The Nith U.S. Circuit Court has ruled on the Jeppesen case

The court makes short work of the Obama administration's invocation of States Secrets to quash legal actions against the government:

"According to the government's theory, the judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands and limits of the law."

The upshot of this is that the court has (re-)affirmed that the only legitimate use of the State's Secrets privelege is for individual pieces of evidence which are evaluated by the courts.

A stirring victory for government accountability and transparency. 

As always, Glenn has more.

More of the same...

On the heels of the Obama administration's decision to embrace some of the more egregious elements of the Bush administration's policy on secrecy (see here and here), the Justice Department has appealed a district court ruling that granted Habeas Corpus rights to prisoners held at Afghanistan's Bagram Airforce Base.

In essence, the Obama administration is arguing that prisoners of the United States can be flown from anywhere in the world to Bagram and imprisoned without due process, indeed, without rights of any kind.

Keep in mind that the Obama administration isn't merely continuing a Bush-era lawsuit on this matter - it is actually appealing the ruling of a conservative Bush appointee who claimed that this procedure was as unconstitutional as what was happening at Guantanamo. In fact, the judge claimed that detainees at Bagram received fewer rights than detainees at Guantanamo.

More from Glenn Greenwald.