What are they hiding?
Jan. 26th, 2007 01:35 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
libertangoOur reading today comes from Proverbs 28:1
"The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion."
With that in mind, consider this report from the New York Times, where the Bush Administration is fleeing as fast as it can over the NSA program that it repeatedly asserts is about national security. They never actually provide evidence that it is, and of course it couldn't possibly be because they're just covering their own asses. But, still.
The truly surreal stuff is buried in the last half of the article, which I'll swipe now before it goes behind a pay wall.
*^*^*^*^*
In August 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which was investigating an Oregon charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, inadvertently provided a copy of a classified document to a foundation lawyer, Lynne Bernabei.
That document indicated, according to court filings, that the government monitored communications between officers of the charity and two of its lawyers without a warrant in spring 2004.
“If I gave you this document today and you put it on the front page of The New York Times, it would not threaten national security,” Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for the foundation, said. “There is only one thing about it that’s explosive, and that’s the fact that our clients were wiretapped.”
Ms. Bernabei circulated the document to two directors of the charity, at least one of them in Saudi Arabia, and to three other lawyers. She discussed them with two more lawyers. A reporter for The Washington Post, David B. Ottaway, also reviewed the document.
The full significance of the document was apparently not clear to any recipient, more than a year before The New York Times disclosed the existence of the N.S.A. program in December 2005.
The F.B.I. learned of the disclosure almost immediately in August 2004, Judge King said at a court hearing last year, but made no effort to retrieve copies of the document for about six weeks.
When it did, everyone it asked apparently returned all copies of the document. In a statement reported in The Post in March, for instance, Mr. Ottaway said he the F.B.I. had told him that the document had “highly sensitive national security information.”
“I returned it after consulting with Washington Post editors and lawyers, and concluding that it was not relevant to what I was working on at the time,” Mr. Ottaway said.
In a sworn statement in June, a lawyer who had the document, Asim Ghafoor, said the bureau took custody of his laptop computer “in order that the document might be ‘scrubbed’ from it.”
The computer was returned weeks later.
In February 2006, the charity and the two lawyers who say they were wiretapped sued to stop the program, requesting financial damages. They attached a copy of the classified document, filing it under seal. They have not said how they came to have a copy.
Three weeks later, the lawyers for the foundation received a call from two Justice Department lawyers. The classified document “had not been properly secured,” the lawyers said, according to a letter from the plaintiffs’ lawyers to the judge.
As Mr. Eisenberg recalled it, the government lawyers said, “The F.B.I. is on its way to the courthouse to take possession of the document from the judge.”
But Judge King, at a hurriedly convened hearing, would not yield it, and asked, “What if I say I will not deliver it to the F.B.I.?”
A Justice Department lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, gave a measured response, saying: “Your Honor, we obviously don’t want to have any kind of a confrontation with you. But it has to be secured in a proper fashion.”
The document was ultimately deposited in a “secure compartmented information facility” at the bureau office in Portland.
In the meantime, copies of the document appear to have been sent abroad, and the government concedes that it has made no efforts to contact people overseas who it suspects have them.
“It’s probably gone many, many places,” Judge King said of the document at the August hearing. “Who is it secret from?”
A Justice Department lawyer, Andrew H. Tannenbaum, replied, “It’s secret from anyone who has not seen it.”
He added, “The document must be completely removed from the case, and plaintiffs are not allowed to rely on it to prove their claims.”
Judge King wondered aloud about the implications of that position, saying, “There is nothing in the law that requires them to purge their memory.”
Mr. Eisenberg, in an interview, said that was precisely the government position. “They claim they own the portions of our brains that remember anything,” he said.
In a decision in September, Judge King ruled that the plaintiffs were not entitled to review the document again but could rely on their recollections of it. In October, they filed a motion for summary judgment, a routine step in many civil litigations. In a sealed filing, they described the classified document.
Government lawyers sent Judge King a letter saying the plaintiffs had “mishandled information contained in the classified document” by, among other actions, preparing filings on their own computers.
In a telephone conference on Nov. 1, Judge King appeared unpersuaded. “My problem with your statement,” he told Mr. Tannenbaum, “is that you assume you are absolutely correct in everything you are stating, and I am not sure that you are.”
Mr. Boyd of the Justice Department said the government “continues to explore with counsel ways in which the classified information may be properly protected without any intrusion on the attorney-client privilege.”
"The wicked flee when no man pursueth: but the righteous are bold as a lion."
With that in mind, consider this report from the New York Times, where the Bush Administration is fleeing as fast as it can over the NSA program that it repeatedly asserts is about national security. They never actually provide evidence that it is, and of course it couldn't possibly be because they're just covering their own asses. But, still.
The truly surreal stuff is buried in the last half of the article, which I'll swipe now before it goes behind a pay wall.
*^*^*^*^*
In August 2004, the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control, which was investigating an Oregon charity, al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, inadvertently provided a copy of a classified document to a foundation lawyer, Lynne Bernabei.
That document indicated, according to court filings, that the government monitored communications between officers of the charity and two of its lawyers without a warrant in spring 2004.
“If I gave you this document today and you put it on the front page of The New York Times, it would not threaten national security,” Mr. Eisenberg, a lawyer for the foundation, said. “There is only one thing about it that’s explosive, and that’s the fact that our clients were wiretapped.”
Ms. Bernabei circulated the document to two directors of the charity, at least one of them in Saudi Arabia, and to three other lawyers. She discussed them with two more lawyers. A reporter for The Washington Post, David B. Ottaway, also reviewed the document.
The full significance of the document was apparently not clear to any recipient, more than a year before The New York Times disclosed the existence of the N.S.A. program in December 2005.
The F.B.I. learned of the disclosure almost immediately in August 2004, Judge King said at a court hearing last year, but made no effort to retrieve copies of the document for about six weeks.
When it did, everyone it asked apparently returned all copies of the document. In a statement reported in The Post in March, for instance, Mr. Ottaway said he the F.B.I. had told him that the document had “highly sensitive national security information.”
“I returned it after consulting with Washington Post editors and lawyers, and concluding that it was not relevant to what I was working on at the time,” Mr. Ottaway said.
In a sworn statement in June, a lawyer who had the document, Asim Ghafoor, said the bureau took custody of his laptop computer “in order that the document might be ‘scrubbed’ from it.”
The computer was returned weeks later.
In February 2006, the charity and the two lawyers who say they were wiretapped sued to stop the program, requesting financial damages. They attached a copy of the classified document, filing it under seal. They have not said how they came to have a copy.
Three weeks later, the lawyers for the foundation received a call from two Justice Department lawyers. The classified document “had not been properly secured,” the lawyers said, according to a letter from the plaintiffs’ lawyers to the judge.
As Mr. Eisenberg recalled it, the government lawyers said, “The F.B.I. is on its way to the courthouse to take possession of the document from the judge.”
But Judge King, at a hurriedly convened hearing, would not yield it, and asked, “What if I say I will not deliver it to the F.B.I.?”
A Justice Department lawyer, Anthony J. Coppolino, gave a measured response, saying: “Your Honor, we obviously don’t want to have any kind of a confrontation with you. But it has to be secured in a proper fashion.”
The document was ultimately deposited in a “secure compartmented information facility” at the bureau office in Portland.
In the meantime, copies of the document appear to have been sent abroad, and the government concedes that it has made no efforts to contact people overseas who it suspects have them.
“It’s probably gone many, many places,” Judge King said of the document at the August hearing. “Who is it secret from?”
A Justice Department lawyer, Andrew H. Tannenbaum, replied, “It’s secret from anyone who has not seen it.”
He added, “The document must be completely removed from the case, and plaintiffs are not allowed to rely on it to prove their claims.”
Judge King wondered aloud about the implications of that position, saying, “There is nothing in the law that requires them to purge their memory.”
Mr. Eisenberg, in an interview, said that was precisely the government position. “They claim they own the portions of our brains that remember anything,” he said.
In a decision in September, Judge King ruled that the plaintiffs were not entitled to review the document again but could rely on their recollections of it. In October, they filed a motion for summary judgment, a routine step in many civil litigations. In a sealed filing, they described the classified document.
Government lawyers sent Judge King a letter saying the plaintiffs had “mishandled information contained in the classified document” by, among other actions, preparing filings on their own computers.
In a telephone conference on Nov. 1, Judge King appeared unpersuaded. “My problem with your statement,” he told Mr. Tannenbaum, “is that you assume you are absolutely correct in everything you are stating, and I am not sure that you are.”
Mr. Boyd of the Justice Department said the government “continues to explore with counsel ways in which the classified information may be properly protected without any intrusion on the attorney-client privilege.”
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no subject
Date: 2007-01-26 11:11 pm (UTC)Not that I disagree, but...
Date: 2007-01-26 11:20 pm (UTC)Um... I am a bear of little brain. Leave what to them? Breaking the story? Taking that point of view? Putting it behind a pay wall? Like I said, I'm not sure I'd disagree, just want to be clear one way or t'other. :)
Pleased to meet you. How'd you guess my
nameLJ?Re: Not that I disagree, but...
Date: 2007-01-27 01:14 am (UTC)Pleased to LJ-meet you too! I was just randomly cruising and came across yours :)