[col. writ. 3/] © ’13 Mumia Abu-Jamal
The late U.S. Supreme Court Chief Justice, William Rehnquist, once opined, “In times of war, the law is silent.”
That is to say, as is the State’s supreme executive power, the courts will neither interfere nor restrict nor limit that power.
And although Rehnquist has been gone from the court and life for 8 years, his dictum remains.
For in the recent case Clapper v. Amnesty International, et al., No. -, the exigencies of war prevailed over that of the Constitution, or any mere notions of democracy.
In the Clapper* case, Amnesty, joined by the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), journalists and lawyers challenged the U.S. government’s practice of warrantless wiretapping of international phone calls, emails and other communications.
The Clapper majority determined that because the parties couldn’t prove that the government did this to them (or their clients); they lacked standing to pursue their challenge.
Standing is a judicial concept which determines if (or if not) someone is the proper person to sue.
Calling their claim too “speculative”, Justice Samuel Alito, writing for a 5-vote majority, noted that the plaintiffs “couldn’t manufacture standing by incurring costs in anticipation of no-imminent harms.”
Dissenting Justice Stephen G. Breyer disagreed, saying the harm complained of, as in the fear that government agents were monitoring their communications, “Is as likely to take place as are most future events that commonsense inference and ordinary knowledge of human nature tell us will happen.”
Alito pointed to the so-called FISA – OR Foreign Intelligence Surveillance – Court, as a safe guard over the program.
In fact, the FISA court is a secret court, with secret judges, which issues opinions which too are secret. According to published reports, the FISA court rules for the government something like 99% of the time.
Secret courts to rule on government secrecy, huh? Good luck with that. (We have secret prisons’ why not secret courts?)
William Rehnquist said, “In times of war, the law is silent.”
He should’ve said, ‘in times of war, the law is secret.’
–© ’13 maj
[Source: Liptak, Adam, “Justices
Reject Legal Challenge to Surveillance”, New York Times, Wed., Feb. 27, 2013, pp. A1-A18.
*The ‘Clapper’ references here refers to Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper (Ret.), Director, National Intelligence.]