So, is it truly the case that Awlaki is indeed the unnamed “national of the United States” here in the Warsame indictment? I don’t know for certain, but it sure as heck fits the facts as we know them and the depraved refusal of the American government to talk about or let the public know its basis for impunity in marking an American citizen for extrajudicial termination with prejudice.

The government has now responded to Risen’s attempt to quash his subpoena in the Jeffrey Sterling case. I fear the government will succeed in at least getting Risen to the stand, not least because of the gimmicks they’ve used to claim they need information not protected by any confidentiality agreement Risen might have had with [...]

While I often disagree with Benjamin Wittes, I rarely think the stuff he writes is sheer nonsense. This post, which attempts to rebut Eugene Robinson’s column on Assassination by Robot, is an exception. I disagree, respectfully, with most of his post. But this bit I find just mindboggling. My former colleague Eugene Robinson has a [...]

The Pentagon Papers were declassified earlier this month. In advance of its formal declassification, the National Archives had announced that 11 words would remain classified. But ultimately, the entire document was released. Kudos to Steven Aftergood for FOIAing the documents that explained what happened. Staffers at the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library discovered on June [...]

I had been predicting for weeks before Obama went to Poland that the Poles would move to quash their investigation into the black site at which KSM and others were tortured. And sure enough, that appears to be what happened. The first move actually happened before Obama arrived in Poland: three days before Obama got [...]

The government appears to hope three time’s a charm. The last two times they subpoenaed James Risen in the case of Jeffrey Sterling, Judge Leonie Brinkema quashed the subpoena. But they’re trying again, this time to get him to testify at Sterling’s trial. It appears likely they planned to do this all along and crafted [...]

SCOTUS just declined to take the Jeppesen Dataplan suit. The high court rejected an appeal by five men who claimed that U.S. operatives—with support from Jeppesen Dataplan Inc., a Boeing unit—abducted them and sent them to other countries where they were tortured. They alleged Jeppesen provided critical flight planning and logistical support to the CIA’s [...]

At some point the courts are going to have start calling bullshit on the government’s transparent attempts to use State Secrets to hide embarrassing information. From Charlie Savage, we have the story of Kevin Shipp, who tried to sue the CIA for all the medical problems his family suffered from being housed in a house [...]

Josh Gerstein links to this fascinating filing from Abbe Lowell, the lawyer who successfully got leak charges against AIPAC employees dismissed, and now representing a former State Department contractor, Stephen Kim, alleged to have leaked Top Secret information on North Korea to Fox. Gerstein explains: Stephen Kim, who worked at State as an intelligence adviser before [...]

2011 is going to be a busy and critical year for state secrets litigation in the Supreme Court, and the Obama Administration will be arguing for an expansion of the doctrine in the Supreme Court when it returns to business in January.