Obama Listens!

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On Monday October 04…

…the Supreme Court said it would not take up a warrantless surveillance case, Wilner v. National Security Agency (NSA), filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR). The lawsuit argued that the Executive Branch must disclose whether or not it has records related to the wiretapping of privileged attorney-client conversations without a warrant. Lawyers for the Guantánamo detainees fit the officially acknowledged profile of those subject to surveillance under the former administration’s program, and the Bush administration argued in the past that the Executive Branch has a right to target them.

The Obama administration has never taken a position-in this or any of the other related cases-on whether the Bush administration’s NSA surveillance program was legal. In this case they claimed that even if it was illegal, the government has the right to remain silent when asked whether or not the NSA spied on lawyers,” said Shayana Kadidal, Senior Managing Attorney of the CCR Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative. “Today the Supreme Court let them get away with it.”  […]

The plaintiffs [had] filed a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking records of any surveillance of their communications under the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program, which began after 9/11 but was only disclosed to the public in December 2005. The government refused to either confirm or deny whether such records existed, and the lower courts refused to order the government to confirm whether it had eavesdropped on attorney-client communications. The question before the Supreme Court was whether the government can refuse to confirm or deny whether records of such surveillance exist, even though any such surveillance would necessarily be unconstitutional and illegal.

more at CCR…

Real News Network’s Paul Jay talks with Shayana Kadidal** – Senior Managing Attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative (GGJI) at the Center for Constitutional Rights about the CRR’s initiative and about this case and the Administration’s eavesdropping.



Real News Network – October 08, 2010

Shayana Kadidal: Government refuses to disclose possible wiretapping of civil rights lawyers

** Shayana Kadidal is senior managing attorney of the Guantánamo Global Justice Initiative at the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York City. He is a graduate of the Yale Law School and a former law clerk to Judge Kermit Lipez of the United States Court of Appeals for the First Circuit. In his eight years at the Center, he has worked on a number of significant cases in the wake of 9/11, including the Center’s challenges to the detention of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay (among them torture victim Mohammed al Qahtani and former CIA ghost detainee Majid Khan), which have twice reached the Supreme Court (with a third case to be heard in March 2010), and several cases arising out of the post-9/11 domestic immigration sweeps. He is also counsel in CCR’s legal challenges to the “material support” statute (to be argued at the Supreme Court in February 2010), to the low rates of black firefighter hiring in New York City, and to the NSA’s warrantless surveillance program.

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    • Edger on October 8, 2010 at 17:29
      Author

    any more complaints that Obama doesn’t listen.

  1. ….I just found this blog. The writer says some insightful, true  things.

    http://sjlendman.blogspot.com/

    Though well along earlier, the pace accelerated in the last decade. Obama has been as hard line as Bush, showing he’s no different from America’s worst ever leaders. He may, in fact, be the most dangerous, given the support he so far retains. None of it, of course, is deserved.

    Bush made America a police state. Obama hardened it – among other ways through:

    — greater intrusive surveillance;

    — unjustifiable preventive detentions;

    — targeting American citizens for assassination, solely by presidential edict;

    — invoking the “state secrets” doctrine to block litigation against rendition, torture, and warrantless wiretapping;

    — opposing Net Neutrality;

    — threatening free expression and the right to dissent, including online;

    — prosecuting whistleblowers as well as journalists and others who protect their anonymity or publish their revelations; and

    — making anyone against US extremism vulnerable to lawless political persecutions, especially anti-war and Muslim American activists as well as lawyers who defend them too vigorously.

  2. They are listening (maybe); and taking appropriate action… 😉

    http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new

    Capt Salas continued: “I was on duty when an object came over and hovered directly over the site.

    “The missiles shut down – 10 Minuteman missiles. And the same thing happened at another site a week later. There’s a strong interest in our missiles by these objects, wherever they come from. I personally think they’re not from planet Earth.”l

  3.  It’s deja vu all over again.

    http://www.guardian.co.uk/worl

    A US terror alert issued this week about al-Qaida plots to attack targets in western Europe was politically motivated and not based on credible new information, senior Pakistani diplomats and European intelligence officials have told the Guardian.

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