Obama DoJ Continues to Assert BushCo's "State Secrets" Argument

By GottaLaff

Forgive my not offering more commentary today, but it's hard to type.. wrist issues. As a result, it's a copy-and-paste day. However, you can imagine that I am not thrilled with this:

In legal papers filed in the middle of the night, the Obama administration has weighed in again on the case of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation et al. v. Obama, asking the judge to drop the case and continuing to wield President Bush's "state secrets" argument that has drawn criticism from civil libertarians, liberals and progressives.

The Saudi charity the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, investigated for terrorist financing out of its Oregon offices, sued the government in 2006, alleging it was targeted illegally under the National Security Agency's warrantless wiretapping program. They made this assertion after U.S. officially accidently turned over logs of phone calls. [...]

Jon Eisenberg, one of the attorneys for the charity, said the filing indicated "not only that the Obama administration isn't hedging on the state secrets argument, if anything it's solidified."

The Obama Justice Department continues to assert, as first reported by Politico's Josh Gerstein, that the charity's officials have not yet "set forth specific, uncontroverted facts establishing that they were the targets of, or have been subjected to, warrantless electronic surveillance. Plaintiffs instead continue to rely on the same speculative 'inferences' and conjecture that plainly fail to establish their standing."

There has been some confusion among legal experts about the argument the Obama administration is making, because its lawyers assert they are not relying "on an assertion of the state secrets privilege to cover-up alleged unlawful conduct. The central concern in a case such as this is that the disclosure of whether or not someone is or has been subject to surveillance (and, if so, what type of surveillance) would reveal intelligence sources and methods—in this case, sources and methods concerning alleged surveillance of an entity determined to have provided support to the al Qaeda terrorist organization."

Follow the link for more details.

State secrets showdown

By GottaLaff

Via BuzzFlash:

There actually may be no more secrets in this ongoing case -- but there's serious wrangling between the branches of government.

The Washington Post and the website Wired have noted in recent headlines that a "showdown" could come as soon as Friday over claims of state secrets being made in court cases where government wrong-doing or cover-ups in the "war on terror" are suspected. The legal face-off pits government lawyers, now representing President Barack Obama's Executive Branch, against an increasingly impatient, Reagan-nominated, GHW Bush-appointed judge in California -- Vaughn R. Walker. The Senate, too, is poised to join the fray. [...]

What's going on now? The judge has given the Department of Justice a deadline of Friday, May 29 to respond in writing about their readiness to move the case forward. He also told attorneys for both sides to appear at a hearing on Wednesday, June 3. With the case already stalled for five years, defense attorney Jon Eisenberg is calling the current move "Judge Walker's enough-is-enough order."

Citizens who care about the Constitutional fight or who are trying to assess whether the Obama Administration will change course or, like their predecessors, play the "state secrets" trump card freely, should monitor the news closely in the coming days.

Elements of the story include:

• The State-Secrets Privilege
• Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn R. Walker, Northern District of California
• The al-Haramein Islamic Foundation
• American attorneys Wendell Belew and Asim Gafoor
• FISA
• Reynolds 53 (the legal basis for state-secrets privilege claims)
• Attorney Jon B. Eisenberg
• A judge threatening to award monetary damages to an organization that was placed on a terrorists list

What else?

In a related development in the Legislative Branch, Senator and Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy (D, VT) has scheduled discussion of a proposed "State Secrets Protection Act" for next week, June 4, in a committee hearing meeting. The bill was drafted but not voted on by the previous Congress, and it is sponsored now by:

• Sen. Edward Kennedy [D, MA]
• Sen. Joseph Biden [D, DE]
• Sen. Hillary Clinton [D, NY]
• Sen. Christopher Dodd [D, CT]
• Sen. Russell Feingold [D, WI]
• Sen. Patrick Leahy [D, VT]
• Sen. Claire McCaskill [D, MO]
• Sen. Robert Menéndez [D, NJ]
• Sen. Charles Schumer [D, NY]
• Sen. Arlen Specter [D, PA]
• Sen. Jon Tester [D, MT]
• Sen. Jim Webb [D, VA]
• Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse [D, RI]

Amendments to S.2533

Number	Status	Purpose

There are the excerpts. For more, follow the link.

Judge Rejects President Obama's 'State Secrets' Argument

By GottaLaff

There's been another setback for the state secrets argument:

As a case against President Bush for withholding documents about allegedly illegal wiretapping became a case against President Obama for withholding documents about allegedly illegal wiretapping, President Obama has once again assumed the same "state secrets" arguments as his predecessor. And a judge that rejected the argument under Bush yesterday rejected the argument under Obama.

In the case, Al-Haramain v. Obama, (formerly Al-Haramain v. Bush) the leaders of a now-defunct Islamic charity, allege that the National Security Agency under President Bush engaged in illegal warrantless wiretapping.

In 2004, while preparing to defend the charity -- which had been placed on the government's terrorist watch list -- the charity's lawyers accidentally obtained a document indicating the wiretapping had taken place.

The lawyers returned the document and have ever since been denied the ability to obtain it again to use it to show the charity had been allegedly illegally wiretapped.

The Bush administration had argued that the document could not be "disclosed without causing serious harm to national security," even if the plaintiff's lawyers are given access to the document under secure conditions after extensive background checks.

U.S. District Chief Judge Vaughn Walker denied the Bush administration's argument repeatedly. The Obama administration repeated the same "national security" argument in February, and yesterday Judge Walker said that the government "should now comply with the court's orders" to hand over the documents.

Attorney general orders review of 'state secrets' claims

By GottaLaff

I mentioned this in Comments earlier after hearing something about it on the Thom Hartmann show. Then, poof! I just got home to find the article waiting for me:

Attorney General Eric Holder Monday ordered a complete review of all cases in which the Justice Department under his Republican predecessors had invoked claims of a "state secrets" privilege to protect classified government programs from lawsuits.

Holder has instructed the department's top lawyers to begin the review promptly "to ensure that it is being invoked only in legally appropriate situations," department spokesman Matt Miller said..

Holder's instructions stressed, "It is vital that we protect information that if released could jeopardize national security, but the Justice Department will ensure that it is not invoked to hide from the American people information about their government's actions that they have a right to know," Miller said. [...]

The American Civil Liberties Union, which has been pressing the Obama administration to drop the state secrets claim, issued a blistering statement Monday.

"Eric Holder's Justice Department stood up in court today and said that it would continue the Bush policy of invoking state secrets to hide the reprehensible history of torture, rendition, and the most grievous human rights violations committed by the American government. This is not change. This is more of the same," said ACLU Executive Director Anthony Romero.

"Candidate Obama ran on a platform that would reform the abuse of state secrets, but President Obama's Justice Department has disappointingly reneged on that important civil liberties issue," Romero said.

Pressure, pressure, pressure.