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by Makia Freeman
February 03, 2017
from
Freedom-Articles
Website
The state secrets privilege is way the government,
or more precisely
the Military Intelligence Complex that runs it,
retains control in
legal skirmishes.
State Secrets
Privilege
is the cunning way the Military Intelligence Complex (MIC) shields
its secrets from the judicial branch and achieves undeserved legal
immunity.
Eisenhower famously referred to the
Military Industrial
Complex in
his outgoing speech, but these days, the dark heart of
the
Deep State or Shadow Government would better be called the
Military Intelligence Complex.
The Matrix or entrenched system that
surrounds us cannot change with the election of Trump or a new
leader, unless many determined steps are taken to dismantle the
sprawling MIC monster.
The MIC has unprecedented and highly
consolidated power in its hands that comes from monitoring, surveilling and spying upon almost every person in the world.
Even
when it is challenged, the executive branch of the US Government (to
protect the MIC) invokes state secrets privilege to prevent legal
cases being heard in court.
What is the State Secrets
Privilege?
First of all to
definitions - what exactly is state secrets privilege?
The
Center for Constitutional Rights defines it as follows:
"The
state secrets privilege
(SSP)
is a common law privilege that allows the head of an executive
department to refuse
to produce evidence in a court case on the grounds that the
evidence is secret information that would harm national security
or foreign relation interests if disclosed."
Like common law
itself as used in the US, Australia, Canada and other culturally
similar nations, the state secrets privilege actually originates in
England.
The law allowed the monarch (similar to the US executive
branch) the privilege of refusing to share information with
Parliament (similar to the US legislative branch) or the courts (the
judicial branch).
Slowly but surely, the US executive branch,
especially during the administration of
George W. Bush (Boy Bush),
has asserted this privilege more and more to cover up information it
doesn't want exposed.
I say the executive branch but what is really
driving this is the MIC.
With state secrets privilege, the
intelligence community can prevent any investigation into sensitive
issues, halt disclosure of pertinent information in an investigation
and stop any lawsuits it wants to quash.
Setting a Precedent -
United
States vs. Reynolds
Trevor Paglen is an
author and researcher who studies the black sites and black ops of
the MIC.
His book
Blank Spots on the
Map - The Dark Geography of the Pentagon's Secret World exposes
a lot of the geographical black locations and operations of the US
military - and the concomitant legal opinions and rulings which go
hand in hand with it.
Each black site has a certain geography and
legality to it, and sometimes, in order to get what it wants, the US
Government has to go black and off the map to achieve its secret
goals.
Paglen writes:
"There's nothing natural about how
state secrecy carved a black spot into the law, creating legal
no-man's-lands wherever governmental attorneys cried secret.
In
a field near the Okefenokee Swamp on October 6, 1947, a B-29
crashed and created a collection of facts on the ground.
In the name of protecting a secret
project aboard the crashed plane, the White House would appeal a
lawsuit brought by the families of the deceased men, United
States v. Reynolds, up to
the Supreme Court.
The executive branch would find a
favorable decision, and the state secrets privilege would become
a juridicial precedent."
When the B-29
crashed, the USAF was in the final stages of conducting
Project
Banshee, an operation to, among other things, convert bombers into
unmanned drones.
Several people were killed in the crash but it
didn't want the info about the project to get out.
The dead men's
widows hired lawyers to take the government to court in 1953. The USAF invoked the state secrets privilege. The judge said okay, then
give me the document so I can personally review it. No, said the Air
Force.
The government lawyer
Thomas Curtin said,
"We contend that the findings of the
head of the department are binding, and the judiciary cannot waive
it."
Translation:
judge, let it go. We're not going to give you
the documents because we
decided not to.
The
state secrets privilege - give 'em an inch, they take a mile.
Legalized Executive Secrecy =
Lack of Accountability = More Executive Power
The judge didn't
agree with the contention of the executive branch, and ruled in
favor of the widows.
The case was appealed and a higher court
concurred with the lower court's opinion. However, once more the
case was appealed and went all the way to the Supreme Court.
As Paglen writes:
"When the widow's case reached the
Supreme Court, it found a cast of presiding judges with a robust
view of executive power.
The Vinson court was composed of
Roosevelt appointees who'd been specifically selected to
authorize the sweeping powers the late president sought to
implement the New Deal and the Second World War… [in a similar
case governmental attorneys] argued that there were essentially
only two limitations on executive power:
"One is the ballot box
and the other is impeachment."
Was the administration arguing
that when a sovereign people elected a government,
it was limiting the Congress and the judiciary but not the
executive, asked District Judge David Pine?
"That's our
conception, Your Honor," Assistant Attorney General Holmes Baldridge answered.
Chief Vinson
delivered a verdict that overturned the decision of the lower courts
and handed massive power to the executive branch:
"In the majority opinion, Vinson
recognized that 'abandonment of judicial control' over the state
secrets privilege 'would lead to intolerable abuses', even as
his own opinion effectively abandoned the very principle of
judicial oversight…
Half a century later, it would turn out the
ancient reports related to Project Banshee… contained
absolutely no classified information whatsoever.
They did,
however, contain ample evidence of government negligence,
evidence that if revealed would have proved the widows right.
The state secrets privilege, it would turn out, was based on a
lie."
Bush, Cheney, Neocons and Co. Run
Away with Unchecked Executive Power
The MIC was setup
in the aftermath of World War 2.
There were several key steps or
decisions, such as Truman,
The Supreme Court ruling on the
Reynolds case, enthroning the principle of the state secrets
privilege, added to all this in 1953.
After the
false flag attack of 9/11 and the subsequent
War on Terror, the
MIC gained even more power, aided by the
Boy Bush Administration
which was happy to skirt the law in numerous ways, including
overseeing the proliferation of,
Guantanamo Bay, still not closed,
was chosen as one of the sites deliberately because it's in a legal
no man's land, in between full possession of the US and Cuba,
without the constitutional protections afforded to people living in
the US (or Cuba).
The prisoners there didn't even have the ability
to claim habeas corpus, an
old legal remedy which usually allows a person to be released unless
lawful grounds are shown for their detention.
In short, the US,
the MIC and all its minions created off-map zones where they could
do whatever the f*ck they wanted - with no oversight and zero
accountability.
Once more from
Paglen:
"In the hours after 9/11, it
became clear to everyone in the Bush administration that there
would be a war.
'Any barriers in your way, they
are gone,' he told Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. 'I don't
care what the international lawyers say, we are going
to kick some ass'…
The CIA, an agency designed to
operate outside the law, was now free to pursue its vision of
a new world, to create new
geographies, and to keep that world's details far from the
public record.
The
black world
was supercharged with newfound life and purpose."
You Don't Have Need to Know
The state secrets
privilege is a manifestation of the larger arrogance shown by
tyranny.
-
It's all about hiding behind national security, being "read
in" or not, being cleared to know or not - being judged for whether
you have the need to know or
not.
-
It's all about compartmentalization, just as mind control (pet
project of the Nazis and CIA) itself is.
-
It's all about escaping
liability. It's all about power. Presidents don't even have the need
to know, as
JFK found out the hard way.
And, if you do
know, then you better keep it to yourself… or else.
Obama
was the king of punishing whistleblowers severely. The
US Government has become a master at intimidating and silencing
whistleblowers through various means.
As former CIA Officer Kevin
Shipp attests:
"There is a massive, mammoth,
complex secret mechanism in the U.S. Government.
It's called the
intelligence community. It
is so powerful that not even the Congress or the Senate can
control it. Matter of fact, it controls them. It does whatever
it wants.
They have these Senate
investigations, and they'll come and they say,
'Sorry
Senator, we can't tell you what we're doing because you don't
have the agency clearance.'
And
that's where it's shut down."
Those truly
interested in freedom need to put their attention on the MIC and its
mechanisms.
Focusing too much on puppet politicians who come and go
every 4 years or so is not going to change the underlying fabric of
society - which is now bending towards tyranny...
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