By Noel Brinkerhoff
United States - Congressional
Democrats, the media and civil libertarians are continuing their fight
with President Barack Obama over his administration’s secret
interpretations of the Patriot Act.
Senators Ron Wyden of Oregon and Mark Udall of Colorado, who sit on the Senate Intelligence Committee, wrote to Attorney General Eric Holder
last week claiming a classified intelligence operation based on the
Patriot Act interpretation is not as critical to national security as
the administration says.
Wyden and Udall also wrote that Americans would be “stunned” if
they knew what the government was really doing based on the legal theory
being employed through the Patriot Act. In October, Sen. Richard Durbin
(D-Illinois) said that the government’s use of “Section 215 is
unfortunately cloaked in secrecy. Some day that cloak will be lifted,
and future generations will ask whether our actions today meet the test
of a democratic society: transparency, accountability, and fidelity to
the rule of law and our Constitution.”
The Department of Justice
has insisted that revealing anything about the secret spy program could
“cause exceptionally grave damage to the national security of the
United States.”
Federal lawyers are trying to dismiss two lawsuits, one by The New York Times and
the other by the American Civil Liberties Union and the Electronic
Frontier Foundation, that seek to force the administration into
disclosing how the Patriot Act has been interpreted.
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