U.S. may invoke 'state secrets'

The Bush administration is signaling that it plans to turn once again to a favorite legal tool known as the "state secrets" privilege to try to shut down a lawsuit brought against a Belgium banking cooperative that secretly supplied millions of private financial records to the U.S. government, court documents show.

The "state secrets" privilege, allowing the government to shut down public litigation on national security grounds, was once a rarely used tool. But the Bush administration has turned to it dozens of times in terrorism-related cases in seeking to end public discussion of everything from an FBI whistle-blower's claims to the abduction of a German terrorism suspect.

Bush administration officials have defended the banking data program as an important tool in its war on terror, but European regulators and privacy advocates were quick to denounce the program as improper and possibly illegal, and the pressure forced Swift and U.S. officials earlier this year to agree to tighter restrictions on how the data could be used.