I hope this story continues to be covered, I am very curious to see what the truth of this matter is. If the witness was truly put on the no-fly list it is hard to imagine how her testimony could have been more damaging than the action of putting her on the list to prevent it. That move would be insane, even for DHS.
Our government has a long history of abusing its power to prevent evidence from being admitted in court. In fact, the "State's Secrets" privilege granted to the executive branch was based on exactly that. The case that established the precedent is Reynolds vs. US Navy (definitely Reynolds not sure about Navy). I was finally declassified a couple of years ago and it came out that there were no secrets to be kept from the court other than government was at fault.
I'm not sure what's going on with my previous post. There is ambiguity in what was declassified. It's not clear if the commenter's own history was declassified, or if the aforementioned court case was declassified. My comment was a request for clarification.
The reaction you are getting is because you appeared to be making a trivial grammar correction in a heavy-handed way. Others presumed that the word was definitely intended as 'it' and that the correction did not merit mention.
Supposing I was making a grammatical comment, what would be a less heavy-handed way of phrasing it?
I italicized the word "it" for the purpose of identifying that word as the part that changed. Is the italicization being interpreted as derogatory vocal stress?
I thought about it before my first response, and I'm not sure there is a good way. Anything that comes off as correcting grammar is difficult to do politely, especially in a mixed group of native and non-native speakers.
I think most people (including me) didn't consider the 'I was declassified' interpretation because there was little else in the parent to suggest it, and because the phrasing was odd. Usually it is information that is declassified rather than individuals.
But if one was to ask for clarification, I think your second comment would be a good pattern: "I'm genuinely confused: did you mean X or Y?" Putting the burden on yourself as reader often comes off better than implying that the writer made a mistake, even if the real problem is that writer made a mistake.
(This isn't to mean that you shouldn't ever bluntly correct writers when they are wrong, just that in the absence of a pre-existing relationship it often doesn't go over well with the writer)
I think I've heard people refer to themselves as being declassified as a shorthand for their career and projects being declassified, thus I wasn't sure how to interpret the original statement.
The government lawyers should face disbarment for lying to the judge about the DHS's actions. These aren't prosecutors, they don't have immunity and they have professional duties that _absolutely_ do not involve lying.
It's not. The lawyer who made the statement is Paul Freeborne. He's not outside counsel, he's a DOJ employee. His salary is unlikely to be surprising to, say, a Silicon Valley programmer. If he's been around a while, he's probably somewhere between $100-150k with locality adjustments.
He'd be doing much better in the private sector, even as an associate in a law firm.
