The two American lawyers who were illegally wiretapped by the Bush administration asked a federal judge Friday to order the government to pay $612,000 in damages, plus legal fees for their attorneys.
The demand (.pdf) comes two weeks after U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker said the former administration wiretapped the lawyers' telephone conversations (.pdf) without a warrant, in violation of federal law.
It was the first ruling addressing how Bush's once-secret NSA spy program, adopted in the wake of the 9/11 terror attacks, was carried out against American citizens. Other lawsuits considered the program's overall constitutionality -- absent any evidence of specific eavesdropping -- and were dismissed.
The government in 2004 was intercepting the telephone communications of lawyers Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoor. They were counsel to a Saudi charity, the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, which the government has declared a terror organization.
They learned of the eavesdropping after the government erroneously sent them records. Both the Bush and the Obama administrations declared those records state secrets, so the documents were removed from the case.
Walker allowed the case to proceed, based on other evidence of eavesdropping (.pdf).
The lawyers are seeking $204,000 each, in addition to $204,000 for the charity, whose U.S. assets are frozen because of its terror designation. Judge Walker did not immediately rule on the request.
Under Bush’s so-called Terrorist Surveillance Program, which *The New York Times *disclosed in December 2005, the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans’ telephone calls without warrants if the government believed the person on the other line was overseas and associated with terrorism. Congress, with the vote of Barack Obama — who was a U.S. senator from Illinois at the time — subsequently authorized such warrantless spying in the summer of 2008.
The legislation also provided the nation’s telecommunication companies immunity from lawsuits accusing them of being complicit with the Bush administration in illegal wiretapping.
Photo: wintersoul1/flickr
See Also:
- Court Says Bush Illegally Wiretapped Two Americans
- Obama Dares Judge to Order Release Of NSA Spy Document
- Appeals Court Allows Classified Evidence in Spy Case
- Top Secret: We're Wiretapping You
- Analysis: Some Secret Documents Are Too Secret
- Feds Urge Dismissal of High-Profile Spy Case
- Thoughts of Storm Troopers Filling Spy Case
