Government Asks For Dismissal Of NSA Wiretapping Suits

Posted on May 27, 2006

The U.S. government has asked a pair of federal judges to dismiss legal challenges to the Bush administration’s controversial domestic eavesdropping program, arguing any court action in the cases would jeopardize secrets in the ongoing “war on terror.”

What has taken so long for this? Hopefully the judges involved in this will see the common sense that the NSA programs are an important tool in our war against terror, and that any further leaks involving its details only puts our national security at more risk.

President Bush said in December he had authorized that eavesdropping without a court order shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks in order to track suspected communication from al-Qaeda operatives. Government officials have since declined to provide details on how widely the NSA wiretaps have been used or what communications have been intercepted.

In asking federal judges in Detroit and New York to throw out challenges to the eavesdropping, the Bush administration invoked a doctrine known as the “state secrets privilege” it has used to head off other court action on its spy programs.

The claim was accompanied by an affidavit by Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte, who said disclosure of any information about the NSA’s “Terrorist Surveillance Program” would “cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the United States.”

The administration said the case before Judge Gerard Lynch in New York could not proceed without “revealing to the very adversaries we are trying to defeat what we know about them and how we are proceeding to stop them.”

Government lawyers made the same argument in an attempt to scuttle the parallel lawsuit brought by the American Civil Liberties Union being heard in Detroit.

Of course protecting national security is not very high on the ACLU’s list of priorities.

“The government believes that state secrets gives it the power to shut down litigation,” said Jameel Jaffer, a lawyer involved in the ACLU lawsuit.

The civil rights activists behind the two cases argue the eavesdropping violates the privacy and free speech rights of U.S. citizens and have asked the courts to order it shut down.

That is the real goal of the ACLU; to shut the program down. While the majority of Congress from both parties have conceded that the program is neccessary in connecting the dots and hunting down terrorists, the ACLU are only interested in shutting the entire program down. They are putting together a massive campaign, putting full page ads in the NY Times, and filing lawsuits across the nation not only against the government, but also against phone companies doing their patriotic duty to help keep America safe.

The article later reveals the ACLU’s real concern with the NSA program. The ACLU get the chills that the government might be listening to the conversations they are having with terror suspects.

Both lawsuits also argue the NSA program threatens the ability of defense lawyers in terrorism-related cases to speak freely with their clients, a so-called chilling effect.

The government counters this insanity well:

“Plaintiffs cannot credibly claim that they face any added marginal chill of surveillance … when their clients facing terrorism-related investigations or charges may be subject to surveillance pursuant to other means.”

I hope the NSA are listening to the ACLU’s phone conversations with suspected terrorists. Hopefully the judges involved in these cases will have the common sense to dismiss these ridiculous lawsuits. The lawsuits that need to be going forward, and Americans focused on are not ones that are seeking to undermine the government’s ability to protect us, but ones that are seeking to prosecute those that put us in danger by leaking the classified information in the first place.

Also see: CBS

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Comments

2 Responses to “Government Asks For Dismissal Of NSA Wiretapping Suits”

Theway2k on May 27th, 2006 10:04 pm

If the judges are liberal activist judges do not count on National Security being an issue for them either.
kerwin_brown on May 28th, 2006 1:01 pm

They are probably fishing expedition and the courts have given out too much information already.