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President Barack Obama Making Executive Decisions Within 48 Hours of Taking Office
As the 44th President of the United States, Barack Obama is taking fast decisive action on some constitutional issues.Within forty-eight hours of being sworn into office President Obama has signed and issued four executive orders indicating his respect for the Constitution of the United States and the rule of law.
He has ordered Guantánamo Bay shut down. Our new president has
banned torture, and ordered a full review of U.S. detention policies and procedures; and President Obama has delayed the trial of Ali al-Marri, an ACLU client whose case is at the center of the Supreme Court’s review of indefinite detention policies.
Although these acts are commendable we believe the new president has dropped the ball on the issue of warrantless eavesdropping by government agencies.
In the matter involving U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco, President Obama has sided with the previous administration, by substituting its name as defendant in a wherein the Bush administration has urged a federal judge to set aside a ruling in a closely watched spy case weighing whether a U.S. president may bypass Congress and establish a program of eavesdropping on Americans without warrants.
The legal camflamma concerns Walker’s decision to admit as evidence a classified document allegedly showing that two American lawyers for a now-defunct Saudi charity were electronically eavesdropped on without warrants by the Bush administration in 2004.
The lawyers — Wendell Belew and Asim Ghafoo — sued the Bush administration after the U.S. Treasury Department accidentally released the Top Secret memo to them. At one point, the courts had ordered the document, which has never been made public, returned and removed from the case.
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The document’s admission to the case is central for the two former lawyers of the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation charity to acquire legal standing so they may challenge the constitutionality of the warrantless-eavesdropping program Bush publicly acknowledged in 2005.
The Friday hearing is needed, because disputes with pretrial decisions generally require the trial judge to permit an appeal.
The Obama administration is also concurs with the former administration in its legal defense of July legislation which provides immunity for the nation’s telecommunications companies from lawsuits accusing them of complicity in Bush’s eavesdropping program, according to testimony last week by incoming Attorney General Eric Holder.
President Obama voted for the legislation when he was a U.S. senator from Illinois. The immunity from being sued was included in a broader spy package granting the government wide-ranging, warrantless eavesdropping powers on Americans’ electronic communications.
A decision on the constitutionality of the immunity legislation is pending before Judge Walker in a separate case brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
We find there is a duplicitous nature to the actions taken by the new president and his administration with regard to the rule of law.
As radical an idea as it may seem, we believe if any government entity is going to eavesdrop on Americans a warrant to do so should be required.
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