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The Law : The State Secrets Privilege: From Bush II to Obama
Author(s) -
Fisher Louis
Publication year - 2016
Publication title -
presidential studies quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.337
H-Index - 5
eISSN - 1741-5705
pISSN - 0360-4918
DOI - 10.1111/psq.12257
Subject(s) - privilege (computing) , administration (probate law) , political science , law , state (computer science) , government (linguistics) , terrorism , power (physics) , linguistics , philosophy , physics , algorithm , quantum mechanics , computer science
Following the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Bush administration relied heavily on the state secrets privilege to defend executive actions. When Barack Obama entered office, he announced that the privilege had been “over‐used” by the Bush administration and offered this as a first principle: “We must not protect information merely because it reveals the violation of a law or embarrassments to the government.” Yet the Obama administration continued to rely on the privilege to protect litigants from challenging abusive, illegal, and unconstitutional actions by the Bush administration and applied the privilege to entirely new assertions of executive power.