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 News from Around the Americas | January 2006 
Domestic Spying Challenged in Courts
 Claudia Parsons - Reuters
| | President Bush delivers remarks at the Kennedy Center in Washington, January 16, 2006. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst) |
Two U.S. civil liberties groups filed lawsuits on Tuesday challenging the legality of President George W. Bush's domestic spying program and demanding the practice be ended immediately.
White House spokesman Scott McClellan called the lawsuits "frivolous" and defended Bush's authorization of domestic eavesdropping on U.S. citizens without a court order as legal, saying it was aimed at detecting and preventing attacks by al Qaeda.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a lawsuit against the National Security Agency on behalf of scholars, attorneys, journalists and nonprofit groups that regularly communicate by telephone and e-mail with people in the Middle East.
The suit filed in U.S. district court for eastern Michigan also names NSA Director Army Lt. Gen. Keith Alexander as a defendant. It seeks a court order declaring the spying program is illegal and ordering its immediate and permanent halt.
Separately, the New York-based Center for Constitutional Rights, which has provided legal aid to people detained or interrogated in Washington's declared war on terrorism, said it had filed a suit in a federal court in New York against Bush and the heads of security agencies challenging the program and seeking to halt it.
Bush acknowledged last month that he had authorized the NSA to monitor the international telephone calls and e-mails of U.S. citizens without first obtaining warrants in an effort to track al Qaeda members and other terrorism suspects.
News of the program set off an outcry from both Democrats and Republicans who questioned whether the administration was violating the Constitution by spying on Americans.
The ACLU said its legal complaint charges that the spying program violates Americans' rights to free speech and privacy under the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution.
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, a Washington-based group that joined the ACLU suit, said the NSA eavesdropping "chills efforts by the American Muslim community to build bridges of understanding."
"It's clear from all reports that the American Muslim community is the primary target of any secret surveillance," CAIR spokesman Ibrahim Hooper said.
ATTORNEYS SAY CLIENTS TARGETED
An attorney for the Center for Constitutional Rights, Shayana Kadidal, said at a news conference in New York there was every reason to believe CCR's clients were targeted by the program, undermining its attorneys' ability to offer proper representation as guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
Among the CCR's clients are numerous detainees held at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba as well as Canadian Maher Arar, who was deported from New York in 2002 and sent to Syria, where he was held for almost a year.
Rachel Meeropol, an attorney who represents a number of Muslims rounded up after September 11 and since deported, said she was forced to communicate with her clients by telephone or e-mail, making her a likely target of NSA eavesdropping.
"I'm personally outraged that communication I believed was absolutely privileged, absolutely confidential ... may have been listened in on by the U.S. government," said Meeropol, one of five CCR staff who are also plaintiffs in the case.
Kadidal said Bush's actions were in defiance of Congress which had clearly set out two laws allowing for electronic surveillance under controlled circumstances. "It's made any surveillance outside of those bounds a felony," he said.
At a White House briefing McClellan said the "frivolous lawsuits ... do nothing to help enhance civil liberties or protect the American people."
The 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act makes it illegal for the U.S. government to spy on Americans in the United States without first getting approval from a secret federal court.
Al Gore, the Democratic challenger who lost to Bush in the 2000 presidential election, on Monday called for a special counsel to investigate whether Bush broke the law.
McClellan accused Gore of "hypocrisy," saying that under his Democratic administration searches of the home of Aldrich Ames, the former CIA officer turned spy for Moscow, were conducted without warrants.
Those searches were approved by the attorney general, while electronic surveillance on Ames was court approved.
Justice Department spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said of the two ACLU and CCR lawsuits, "We believe these cases are without merit and plan to vigorously defend against such charges."
Additional reporting by David Morgan, Tabassum Zakaria and Deborah Charles in Washington and Poornima Gupta in Detroit. |
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