Showdown Looming On 'State Secrets'

[BlueJessamine]

Source: Washington Post

President Obama vowed last week to rein in the use of a legal privilege that allows the administration to discard lawsuits that involve "state secrets," promising that a new policy is in the works that will quell criticism by civil libertarians.

But hours after Obama's speech laid out a "delicate balance" on national security, his Justice Department was criticized by a federal judge in California overseeing a case that has delved deeper than any other into one of the government's most highly classified data-gathering programs.

The Obama administration has invoked the state-secrets privilege in resisting a lawsuit filed by an Oregon charity whose attorneys may have been subjected to warrantless wiretapping. Late Friday, Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker issued a terse order that raised the prospect of "sanctions" for government lawyers who have not responded to his order for a plan for how the case should proceed. The sanctions may include awarding monetary damages to the charity, the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation.

The document amounts to "Judge Walker's enough-is-enough order," said Jon Eisenberg, an attorney for the now-defunct charity.



Read more: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/05/25/AR2009052502076.html?wprss=rss_politics

[florida08]

1. this will be interesting

In the Haramain case, officials at the National Security Agency have determined that attorneys for the charity, who mistakenly received documents reflecting that they may have been the subject of government eavesdropping, do not have a "need to know" about the electronic surveillance program.

The NSA screwed up:

"Al-Haramain, a now-defunct charity, inadvertently obtained a document in 2004 that reportedly showed it had been wiretapped that year during an investigation that led the government to place the group on its terrorist list.

The organization returned the document and has been barred from using it to establish that it was a target of the surveillance program. But Walker ruled in January that Al-Haramain had shown through officials' public statements that it had probably been wiretapped....

..the Justice Department repeated its earlier position: that the administration, not the courts, controls access to classified material, and that the National Security Agency has determined that Al-Haramain has no legitimate need for the document.

The department did not renew its threat to remove the document from Walker's files if he planned to disclose it to Al-Haramain's lawyers. But government attorneys said they wanted advance notice of any disclosure so they could ask an appellate court to intervene. http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2009/05/15/MNUH17LE4F.DTL.

I don't see the Justice Dept. going along on this because it would open all kinds of doors on illegal wiretaps that were used by the Bush administration. Am leaning toward some kind of settlement will follow.

[midnight]

2. I'm looking forward to seeing our President stop this secret stuff.