I watched All the President's Men last night, for the first time in 20 years. What struck me was not just the less-obeisant Washington press, or a still-cute Dustin Hoffman: it was how relatively innocent the Nixon's administration's abuses seemed. to me -- even its abuse of counter-intelligence, when compared to how deeply these guys are working to embed such practices into the "normal" range of executive power. And while Marvin Kalb's Financial Times piece What Watergate Can Teach the White House (via Talk Left) points to the danger of perjury charges in the WHIG scanda, he doesn't acknowledge that to these guys, when the law goes against them it's time to change the law.
Even "cover-up" has to go by a new name. In a New York courtroom, a judge is finally hearing Maher Arar's suit against the INS and Justice Department . The judge is scratching his head at the government's invocation of the "state secrets" privilege, rarely used before this administration's Etch-a-Sketch approach to the Constitution.
In addition to claiming that valuable state secrets would have to be spilled in discovery -- precluding any discussion of whether Maher Arar should have been abducted and shipped to Syria, where he was tortured -- this privilege has been invoked in a range of cases.. Inter-Press Service reports: Steven Aftergood, who heads the Project on Government Secrecy for the Federation of American Scientists, told IPS, "Once rarely invoked, the state secrets privilege is now increasingly used by the government as a 'get out of jail free' card to block unwanted litigation."
Including employment discrimination:
Jeffrey Sterling, an operations officer with the CIA in its Near East and South Asia Division from 1993-2001, claimed he was told he was "too big and black" to receive certain CIA assignments, and that CIA management placed expectations on him "far above those required of non-African-American Operations Officers." He also contended he was retaliated against for using the CIA's internal equal employment opportunity process.
However, the court noted, "There is no way for Sterling to prove employment discrimination without exposing at least some classified details of the covert employment that gives context to his claim."
The IPS story (no link yet, sorry) also notes the use of this strategy in the cases of Sibel Edmonds and Wen Ho Lee.