The Irate Nation Est. 2001

Government asks that ACLU case to block terror-related communication surveillance be rendered moot

Crossposted from StopTheAclu

UPI: Government seeks to quash spying suit

The U.S. Justice Department filed court papers in Cincinnati arguing a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration’s wiretap program should be dismissed.

The department claims the lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs, is no longer significant because the National Security Agency’s warrantless surveillance program is now being conducted under the supervision of a secret intelligence court, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Justice Department lawyers argued in papers filed with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the suit should be dismissed because it “no longer has any live significance.”

The move follows an announcement last week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the program, which had allowed the NSA to monitor calls made between the United States and foreign countries without court approval if one of the parties was determined to be linked to terrorism, is being terminated and replaced by a surveillance program overseen by a secret 11-member court.

It’s not “spying!!!!!!!!”

More:

NYT: Secrecy Is at Issue in Suits Opposing Spy Program

The Bush administration has employed extraordinary secrecy in defending the National Security Agency’s highly classified domestic surveillance program from civil lawsuits. Plaintiffs and judges’ clerks cannot see its secret filings. Judges have to make appointments to review them and are not allowed to keep copies.

Judges have even been instructed to use computers provided by the Justice Department to compose their decisions.

But now the procedures have started to meet resistance. At a private meeting with the lawyers in one of the cases this month, the judges who will hear the first appeal next week expressed uneasiness about the procedures, said a lawyer who attended, Ann Beeson of the American Civil Liberties Union.

Lawyers suing the government and some legal scholars say the procedures threaten the separation of powers, the adversary system and the lawyer-client privilege.

Justice Department officials say the circumstances of the cases, involving a highly classified program, require extraordinary measures. The officials say they have used similar procedures in other cases involving classified materials.

In ordinary civil suits, the parties’ submissions are sent to their adversaries and are available to the public in open court files. But in several cases challenging the eavesdropping, Justice Department lawyers have been submitting legal papers not by filing them in court but by placing them in a room at the department. They have filed papers, in other words, with themselves.

At the meeting this month, judges on the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit asked how the procedures might affect the integrity of the files and the appellate records.

In response, Joan B. Kennedy, a Justice Department official, submitted, in one of the department’s unclassified filings, a detailed seven-page sworn statement last Friday defending the practices.

“The documents reviewed by the court have not been altered and will not be altered,” Ms. Kennedy wrote, and they “will be preserved securely as part of the record of this case.”

Simply adding “plaintiff” to your name does not guarantee you access to every bit of intelligence and national security related data that the government possesses, particularly when the plaintiff cannot demonstrate harm. That the judges have access to these records demonstrates that the government is not trying to suppress the information altogether, but is following normal protocol for classified information — it’s available on a “need to know” basis. Just because the ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of people who think their First Amendment rights have been violated when they have no evidence that their calls were even monitored (a stupid argument only a corrupt judge in Detroit with recusal-worthy financial connections to the ACLU could agree with this idiocy) doesn’t mean that all programs and methods used to gather terrorism-related intelligence must be revealed.

At least one case, the one in Oregon, is probably not moot.

It goes beyond the other cases in seeking damages from the government, because the plaintiffs say they have seen proof that they were wiretapped without a warrant.

In August 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which was investigating an Oregon charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, inadvertently provided a copy of a classified document to a foundation lawyer, Lynne Bernabei.

That document indicated, according to court filings, that the government monitored communications between officers of the charity and two of its lawyers without a warrant in spring 2004.

“If I gave you this document today and you put it on the front page of The New York Times, it would not threaten national security,” Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for the foundation, said. “There is only one thing about it that’s explosive, and that’s the fact that our clients were wiretapped.”

Here we go again talking about “wiretapping” when that is not what this really is. As far as I know, no one has randomly hooked up listening devices to any phones and no one’s conversations are being monitored for no reason. What the electronic surveillance does is flag international calls that come from sources associated with terror activities.

As it turns out, the “charity” in question, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, has been, you guessed it, identified as a fund funnel for terror groups, including having a direct link to OBL! Would have been nice for Adam Lipsmack to mention that:

US Teasury Dept. Office of Public Affairs (September 9, 2004): U.S.-Based Branch of Al Haramain Foundation Linked to Terror, Treasury Designates U.S. Branch, Director

“We continue to use all relevant powers of the U.S. government to pursue and identify the channels of terrorist financing, such as corrupted charities, at home and abroad. Al Haramain has been used around the world to underwrite terror, therefore we have taken this action to excommunicate these two branches and Suliman Al-Buthe from the worldwide financial community,” said Stuart Levey, Treasury’s Under Secretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence.

The assets of the U.S. AHF branch, which is headquartered in Oregon, were blocked pending investigation on February 19, 2004. On the previous day, a federal search warrant was executed against all property purchased on behalf of the U.S. AHF branch. The investigation involved agents from the Internal Revenue Service – Criminal Investigations (IRS-CI), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Department of Homeland Security’s Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).

The U.S.-based branch of AHF was formally established in 1997. Documents naming Al-Buthe as the organization’s attorney and providing him with broad legal authority were signed by Aqeel Abdul Aziz Al-Aqil, the former director of AFH. Aqil has been designated by the United States and the UN 1267 Sanctions Committee because of AHF’s support for al Qaida while under his oversight.

The investigation shows direct links between the U.S. branch and Usama bin Laden. In addition, the affidavit alleges the U.S. branch of AHF criminally violated tax laws and engaged in other money laundering offenses. Information shows that individuals associated with the branch tried to conceal the movement of funds intended for Chechnya by omitting them from tax returns and mischaracterizing their use, which they claimed was for the purchase of a prayer house in Springfield, Missouri.

Other information available to the U.S. shows that funds that were donated to AHF with the intention of supporting Chechen refugees were diverted to support mujahideen, as well as Chechen leaders affiliated with the al Qaida network.

AHF has operations throughout the Union of the Comoros, and information shows that two associates of AHF Comoros are linked to al Qaida. According to the transcript from U.S. v. Bin Laden, the Union of the Comoros was used as a staging area and exfiltration route for the perpetrators of the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. The AHF branches in Kenya and Tanzania have been previously designated for providing financial and other operational support to these terrorist attacks.

The only thing “explosive” about the apparent fact that this group has an eye on it is what we are trying to avoid happening — a real “explosive” event. Now is the government really obligated to provide an open door to all of our nation’s secrets to terrorist fronts? The next obvious question is how this group is even permitted to continue its existence within our borders.

If one thing is certain in the world today it’s that the ACLU and its allies in the Fossil Media will continue its relentless War on the War on Terror, even if it means actively supporting terrorist front groups or at least ignoring their terror connections.