[ashukla]

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?

[Cboldt]

Note the question is IF [whether or not] 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.

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.

[summer]

Re post #25 and #45 -- I did not have a chance to post the entire article because of the excerpt requirement for the NYT, but here is some other text from the article:

The lawsuits seek to answer one of the major questions surrounding the eavesdropping program: has it been used solely to single out the international phone calls and e-mail messages of people with known links to Al Qaeda, as President Bush and his most senior advisers have maintained, or has it been abused in ways that civil rights advocates say could hark back to the political spying abuses of the 1960's and 70's?

"There's almost a feeling of déjà vu with this program," said James Bamford, an author and journalist who is one of five individual plaintiffs in the A.C.L.U. lawsuit who say they suspect that the program may have been used to monitor their international communications.

"It's a return to the bad old days of the N.S.A.," said Mr. Bamford, who has written two widely cited books on the intelligence agency.

I watched some of Al Gore's speech last night, and while he wsa clearly playing to the audience at times, there was also a theme running through his speech which was thought-provoking, in that he, too, mentioned Lincoln and other presidents whose use of expanded power eventually contracted over time.

The point Gore made which caused me to pause was that along with GW's expanded power (legal or not), the "timeframe" for using this expanded power appears to be in perpetuity, in light of the nature of this war, unlike past presidents. This would seem to me to bring about a fundamental change in our government, unless one believes our government is spying illegally all the time anyway. And, some voters probably do believe that, and so, no big deal to them.

But, I don't know. It's not an issue that I can see directly impacting my life at this moment. And, I do think a president has greater authority during wartime. So, who knows...