What does Bush have to hide from the American People?
Executive Order 13233 - George W. Bush extended the accessibility of the State Secrets Privilege to allow former Presidents, and the offspring and descendants of former presidents, to invoke it to bar records from their tenure.
Maher Arar - The privilege was invoked against a case where Maher Arar, a wrongfully-accused and tortured victim sought to sue Attorney General John Ashcroft for his role in deporting Arar to Syria to face torture and extract false confessions. It was formally invoked by Deputy Attorney General James B. Comey in legal papers filed in the Eastern District of New York. The invocation read "Litigating (the) plaintiff's complaint would necessitate disclosure of classified information", which it later stated included disclosure of the basis for detaining him in the first place, the basis for refusing to deport him to Canada as he had requested, and the basis for sending him to Syria.
CNN - CNN's top war correspondent, Christiane Amanpour, says that the press muzzled itself during the Iraq war. And, she says CNN "was intimidated" by the Bush administration and Fox News, which "put a climate of fear and self-censorship."
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 in 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.
ExxonMobil - ExxonMobil's activities in the Indonesian territory of Aceh, where the company extracts and exports natural gas, have attracted scrutiny. In June 2001, ExxonMobil became the target of a lawsuit in the Federal District Court of the District of Columbia, under the Alien Tort Claims Act. The suit alleged that the company knowingly assisted human rights violations, including torture, murder and rape, by employing and providing material support to Indonesian military forces, who committed the alleged offenses in Aceh. The U.S. State Department filed an opinion in the case in July 2002, requesting that the suit, brought by the International Labor Rights Fund, be dismissed on national security grounds.
James Hansen - NASA's top climate scientist has accused the Bush administration of trying to stop him from speaking out after he called for swift cuts in emissions of the greenhouse gases linked to global warming in a recent lecture.
Jeffrey Sterling -The Supreme Court rejected an appeal from a former covert CIA officer who accused the agency of race discrimination. Jeffrey Sterling, who is black, had sued CIA director Porter Goss and 10 employees. A judge dismissed the case on grounds that the litigation would require the disclosure of highly classified information. The Justice Department claimed that allowing the lawsuit to go forward would threaten “state secrets,” or national security.
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, 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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_Secrets_Privilegehttp://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10776953/http://www.usatoday.com/life/columnist/mediamix/2003-09-14-media-mix_x.htmhttp://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn8650
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