Greedy Trial Lawyer
Secrecy Has Its Rewards, But Can We Afford Them?
Category: Gaming The System
We all know the pen is mightier than the sword. But, who knew the Top Secret stamp is mightier than the entire U.S. legal system?
Court supports Bush in wiretap suit
Because plaintiffs can't prove they were targets of the secret program, they can't sue, according to the federal appellate ruling.A federal appeals court on Friday handed the Bush administration a major victory, ruling that plaintiffs who had challenged its domestic spying program did not have legal standing to do so.
Judges Alice M. Batchelder and Julia Smith Gibbons of the 6th Circuit, both Republican appointees, said no single plaintiff could prove that he or she had been wiretapped and had therefore suffered harm -- the legal standing necessary to go to court.
Batchelder wrote: "The plaintiffs do not -- and because of the state secrets doctrine cannot -- produce any evidence that any of their communications have ever been intercepted by the NSA, under the TSP, without warrants." Rather, she said, the plaintiffs had asserted "a mere belief" that their overseas contacts were the types of people being targeted by the NSA.
The ruling presents "a Catch-22," said Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University and one of the plaintiffs.
"If the court insists that a plaintiff must have certain knowledge that some of their messages were intercepted in order to have legal standing ... then no one can ever have standing because we can never know, since the program is secret," Diamond said.
From the LA Times
If the domestic spying program is as successful, comprehensive and extensive as the government claims, shouldn't we simply assume that these plaintiff's have standing. After all, some of these plaintiffs need to communicate with likely targets -
ACLU lawyer Ann Beeson had asserted that her clients suffered "concrete harm" by having to forgo conversations with individuals who they reasonably believed might be the targets of government surveillance.
Or, is the real secret the program's failure to generate any productive (actionable?) intelligence?
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