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It's been my experience that when a citizens' group files a suit like this against the federal government, it's tossed because the group has no standing. So it seems like a publicity grab. I'd like to be wrong about that. It's one thing to be amicus curiae, another to be the one with the standing to file suit.
TK
"Attorney General Alberto Gonzales continues to defend the warrantless spying program -- and to insist that the administration doesn't need the legislation that Republicans on the Senate Intelligence Committee have proposed as part of their "accommodation" with the White House. "There's a general consensus -- quite frankly -- that this is a needed program," Gonzales said during a speech before the National Association of Attorneys General Wednesday. Maybe he's right."
The "general consensus" among people I know is that illegal spying on American citizens is needed about as much as a police state is needed to secure freedom. This sort of apologia for compromising the Bill of Rights because of some misperceived domestic "emergency" is no more useful or valid than the "legal" justification for torture offered by fascist law professors in defense of the indefensible.
If we do not exercise real vigilance now to preserve our freedom in this country, if we surrender it piece by piece in the misbegotten notion that by doing so we can "protect" ourselves, we will have given up the very things which are most worth protecting.
