State Secret BS shot down by Courts

One of the things you don’t here the Teabaggers and the rest of the conservatives talking about is Obama’s attempt to use the Bush hail mary play, aka State Secrets.  Obama has used it 3 times already and one of the times has been shot down by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.
What he is essentially attempting to do is wave the state secret card and get out of the case before it even gets going. It’s pretty weak and pretty alarming coming from a lawyer that taught Constitutional Law.

Via TPM.com

From the decision:

Acceding to the government’s request would require us to ignore well-established principles of civil procedure. At this stage in the litigation, we simply cannot prospectively evaluate hypothetical claims of privilege that the government has not yet raised and the district court has not yet considered.”

In other words, asking the court to dismiss the case at this point puts the cart before the horse. The state secrets claim “must be invoked during discovery or at trial,” not at the pleadings stage.” (court’s itals)

The Jeppesen case is one of the three national security cases in which the Obama administration has invoked state secrets (the other two cases involve warrantless wiretapping). This despite the fact that, as a candidate, Obama criticized President Bush for too frequently invoking the privilege.

It is one of the low points of his first 100 days not one person has mentioned.  He gets an F on this one.