NSA Program Headed To Court
The ACLU, Greenpeace, and CAIR have joined forces with Christopher Hitchens(!!!???!!!) to challenge the NSA program leaked by the NY Times one month ago:
Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program to determine whether the operation was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East.
The two lawsuits, which are being filed separately by the American Civil Liberties Union in Federal District Court in Detroit and the Center for Constitutional Rights in Federal District Court in Manhattan, are the first major court challenges to the eavesdropping program.
…One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, said that a Stanford student studying in Egypt conducted research for him on political opposition groups, and that he worried that communications between them on sensitive political topics could be monitored. “How can we communicate effectively if you risk being intercepted by the National Security Agency?” Mr. Diamond said.
Also named as plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit are the journalist Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers; Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations, the country’s largest Islamic advocacy group.
Well, that’s a quite interesting cast of characters, to be sure.
I welcome this news; I think the ‘Program’ is far too important to be in legal limbo, and I’d like to see the case go all the way to the Supreme Court (though of course, the focus will be on the constitutionality in that event – a seperate, but still important, question). If the operation is determined to be legal and constitutional, so much the better; if it is halted, perhaps the administration can prevail upon Congress to explicitly authorize it. As I’ve stated many times before, this isn’t (or shouldn’t be) about Bush; it’s an important issue for our society…
I’m shocked. That’s about the most reasonable paragraph I’ve read from a conservative blogger on this issue since the story first broke. Good job. Just as legal matter, though, if this case gets to the SCOTUS, I think it’s unlikely the focus will be on any constitutional questions. The 4th amendment is only a secondary issue here (maybe not even an issue at all) and the administration’s Art. II/inherent authority argument is remarkably weak. The real issue here is whether the AUMF somehow authorized the president to conduct this program, and that’s an issue of pure statutory interpretation. I suspect that if SCOTUS is asked to address anything, that will be it.
I wish I could share your optimism, but I have yet to see the Democrats apply the country’s need over their desire to regain political power in anything lately. So unless the Republicans actually start acting like they are the majority & authorize it so no vital intelligence is lost, the Liberals will use whatever means they can to halt something that seems like a common sense approach to National Security. I do however agree that I’d almost prefer to have it go to court & have it be defined as legal or not – just to shut the shrillness of the left up for a minute or 2.
PMain-
What makes you think that a trial is going to “shut the shrillness of the left up”???
Every motion hearing in Ronny Earl’s case against Tom Delay has been met with a barage of shrillness… as, I expect, will every step in Fitzgerald’s case against Libby. I’d guess that this case will be much the same.
I think it is more than a little disingenuous to suggest that shrillness comes exclusively from the left – Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Anne Coulter, Bill O’Reilly, Bob Novak, the Wall Street Journal editorial page, and most right wing blogs are nothing if not shrill – Karl Rove suggesting that conservatives reacted to 9/11 with manly assertiveness and liberals reacted with tea and sympathy is shrill – Dick Cheney suggesting that people who oppose his policies are unsupportive of the troops or treasonous is shrill – so there is plenty of shrillness to go around.
As for the suggestion that Democrats invariably place their political fortunes about national security: this is a proposition so absurd that no thinking person ever conceived it.
peter, I don’t think the Wall Street Journal editorial page belongs in that group, nor Bob Novak, for that matter…it’s a long way down from those two to Coulter….
Peter – there’s no way that you could have been a regular reader of the WSJ edit page, if you honestly believe that the content entails as such. If not, please give examples to the contrary.
Limbaugh, Coulter, Hannity and O’Reilly are idiots, but no one here takes them seriously. But Novak? The man’s got some serious props as a journalist over the years; I’ve been reading him for over 20 years now in the Sun -Times (quite a Lefty paper here for most of it’s ownership), and no matter what you may think of his politics, his record as a reporter is unmatched.
I’ve read the Journal (including the editorial page) nearly every day for the past twenty years — and I think it is as good a newspaper as any (including the Times, although it has a much different mission than the Times) — but I think the editorial page is pretty shrill. I went to today’s paper for examples, but the three editorials are about the Republicans and K Street, Hillary Clinton, and George Pataki. So editorials one and three did not concern Democrats or the left, and the Clinton piece was blunt but not especially shrill. This could be an eye of the beholder thing — you may find the Times editorial page shrill, while I think it is eminently reasonable.
As for the rest of the Journal: always first-rate, always well-written, always compelling. Can’t live without it.
As for Bob Novak: this guy is just full of bile. My guess is that even people in his own family don’t like him.
Don’t forget the many years that they gave a leftward – leaning column on the inside cover of the back page of the edit section, which Al Hunt appeared in every week. Major exposure for that type of viewpoint.
True — just as David Brooks gets op-ed space in the Times — however the logical question is why the Journal never replaced Al Hunt with someone of a similar viewpoint –
The story I’ve heard is that every time they did a readership survey, Hunt was ranked dead last on columnists who were read regularly – perhaps they gave up trying to replace that POV, since the guy before him was completely awful at times.
I actually prefer Brooks to Safire’s hot air, though – and I still miss Russell Baker and Anthony Lewis from the left tilt at the NYT.