Judge rebuffs feds' secret arguments on no-fly list [View all]

[Enrique]

http://www.politico.com/blogs/under-the-radar/2012/12/judge-rebuffs-feds-secret-arguments-on-nofly-list-152969.html#.UOHucy8SvFM.twitter

A federal judge in California has rejected the Obama administration's effort to use secret arguments and evidence to defeat a lawsuit relating to the so-called no-fly list designed to keep suspected terrorists off of airline flights.

U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup turned down a motion by the Justice Department to dismiss former Stanford student Rahinah Ibrahim's lawsuit against various federal government agencies over her reported inclusion on the no-fly list as well as an incident in September 2005 where she was barred from taking a flight from San Francisco and detained for a couple of hours.

Alsup, who sits in San Francisco, also refused the Justice Department's offer to show him affidavits from law enforcement officials which the government would not share with Ibrahim or her attorneys.

"Here the government seeks to affirmatively use allegedly privileged information to dispose of the case entirely without ever revealing to the other side what its secret evidence might be," Alsup wrote in an order filed last week (and posted here). "Only in the rarest of circumstances should a district judge, in his or her discretion, receive ex parte argument and evidence in secret from only one side aimed at winning or ending a case over the objection of the other side. Here, the government has not justified its sweeping proposal."

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