By Kenneth J. Theisen, 5/18/07
On May 17, 2007, in a challenge to the Bush regime’s spying operations,
the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a Freedom of Information Act
(FOIA) lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA) and the Department of
Justice (DOJ) requiring government compliance with requests to turn over all
records of NSA surveillance of attorneys representing Guantánamo detainees.
The lawsuit, Wilner v. NSA,
was filed on behalf of sixteen attorneys representing Guantánamo Bay
prisoners. The lawsuit alleges that the lawyers may have been subjected to the
NSA’s warrantless wiretapping program that was illegally authorized by
President Bush shortly after 9/11.
According to Shayana Kadidal, CCR managing attorney for the
Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative, “Since Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act in
1978, the FISA Court
has only rejected five out of the government’s 19,000-plus wiretap requests. We
have always believed that the primary reason administration officials decided
not to use the FISA statute to get warrants for the NSA program is because they
wanted to target conversations even the FISA court wouldn’t have approved of,
such as attorneys speaking to their clients. The government asserts – generally
without a shred of evidence – that many of our clients are linked to terrorism.
They”ve said the NSA program targets calls between Americans and foreigners
linked to terrorism, and they”ve told Congress that they won’t rule out
listening to lawyers. All that means there is a grave risk that our privileged
conversations were eavesdropped on. We owe it to our clients to find out if
that happened.”
The NSA’s warrantless spying program was revealed in December 2005 by
the New York Times. A month later, CCR submitted FOIA requests to the NSA and
DOJ for records related to the policies, procedures, and guidelines of the NSA
program and records of the warrantless surveillance of the individual
requesters.
The DOJ and NSA were legally obligated to produce responsive documents
within 20 days of the FOIA request. Both provided inadequate responses to the
requests, refusing to provide relevant documents within the required time
period and refusing to even acknowledge the existence of documents related to
whether the individual lawyers were being subjected to warrantless
surveillance. The NSA produced only two documents, both already public
documents, and claimed that another document was being processed. The DOJ
provided 85 pages of un-redacted documents and two redacted documents, much of
which had already been made public, and stated that it was withholding 84 pages
and an e-mail.
CCR’s lawsuit seeks to enforce compliance with the FOIA to provide
information to the public about government conduct. Wells Dixon, one of the
plaintiff attorneys, stated, “I am
outraged that the NSA and DOJ have categorically refused to say whether they
have eavesdropped – without a warrant – on me or other attorneys simply because
we have fought for basic due process rights for men imprisoned without charge
or trial at Guantánamo. Now we will learn the truth.”
What is the Bush regime attempting to
hide? Could it be that they are spying
on these attorneys as part of their continuing effort to strip the Guantánamo prisoners of all due
process rights in order to get guilty verdicts and also to avoid the political
embarrassment that acquittals will cause?