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Thoughts of Storm Troopers Filling Spy Case
By David Kravets March 06, 2009 | 4:44:55 PMCategories: Surveillance
Legal scholars, the blogopshere and the twitterati have been scratching their heads for a week following the Obama administration's assertion that it might "withdraw" (.pdf) classified documents at the center of a closely watched spy case.
Some are wondering whether the feds will use storm-trooper-like tactics to physically remove the data from the case. Others suggest the Obama administration's threats portend a constitutional showdown between the judicial and executive branches.
Yet strangely enough, the closest legal analogy seemingly pertains to the 1990s litigation surrounding Area 51, the once-secret military waste dump in the Nevada desert.
The spy lawsuit tests whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress, as President George W. Bush did, and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants. Bush acknowledged the spy program in 2005, and Congress ratified it in July.
The classified data the administration is threatening to withdraw from the spy case shows that the U.S. government eavesdropped without warrants on the 2004 telephone conversations of two lawyers for a now defunct Saudi charity called the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation that the United States had designated as a terror group.
Without the classified documents, the aggrieved lawyers cannot establish a legal basis to earn them a day in court....
