Sometimes you couldn’t make it up:
It could be a scene from Kafka or Brazil. Imagine a government agency, in a bureaucratic foul-up, accidentally gives you a copy of a document marked “top secret.” And it contains a log of some of your private phone calls.
You read it and ponder it and wonder what it all means. Then, two months later, the FBI shows up at your door, demands the document back and orders you to forget you ever saw it.
More from Wired.com.
The real meat of the story is this. It concerns a rather technical issue called “standing”. Even in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Bill of Rights, you can’t take the government to court unless you are being personally affected by whatever issue you are complaining about. There are several cases to do with Bush’s surveillance programmes in the courts, but most of all of them are being made by people who may or may not be being spied on, and who therefore may or may not have standing. In this case:
Justice Department and phone company lawyers have asserted that the plaintiffs in those [other] cases don’t have legal standing to sue, because they have no proof that they were direct victims of the eavesdropping. At the same time, the government claims it doesn’t have to reveal if any individual was or was not wiretapped because the “state secrets privilege” permits it to withhold information that would endanger national security.
The tangible document makes Belew’s case uniquely positioned to cut through that thicket, says Shayana Kadidal, an attorney with the Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents individuals being held in Guantanamo Bay. The center is also suing to stop the surveillance, but lacks Belew’s concrete evidence of monitoring — arguing instead that the possibility of being monitored hampers its legal work.
“The government’s line is that if you don’t have evidence of actual surveillance, you lose on standing,” says Kadidal. “Out of all the cases, this is the only one with evidence of actual surveillance.”
That evidence also gives the courts enough to rule immediately on whether the president had the authority to spy on Belew and Ghafoor without a court order, said Jon Eisenberg, one of Belew’s lawyers. “We know how many times he’s been surveilled,” Eisenberg told a judge last month. “There is nothing left for this court to do except hear oral arguments on the legality of the program.”