The ACLU and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) are expected to file lawsuits today against the Bush administration to determine whether the NSA surveillance program was used to monitor 10 defense lawyers, journalists, scholars, political activists and other Americans with ties to the Middle East. Both groups seek to have the courts order an immediate end to the program, which the groups say is illegal and unconstitutional. The plaintiffs cover a broad spectrum of individuals and groups, both right-wing and left-wing, from strong advocates of the Iraq War to a Muslim organization whose former head was convicted of involvement in terrorist activities. I view this as the beginning of a process that will end up in the Supreme Court.
The details, as provided by the New York Times, follow.
The ACLU Lawsuit
The plaintiffs include Larry Diamond, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institute; journalist and author Christopher Hitchens, who has written in support of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; Barnett R. Rubin, a scholar at New York University who works in international relations; Tara McKelvey, a senior editor at The American Prospect; the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL); Greenpeace, the environmental advocacy group; and the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), the country’s largest Islamic advocacy group.
The CCR Lawsuit
The plaintiffs include four lawyers at the CCR and a legal assistant there who work on terrorism-related cases at Guantánamo Bay and overseas.
I think that the real reason behind the concern over the NSA intercepts can be traced back to The November Surprise.
Many people have heard of The October Surprise, the threat by Democrats to conduct a last-minute pre-election investigation in 1988 into allegations that the Reagan campaign had secret communications with the Iranians to ensure that the U.S.
hostages were kept locked up until after the election.
But no one seems to recall that the Republicans responded with The November Surprise, in which the NSa had suppsoedly intercepted communicatiosn between Democratic Congressional Staffers and the communists in Nicaragra involving advice on how best to deal with the U.S.
The Republicans treated the October Surprise idea with hilarity.
In marked contrast, even well after the election of 1988, the Democrats responded to the November Surprise investigation proposal in the most viciously negative terms.
“Me thinks the lady doth protest too much…”
And me thinks that they have already been caught by this sort of monitoring and thus are very sensitive to it.
I need your help in a lawsuit against the NSA.