We have just not understood what is going on in the courts. Despite two new woman justices on the SCOTUS we were in a condition of having essentially given up hope... but wait ...we just got a message from the ACLU that their FISA lawsuit has been reinstated
Somehow after 9/11 I think we all just laid down and allowed ourselves to be steamrolled with the Patriot Act, FISA, the Millitary Commissions Act, the Detainee Treatment Act, then after eight long years of hoping for change Obama's apparent continuation of the Bush administrations policies, GITMO, war, FISA and indefinite detention.
Does this mean we can go back to hoping the Bush administration will be prosecuted for its kidnapping, torture, murder and warcrimes in the US?
Glen Greenwald in Salon.com Salon.comreports that
In October, 2007, candidate Barack Obama -- in response to the Bush administration's demand for a new FISA law -- emphatically vowed that he would filibuster any such bill that contained retroactive amnesty for telecoms which participated in Bush's illegal spying program. At the time, that vow was politically beneficial to Obama because he was seeking the Democratic nomination and wanted to show how resolute he was about standing up against Bush's expansions of surveillance powers and in defense of the rule of law. But in a move that shocked many people at the time -- though which turned out to be completely consistent with his character -- Obama, once he had the nomination secured in July, 2008, turned around and did exactly that which he swore he would not do: he not only voted against the filibuster of the bill containing telecom amnesty, but also voted in favor of enactment of the underlying bill. That bill, known as the FISA Amendments Act of 2008, was then signed into law by George W. Bush at a giddy bipartisan signing ceremony in the Rose Garden, which -- by immunizing telecoms and legalizing most of the Bush program -- put a harmless, harmonious end to what had been the NSA scandal.
Now despite that was our first clue as to where Obama had set his jib a lot of us still liked the idea of having a cool calm collected president getting things somehow slowly and incrimentally accomplished, even as rime after time he did things that caused our gorge to rise, continued the war in Afghanistan, continued the Bush administrations legal pleadings, continues GITMO, engaged in indefinited detentions and assassinations upon accusation, continued the Bush tax cuts for billionaires, continued to drive us nuts with glacial incrimental prpgress. The ACLU however persevered.
On Monday, a federal appeals court reinstated a key legal challenge to that surveillance: a lawsuit filed by the ACLU and others within hours of the FISA Amendments Act (.pdf) being signed into law. The lawsuit attacks the constitutionality of the legislation, which allows the government to electronically eavesdrop on Americans without a probable-cause warrant, so long as one of the parties to the communication resides outside the United States, and is suspected of a link to terrorism.
The decision by the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals means the ACLU, and other rights groups involved in the suit, might get their day in court. “This is a really big victory,” said ACLU spokeswoman Rachel Myers. “The ruling is that you don’t have to prove you’ve been spied on to challenge an unlawful spy act.”
Along with Dennis Kosinich and the other Democrats that are willing to tell a Democratic president he has to go to Congress to ask them to declare a war before he involves us in it the ACLU gives us back some hope.
Updated by rktect at Wed Mar 23, 2011 at 03:19 PM EDT
edited tags