. As with Mike German, an inspector general validated her allegations, but her case remains shrouded in official secrecy, even though she broker her own silence in a Times of London article earlier this year.

Regular readers here will also remember the case of Richard Barlow, the former CIA and Pentagon nuclear black-market expert who was fired when he told Congress about the Reagan and first Bush administration’s shady dealings with Pakistan.

Barlow sued, but the CIA and Pentagon both screamed “state secrets” and got the case thrown out.

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1. Thanks. K & R

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