I’ll admit that I’m naturally skeptical any time a government official or government lawyer claims that absolute secrecy is necessary to protect national security. As an ACLU national security attorney, I’ve heard little else from the government in my short time here. Historically, overuse of the “national security” mantra to justify absolute secrecy has typically meant the government is trying to cover up embarrasing or illegal activities.

Cynic that I am, even I was amused when the FBI agreed this week to release the last 10 pages of its file on John Lennon. For over 20 years, UC Irvine Professor Jon Wiener has been relentlessly fighting for the release of the entire Lennon file. The FBI’s refused not only because the documents allegedly contained national secuity information from a foreign government, but that release of the information could “lead to foreign diplomatic, economic and military retaliation against the United States.”

So what was the information that was so sensitive it might lead to MILITARY RETALIATION? Well, it turns out the FBI documents include notes that John Lennon was a lefty who “emphasized his proletarian background and his sympathy with the oppressed and underprivileged people of Britain and the world” in press interviews; that he was planning to help fund a left-wing bookstore in London; and that he actually – get ready - used some of his songs to promote the idea that he had revolutionary views. Wait, I think I hear Tony Blair and the British army coming now!

It is nothing less than absurd. Does the FBI think the public can’t distinguish between sensitive information that might actually harm our national security and this drivel? Yet again we see that these national security claims boiled down to embarrasment and an attempt to cover up abuses. Embarrasment that the FBI spent its resources surveilling John Lennon because of his political activities and his dissenting views.

Our own office just beat back the same sort of attempt last week, when the government tried to misuse subpoena power to get a document from us, then backed down and actually declassified the document. In their overeagerness to cover up what was at best a mildly embarrassing document about detainee procedures, they were prepared to throw the First Amendment out the window.

We’re seeing similar abuses of the national security claim in our challenges to warrantless NSA wiretapping, “extraordinary rendition,” and the FBI’s retaliatory firing of a whistleblower. In each case the government has attempted to proclaim the matter too sensitive and potentially damaging to national security to allow the case even to go before a judge. In other words, potentially illegal government conduct (or quite obviously illegal government conduct) is so sensitive, so secret, and public disclosure so threatening to the security of the nation that not even a court can decide whether government officials have violated the law.

Public scrutiny of government excess is the best medicine. Better to learn of government abuses now than to have our children and grandchildren learn of them 25 years later.

More about our own recent screening of “The U.S. vs. John Lennon” …

More about the Lennon files …

On Friday, researchers at the Guttmacher Institute published an article in the American Journal of Public Health that attributes the recent decline in teen pregnancy rates to better contraceptive use. The article entitled, “Explaining Recent Declines in Adolescent Pregnancy in the United States: The Contribution of Abstinence and Improved Contraceptive Use” notes that pregnancy rates among U.S. girls aged 15 to 19 dropped by 27 percent between 1991 and 2000 and says that contraception is responsible for 86 percent of this decline, while abstinence only accounts for 14 percent of the decrease.

The study has received limited press coverage in Forbes (Contraception Driving U.S. Decline in Teen Pregnancies) and Spotlighting News (US Teen Pregnancy Rates Declined). Hopefully more news outlets will pick up on this story as it highlights the important role of contraceptives in helping teens to avoid pregnancy — a role currently ignored by the federal government’s abstinence-only-until-marriage programs.

Edit: ABC News picked up the story. The article notes that there isn’t widespread support among the public for abstinence-only-until-marriage education:

But in a recent survey of nearly 1,110 U.S. adults, 82 percent supported programs that discuss abstinence as well as other methods for preventing pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. Half of those surveyed were in outright opposition to abstinence-only education.

According to USA Today, the first Muslim elected to Congress, Keith Ellison (D) of Minnesota, has been blasted for taking his oath of office on a Quran, the Muslim holy book. On every poll I’ve seen, at least 50 percent of Americans responding are “offended,” and feel that Ellison should be compelled to swear on the Christian Bible.

What is the matter with these “offended” Americans? They need to grow up and remember where the country has come from, on this issue of oaths and free speech. I’m offended at such pathetic ignorance about American history.

The original “oath with hand on the Bible” was established in 1559 by Queen Elizabeth I. She did this to ensure that no Catholic could hold public office in a newly Protestant England. Catholics wouldn’t swear on the Scriptures in those days. The intolerant practice was imported to the American colonies, and written into most of the original 13 state constitutions to ensure that Protestants would have the same political supremacy in the new nation. It would be a long time before American Catholics and Jews were even allowed to hold office.

As the United States finally grew up, and out of the old religious intolerance, electees found creative ways of complying with the oath requirement. Our first Catholic President, John F. Kennedy, swore on a Catholic edition of the Bible. Today American oath practices have quietly begun to reflect that historical diversity of ours. For example, in any courtroom, a person taking the witness stand is allowed to simply swear. I don’t swear on the Bible — to me, it’s a venerable collection of historical accounts, nothing more. My personal beliefs were accommodated by the federal district court in 1997 when I testified during the CDA hearings.

I have no problem with taking an oath to tell the truth, or to serve well in government. But no American should be compelled to swear by a religion or deity that they don’t hold sacred in their personal life.