Today the U.S. government is constantly invoking “State Secrets Privilege” to shut down lawsuits against the government and keep the American people from knowing the truth about government affairs. When Americans file lawsuits against the government or its blood-brother corporate agents, the government asserts “state secrets privilege” to force the courts to throw out the lawsuits. The government claims that even answering or discussing lawsuits about unconstitutional surveillance, spying and invasions of privacy would imperil national security and alert ISIS (or other bogeyman threats, most of which are creations of western intelligence agencies) to the government’s defense operations.
But the “state secrets privilege” was invented by fraud. The privilege was first officially recognized by the U.S. Supreme Court in United States v. Reynolds, 345 U.S. 1 (1953). The case involved widows of three civilians (RCA employees, actually) who died when a military airplane they were riding in crashed in Georgia. The widows filed suit and sought discovery of the accident reports. The U.S. government refused to provide the accident reports, claiming that to release such details would threaten national security by revealing the bomber’s top-secret mission. For the first time, the federal courts adopted the idea of “state secrets privilege,” and shut down the lawsuit.
There was language in the U.S. v. Reynolds opinion suggesting that the privilege would never be “lightly invoked.” However, the U.S. government has asserted the privilege on hundreds of occasions in recent years, in order to have lawsuits against itself and its coconspirators dismissed.
In 2000, the Georgia accident reports were declassified and released, and it was found that the assertion that they contained secret information was fraudulent. The reports did, however, contain information about the poor condition of the aircraft itself, which would have been very compromising to the Air Force’s case.
