Laws in the United States should not be secret. Laws should be subject to judicial review. Operational details of military actions need not be disclosed but the law and rules governing the military, the Department of Justice or any other part of the government should be publicly open.
Neither is occurring under Barack Obama, any more than under George W. Bush.
The Obama administration’s secret legal memorandum that opened the door to the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki, the American-born radical Muslim cleric hiding in Yemen, found that it would be lawful only if it were not feasible to take him alive, according to people who have read the document.
The secret document provided the justification for acting despite an executive order banning assassinations, a federal law against murder, protections in the Bill of Rights and various strictures of the international laws of war, according to people familiar with the analysis.
It is important to note that, not only is this memorandum kept secret, it wasn’t even completed until months after Obama had ordered al-Awlaki killed.
This isn’t American justice.
And the secrecy isn’t limited to international settings. From today’s Wall Street Journal:
The U.S. government has obtained a controversial type of secret court order to force Google Inc. and small Internet provider Sonic.net Inc. to turn over information from the email accounts of WikiLeaks volunteer Jacob Appelbaum, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.
Sonic said it fought the government’s order and lost, and was forced to turn over information. Challenging the order was “rather expensive, but we felt it was the right thing to do,” said Sonic’s chief executive, Dane Jasper. The government’s request included the email addresses of people Mr. Appelbaum corresponded with the past two years, but not the full emails.
Both Google and Sonic pressed for the right to inform Mr. Appelbaum of the secret court orders, according to people familiar with the investigation. Google declined to comment. Mr. Appelbaum, 28 years old, hasn’t been charged with wrongdoing.
The court clashes in the WikiLeaks case provide a rare public window into the growing debate over a federal law that lets the government secretly obtain information from people’s email and cellphones without a search warrant. Several court decisions have questioned whether the law, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment protections against unreasonable searches and seizures.
And note, that the government was seeking to forbid the ISP and Google from even telling the individual that the government was seeking his information. This is like something from the Soviet Union, not our “democracy.” More the second story from Boing Boing.