Posted on 01/17/2006 2:59:09 AM PST by summer
Two leading civil rights groups plan to file lawsuits Tuesday against the Bush administration over its domestic spying program....
The Center for Constitutional Rights plans to sue on behalf of four lawyers at the center and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba,... Similarly, the plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit include five Americans who work in international policy and terrorism, along with the A.C.L.U. and three other groups....
One of the A.C.L.U. plaintiffs, Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute, ...
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....
Bill Goodman, legal director for the Center for Constitutional Rights, said that in suing in federal court to block the surveillance program, his group believed "without question" that Mr. Bush violated the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which governs wiretaps, by authorizing the security agency operation.
But Mr. Goodman acknowledged that in persuading a federal judge to intervene, "politically, it's a difficult case to make."
He added: "We recognize that it's extremely difficult for a court to stand up to a president, particularly a president who is determined to extend his power beyond anything envisioned by the founding fathers. That takes courage."
The debate over the legality of Mr. Bush's eavesdropping program will be at the center of Congressional hearings expected to begin next month....
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Statute of limitations is a notion that describes the interval betwen injury (in some jurisdictions, this is the time the injury was incurred, in others it is when the injured party became aware of the injury), and bringing of the lawsuit. A statute of limitations runs on a case-by-case basis - party by party.
Echelon and Carnivore are described in mire general terms as "NSA monitoring" in a few court cases that I've read, and no court has found the un-targeted gathering of signal to violate the 4th amendment.
See http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1550960/posts?page=26#26 and later posts (especially 35), as well as links back from there for one example.
The NSA intelligence gathering operation is described sufficiently for present purposes in Halkin, 598 F.2d at 4, as follows (footnote omitted):
A brief description of NSA and its functions is appropriate. NSA itself has no need for intelligence information; rather, it is a service organization which produces intelligence in response to the requirements of the Director of Central Intelligence. Intelligence Activities: Hearings Before the Select Comm. to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities of the U. S. Senate, 94th Cong., 1st Sess. Vol. V at 9 (1975) (Hearings). The mission of the NSA is to obtain intelligence from foreign electrical communications. Signals are acquired by many techniques. The process sweeps up enormous numbers of communications, not all of which can be reviewed by intelligence analysts. Using "watch-lists"-lists of words and phrases designed to identify communications of intelligence interest-NSA computers scan the mass of acquired communications to select those which may be of specific foreign intelligence interest. Only those likely to be of interest are printed out for further analysis, the remainder being discarded without reading or review. Intelligence analysts review each of the communications selected. The foreign intelligence derived from these signals is reported to the various agencies that have requested it (Hearings at 6). Only foreign communications are acquired, that is, communications having at least one foreign terminal (Hearings at 9).
I think there are links back to the Senate hearings from there, as well -- ahh, found it, http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1550146/posts.
How can any of them have standing to sue if it's not their "rights" that have been infringed? It seems that at least one of the groups would have to include someone who does talk to suspected terrorists abroad.
thanks for the link! I love reading Pete Du Pont.
No, only Bill Clinton has this authority, no one else. Sheesh, can't you tell when the country is falling apart? Quick, let's surrender like our RINO representatives.
From the article at the NYT - not quoted in the excerpts posted here:
"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."
Note the question is IF these specific people WERE monitored. I THINK this means the suit is to determine if they (specific people - Hitchens apparently included) were monitored. Now Gore has just called for a Special Prosecutor. I think the attempt is going to be made to subpoena NSA records to see if these people were monitored.
Am I wrong?
But I also wonder how the fact that other Presidents have issued similar orders would factor in to a Court's decision to hear the case as a general violation of the 4th Amendment.
This is all politics. Many recent presidents, including Clinton, Reagan, Bush 1 and carter have used this power to conduct the same type of wiretype without court supervision or approval.
Many prominent legal and Constitutional scholars already acknowledge that Bush is within his rights as the POTUS.
These people are just laying the foundation for what is expected to be an impeachment attempt by the left later this year. We are simply witnesing the ugliest political infighting that has ever occurred in the history of the US. The danger here is that, depending on the amount of hyperbole, lies, bloviating and manipulation of the truth that is done by the left and their MSM handpuppets, we could well be witnessing the beginning of the end of our great Republic. The left would rather see America broken and divided into a gulag and a nation of free people with limited government, than give up these immature and dangerous attacks on the POTUS and the nation when we are at war.
You can always count on the ACLU to sue to weaken national security and advance their communist agenda.
The American people understand the issue and if some in the courts do rule against Bush, even though the new Supreme Court should rule for Bush, it would be a great opportunity to finally rid our system of those judicial activists. Remember federal judges can be impeached to and if they rule against our security I can see judges loosing their jobs because of the noise the people will make over this.
I'm not aware of any specific orders that reached outside of FISA, except for the warrantless physical entry into Aldrich Ames' home (FISA had no such provision at the time, it does have one now). The issue wasn't litigated, Ames' plead guilty. His lawyers planned to object to evidence gathered during that physical entry and search, BTW.
The fact that there is a body of cases isn't helpful to a putative plaintiff. Put yourself in there, could you bring a case? How do you know you were the target of surveillance? If there is a violation of the 4th amendment and the target isn't aware of it, is it really a violation?
So if I'm reading your other posts correctly, they set precedent for you saying this ACLU case and Hitchens case should be thrown out.
The posts I linked to outside of this thread don't discuss the notion of "standing."
I don't know the allegations made in the Hitchens and ACLU cases, and in this thread I am speculating that if the plaintiff doesn't allege (and later has to prove) that he was the target of warrantless surveillance, the case goes away - wrong plaintiff.
Otherwise, all anybody has to do is make some wacky claim in order to force the government to defend itself. Millions of surveillance suits - millions of "I was abducted" suits, etc. That doesn't mean nobody was abducted and held (see Padilla, Hamdan, Hamdi, etc.), just that abduction cases coming from people who haven't been can't be tolerated.
Methinks he's trying to get some judge to advocate a fishing expedition.
And I presume these folks can prove that their phones were wiretapped?
Possibly, it could be to provoke a judge to say "well if you don't want the spying, ask Congress to stop it."
If the complaint reads as the article says, the plaintifffs will lose on a motion for summary judgement. The courts will not pierce national security secrecy based on a published allegation.
ACLU, if AQ is calling you I want to know why? Oh, that's right you're defending them.
True -- if they catch such a call there's no guarantee someone will be able to listen to it in a timely manner. Especially if Qaeda sympathizers greatly step up the number of "suspicious" calls in an attempt to overwhelm the system.
Thanks.
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