Hamdan ruling won't affect NSA surveillance program: DOJ letter

[sabra]

http://jurist.law.pitt.edu/paperchase/2006/07/hamdan-ruling-wont-affect-nsa.php

Hamdan ruling won't affect NSA surveillance program: DOJ letter

The US Supreme Court's recent decision in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld has not changed the Justice Department's position on the legality of the National Security Agency's anti-terrorism surveillance program , according to a senior DOJ official writing to Sen. Charles Schumer (D-NY) . Assistant Attorney General William E. Moschella wrote Monday in response to a letter from Schumer that the Hamdan decision "does not affect our analysis of the Terrorist Surveillance Program for several reasons," although the DOJ is "carefully considering the ramifications of the decision." The DOJ concluded in a Jan. 19 paper that the "NSA activities are ... constitutionally permissible and fully protective of civil liberties."

The Supreme Court held in Hamdan that the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) that was passed by Congress allowing the president to use "all necessary and appropriate force" against those responsible for the 9/11 attacks did not expand or alter the authorizations for military commissions contained in the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ). Therefore, the court reasoned, the military commissions as constituted at Guantanamo Bay exceeded the authority granted to President Bush by Congress.

In his Monday letter to Schumer, Moschella said that Hamdan nontheless did not cast doubt on the legality of the NSA program because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 (FISA) , unlike the UCMJ, contains a provision that "expressly contemplates that Congress may authorize electronic surveillance through a subsequent statute without amending or referencing FISA." Thus, the relevant precedent was not Hamdan but Hamdi v. Rumsfeld , a 2004 case in which the Supreme Court held that the AUMF authorized the president to detain an American citizen classified as an enemy combatant, despite a previous statute providing that "o citizen shall be imprisoned or otherwise detained ... except pursuant to an Act of Congress."

Read Moschella's letter to Schumer.

[chill_wind]

1. Guess it will just have to take a few trillion

in corporation-bankrupting civil law-suits, then, to get them to eventually re-evaluate. The Bush admin's NSA program itself, that is.

[me b zola]

2. Predictable response from bush*co

They've known all along that what they are doing is illegal and unconstitutional. :grr: