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In the tradition of A Civil Action and Gideons Trumpet, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Barry Siegel unfolds the shocking true story behind the Supreme Court case that forever changed the balance of power in America.On October 6, 1948, a trio of civilian engineers joined a U.S. Air Force crew on a B-29 Superfortress, whose mission was to test secret navigational equipment. Shortly after takeoff the plane crashed, killing all three engineers and six others. In June 1949, the widows of the engineers filed suit against the government. What had happened to their men? they asked. Why had these civilians been aboard an Air Force plane in the first place?But the Air Force, at the dawn of the Cold War, refused to hand over the accident reports and witness statements, claiming the documents contained classified information that would threaten national security. The case made its way up to the Supreme Court, which in 1953 sided with the Air Force in United States v. Reynolds. This landmark decision formally recognized the "state secrets" privilege, a legal precedent that has since been used to conceal conduct, withhold documents, block troublesome litigation, and, most recently, detain terror suspects without due-process protections.Even with the case closed, the families of those who died in the crash never stopped wondering what had happened in that B-29. They finally had their answer a half century later: In 2000 they learned that the government was now making available the top-secret information the families had sought long ago, in vain. The documents, it turned out, contained no national security secrets but rather a shocking chronicle of negligence. Equal parts history, legal drama, and exposé, Claim of Privilege tells the story of this shameful incident, its impact on our nation, and a courageous fight to right a wrong from the past. Placing the story within the context of the time, Siegel draws clear connections between the apocalyptic fears of the early Cold War years and post-9/11 America - and shows the dangerous consequences of this historic cover-up: the violation of civil liberties and the abuse of constitutional protections. By evoking the past, Claim of Privilege illuminates the present. Here is a mesmerizing narrative that indicts what our government is willing to do in the name of national security.



About the Author

Barry Siegel

Barry Siegel, winner of the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing, is a former national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times. He now directs the Literary Journalism Program at the University of California, Irvine. His latest book, the widely-acclaimed Dreamers and Schemers (University of California Press, 2019) , chronicles how Los Angeles' pursuit and staging of the 1932 Olympics during the depths of the Great Depression helped fuel the city's transformation from a seedy frontier village to a world-famous metropolis. Siegel began at the Los Angeles Times in 1976 as a staff writer in the feature section and in 1980 became a national correspondent, pursuing a self-created assignment that involved no fixed beat, no relation to breaking news, and no time or space constraints. The unconventional narratives he wrote for The Times, many about communities struggling with moral dilemmas, took him all over the world. In 2003, Siegel left The Times to become the founding director of the Literary Journalism Program at UC Irvine.Siegel is the author of eight books - five volumes of literary journalism and three novels of legal suspense, including the Chumash County series. His narratives have garnered dozens of honors, among them two PEN Center West Literary Awards in Journalism, the Livingston Award, and the American Bar Association Silver Gavel AwardSiegel has a master's degree in journalism from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in English literature from Pomona College. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Marti Devore. He can be reached via email at barry@barry-siegel.com and bsiegel@uci.edu. Visit his website at www.barry-siegel.com



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