State Secrets Privilege Used Improperly, Court is Told
When the government intervened in a private lawsuit to assert the state secrets privilege and to seek dismissal of the entire proceeding (Secrecy News, September 15), it acted improperly and misused the state secrets privilege, the attorney for the plaintiff in the case told the Court yesterday.
“The Government has improperly invoked the state secrets privilege, deprived Plaintiffs of the opportunity to test the Government’s claims through the adversarial process, and limited the Court’s opportunity to make an informed judgment,” wrote Abbe D. Lowell, the plaintiff’s attorney in Restis v. United Against Nuclear Iran.
Specifically, by refusing to identify the subject or scope of the privileged information, or even the agency that was asserting the privilege, the government has “violate[d] any semblance of due process” and “prevent[ed] the opposing party from understanding the claim in any fashion,” he wrote.
The Government says that “the identity of the concerned federal agency, the particular information at issue, and the bases for the assertion of the state secrets privilege cannot be disclosed without revealing classified and privileged matters,” according to a memorandum filed September 12.
But Mr. Lowell asked the Court to order the Government to file a public declaration in support of its privilege claim so that the Plaintiff could offer a substantive rebuttal.
“In the typical state secrets case, the Government will simultaneously file both a sealed ex parte declaration and a detailed public declaration,” Mr. Lowell noted. “The Government has not offered any explanation as to why it cannot do so here. [In other state secrets cases,] there always is some way for the Government to identify the nature of its privilege claim without disclosing the privileged information itself.”
“Absent further disclosure from the Government, the Plaintiffs cannot meaningfully respond to the Government’s claim. The Plaintiffs cannot test whether the supposed evidence at issue is a state secret, and they also cannot test the relevance of that evidence to its case.”
“In every other case of which we are aware, the Government made sufficient public disclosure of the nature of the state secrets and its reasons for seeking dismissal to allow those claims to be tested, and all Plaintiffs ask is that the Government do so here, so that Plaintiffs can then respond adequately to the actual motions filed,” Mr. Lowell wrote.
“The Plaintiffs plan to advance their claims without using any state secrets,” he noted, “and it is not clear how state secrets could be relevant to the defense.”
The FAS Nuclear Notebook is one of the most widely sourced reference materials worldwide for reliable information about the status of nuclear weapons, and has been published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists since 1987.. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: Director Hans […]
On 14 April 2023, the Belarusian Ministry of Defence released a short video of a Su-25 pilot explaining his new role in delivering “special [nuclear] munitions” following his training in Russia. The features seen in the video, as well as several other open-source clues, suggest that Lida Air Base––located only 40 kilometers from the Lithuanian border and the […]
A photo in a Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) student briefing from 2022 shows four people inspecting what appears to be a damaged B61 nuclear bomb.
In early-February 2023, the Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM) had informed Congress that China now has more launchers for Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) than the United States. The report is the latest in a serious of revelations over the past four years about China’s growing nuclear weapons arsenal and the deepening […]