Obama Dares Judge to Order Release Of NSA Spy Document
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/nsa/>
By David Kravets, May 15, 2009
Setting the stage for a constitutional showdown, the Obama administration
dared a federal judge here late Friday to do what no judge has yet done:
disclose classified data the government has declared a national security
state secret.
The administration urged
<http://www.wired.com/images_blogs/threatlevel/2009/05/walkercrisis.pdf>
(.pdf) U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker to order such a disclosure in a
3-year-old lawsuit weighing whether a sitting U.S. president may bypass
Congress and adopt a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
Such an order, the administration said, could halt three years of convoluted
litigation and force the appellate courts to weigh in on the hotly contested
issue.
The classified data in question shows that telephone calls by two American
lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were intercepted by the government
without warrants in 2004. Without the classified documents admitted as
evidence in the case, the aggrieved lawyers for the al-Haramain charity,
which the Bush administration designated as a terror group, cannot establish
a legal basis to earn them a day in court.
--snip--
In this case, Walker reviewed the classified material and said the evidence
pointed toward illegal spying
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/01/judge-sufficien/> .
A George H. W. Bush appointee, Walker has defied the government on state
secrets before, but has never ordered the disclosure of evidence the
government has declared classified.
He rejected the Bush administration's state secrets claim in lawsuits
challenging the nation's telecommunication companies' complicity with Bush's
once-secret electronic eavesdropping program. But Congress stepped in and
immunized the telcos from the lawsuits.
With then-Sen. Barack Obama's vote in July, Congress also sanctioned Bush's
spy program that authorized warrantless wiretapping on Americans if they are
communicating overseas with suspected terrorists.
Walker is also weighing a challenge to that immunity legislation.
--snip--
But if Walker obliges Eisenberg, another constitutional crisis may surface
<http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/thoughts-of-sto/> . The Justice
Department, in an earlier filing, suggested it may "withdraw" the documents
at issue regardless of Walker's orders.
--snip--
----
Mark Perkins MLIS, MCLIP
www.markperkins.info
0 comments:
Post a Comment