“[P]laintiffs have succeeded in alleging that they are ‘aggrieved persons’ under FISA…”
With those twelve words, California Federal District Judge Vaughn Walker may have just opened a small crack in the wall of BushCo’s impunity:
The suit involves two American lawyers accidentally given a Top Secret document showing they were eavesdropped on by the government when working for a now-defunct Islamic charity in 2004. Their suit looked all but dead in July when they were initially blocked from using that document to prove they were spied on.
The case tests whether a sitting U.S. president may bypass Congress — in this case whether President Bush abused his power by authorizing his secret spying program in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.
…Walker said the nation’s spy laws now demand that he view the classified document and others to decide whether the lawyers were spied on illegally and whether Bush’s spy program was unlawful.
The case concerns lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor, whose case appears now the most likely to lead to a ruling on the legality of Bush’s warrantless-wiretapping program. That program started after the Sept. 11 terror attacks and involved various initiatives that peered into Americans’ phone and internet usage without court approval — a surveillance program ratified by Congress last year in legislation immunizing participating telecommunication companies.
Walker is also considering a lawsuit brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenging whether Congress unconstitutionally granted immunity to telecommunications companies from those lawsuits accusing them of assisting the Bush administration to secretly spy on Americans without warrants.
So, even if the Obama administration chooses not to investigate the crimes of BushCo, private lawsuits may dig out the proof of BushCo’s rampant criminality.
The question is: What will Obama’s Justice Department do with that proof?
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