Back in April, I reported on the Attorney General Guidelines issued by the Bush administration just as it was leaving office, in December. They gave the FBI unprecedented powers to investigate people without any reason to believe they’re engaged in wrongdoing. Then last Friday, in response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Justice Department released a heavily redacted version of its Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide (DIOG), an internal policy document that explains how FBI agents would implement the Attorney General Guidelines.

As the ACLU noted earlier this week, the operations guide actually allows the FBI to violate the Attorney General Guidelines without approve from, or notice to, the Attorney General.

“It sets an extremely confusing and dangerous precedent to create an ambiguous set of guidelines for invasive surveillance of Americans and then grant the FBI the authority to violate those guidelines unilaterally,” said Michael Macleod-Ball, acting director of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office, in a statement released Tuesday. “We remain concerned that the Mukasey Guidelines were written so broadly that they imposed essentially no restrictions at all on FBI investigations, and now we see the FBI has interpreted them in exactly the same way. Congress needs to create a statutory framework that limits the FBI’s authority to conduct investigations without reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing as soon as possible.”

The guidelines are raising particular concerns among Muslim civil rights groups who fear they allow FBI agents to sent informants into mosques to spy on their members. “The concern many feel is over attending mosque services for the fear the FBI might be looking over their shoulder.” Farhanda Khera of Muslim Advocates, which also sued to obtain the guidelines, told Josh Gerstein at Politico.

Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco dismissed the cases because Congress explicitly gave the telecom companies immunity from civil suits in a 2008 amendment to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA.

Although the customers who sued, represented by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the American Civil Liberties Union, claimed that the immunity provision of the law was unconstitutional, Judge Walker disagreed.

Significantly, however, he noted that at least one part of the argument presented “a close question,” leaving open the possibility that his decision could be reversed on appeal.

The lawyers who brought the case said yesterday that they plan to pursue that course.

“We’re deeply disappointed in Judge Walker’s ruling today,” Cindy Cohn, legal director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told Keith Perine at CQ Politics. “The retroactive immunity law unconstitutionally takes away Americans’ claims arising out of the First and Fourth Amendments, violates the federal government’s separation of powers as established in the Constitution, and robs innocent telecom customers of their rights without due process of law.”

Judge Walker also specifically wrote that his decision in the case against the telecoms does not foreclose other cases based on similar facts filed against the government.

“The court agrees with the United States and the telecommunications company defendants on this point: plaintiffs retain a means of redressing the harms alleged in their complaints by proceeding against governmental actors and entities who are, after all, the primary actors in the alleged wiretapping activities,” Vaughn wrote.

Meanwhile, in a separate ruling in the Al-Haramain case, Judge Walker ruled that the defunct Islamic charity can proceed with its case against the government even without the document that the Obama administration has been trying so desperately to conceal. That document — which the government inadvertently disclosed to Al-Haramain’s lawyers — establishes that the organization was wiretapped, its lawyers say.

A hearing on the merits of the case — whether the government broke the law when it wiretapped Al-Haramain and its lawyers without a warrant — is scheduled for September 1.

A ruling from Judge Walker last July that the president lacks the authority to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, or FISA, does not bode well for the government.

Jon Eisenberg, Al-Haramain’s lawyer, summed it up at the time this way: “Judge Walker ruled, effectively, that President George W. Bush is a felon.”

Just the other day, when I was writing about the case of Jewel v. NSA (and responding to the Columbia Journalism Review’s criticism that no one was covering this important case about warrantless wiretapping), I remarked that while everyone’s been up in arms about the Obama administration’s claiming the case should be dismissed because it would reveal “state secrets” — the same argument the Justice Department has made repeatedly in previous cases alleging illegal wiretapping and abusive interrogation programs — no one seemed to notice that the Jewel case charges that the wiretapping program is still going on.

Here’s a quote from the government’s brief asking the federal court to dismiss the case:

Plaintiffs in this action allege that the Government, through the National Security Agency (“NSA”), is undertaking an “illegal and unconstitutional dragnet communications surveillance in concert with major telecommunications companies,” and that NSA has indiscriminately intercepted the content of communications, as well as the communications records, of millions of ordinary Americans.

Interestingly, nowhere in its brief does the government deny that.  It just argues vehemently that the court should dismiss the case.

So should we really be all that surprised that, as James Risen and Eric Lichtblau report in The New York Times today, the charges may turn out to be true?

As Spencer’s already mentioned, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif) and the Senate Intelligence Committee today promised to investigate. They might want to call the Electronic Frontier Foundation and their clients in the Jewel case as witnesses.

Attorney General Eric Holder and Katie Couric (CBS News)

In an interview that aired Wednesday night on the CBS Evening News, Attorney General Eric Holder suggested to Katie Couric that the Obama administration is unlikely to depart dramatically from the Bush administration’s position on the use of the state secrets privilege, noting just one case out of about 20 currently under review in which the Justice Department is seriously considering changing its stance. He did not say which case that was.

Most likely, the reversal won’t come in the case of Jewel v. NSA, because Holder’s Justice Department Friday again broadly asserted the “state secrets” privilege as a grounds for dismissing the case, brought by AT&T customers alleging the government used dragnet surveillance to monitor the domestic telephone communications of millions of ordinary Americans.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

The Department of Justice – first under President George W. Bush and now under President Obama – has repeatedly invoked this executive privilege, which allows the president to prevent public disclosure of evidence in court by claiming that its release would endanger national security. And increasingly, the Department of Justice has used the privilege not only to prevent public disclosure of documents, but to dismiss entire cases brought by victims of illegal policies, claiming that the subject matter of the case itself is a state secret, and that even the judge shouldn’t review the documents in private. A recent report by the Constitution Project, a bipartisan think tank, found that the Bush administration used the privilege to seek “blanket dismissal of every case challenging the constitutionality of specific, ongoing government programs” in 92 percent more cases per year than in the previous decade.

Last night, Holder told Couric that after he took over the attorney general’s office, he asked lawyers in the Justice Department to see “if there’s a way where we can be more surgical, whether there is a way in which we can share more information.” The state secrets privilege, he said, is appropriately invoked “at certain times”, but “I want to make sure that we only do it where it’s absolutely necessary. I would only apply the doctrine where national security was at stake, where the lives of the American people were at stake,” he said.

Yet it’s difficult to see that standard at work in the recent cases where the Justice Department has invoked the state secrets privilege.

For example, in a federal court in San Francisco on Friday, the Obama Justice Department moved to dismiss the Jewel case based in part on the state secrets privilege. The AT&T customers who filed suit, represented by the Electronic Freedom Foundation, claim the National Security Agency illegally intercepted their calls and obtained their phone records as part of a broad-reaching, ongoing national security surveillance program and in violation of the First and Fourth Amendments of the United States Constitution, the separation of powers doctrine and federal statutes.

In its legal brief filed with the court, the government’s lawyers claim the case must be dismissed because allowing it to go forward at all would disclose information about the NSA surveillance program, which is itself a state secret. Disclosure of the information the customers want to see, claims the government, “which concerns how the United States seeks to detect and prevent terrorist attacks, would cause exceptionally grave harm to national security,” Justice Department lawyers said in their filing.

This is the second attempt by ordinary AT&T customers to learn more about the government’s secret domestic wiretapping program and to hold the government or a company that assisted it accountable. An earlier case, also brought by the Electronic Frontier Foundation against AT&T itself, was quashed when, after the Bush administration had made the state secrets arguments in court, Congress passed a law granting immunity to AT&T and other telecommunications companies from lawsuits from customers who claimed the companies helped the government spy on them.

The broad use of the state secrets privilege to dismiss entire court cases challenging unlawful government actions has outraged civil liberties and open government groups such as the American Civil Liberties Union and Center for Constitutional Rights. Such advocates had counted on Obama’s promises in the first days of his presidency to run a more transparent government than his predecessor. But the Obama Justice Department already, in several cases seeking information about Bush administration counter-terrorism activities, has invoked the state secrets privilege to prevent the disclosure of critical evidence.

For example, in Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, which TWI has been following, the Obama administration asserted that the Bush administration’s domestic warrantless wiretapping program, or Terrorist Surveillance Program, is a state secret that cannot be revealed without endangering national security. Never mind that President George W. Bush had himself acknowledged the program’s existence, and President Obama has said it is no longer operative.

And in Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, which TWI first wrote about in January, the Obama administration asserted the state secrets privilege to seek dismissal of a case brought by five victims of the Bush administration’s “extraordinary rendition” program — which transferred prisoners to foreign countries for interrogation under torture. In that case, the victims, including Binyam Mohamed, the British resident I’ve written about, sued the subsidiary of Boeing that allegedly assisted the CIA in its torture program. The Bush administration immediately swooped in and convinced the federal court to dismiss the case because the now-defunct extraordinary rendition program is supposedly a “state secret.” In February, the Obama administration, to the surprise of even some of the judges sitting on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit that day, continued to maintain that argument.

During last night’s interview, Couric asked Holder whether he thought the state secrets doctrine had been abused by the Bush administration.

“Well, I don’t know,” said Holder. “On the basis of the two, three cases we’ve had to review so far, I think that the invocation of the doctrine was correct. We – reversed – are in the process of looking at one case. But I think we’re very likely to reverse it.”

Presumably, the three cases he’s referring to are the Jewel, Al-Haramain and Jeppesen Dataplan. But Holder went on to say that there have been more than 20 such assertions in cases that are still open. He added that a report on the Justice Department’s use of the privilege is being prepared, and his “hope is to be able to share the results of that report with the American people.”

Marc Ambinder, who obtained an early transcript of the interview, wrote Wednesday in The Atlantic that a senior Justice Department official “declined to elaborate” on in which case Holder was planning to reverse the department’s position.

Congress, meanwhile, may not leave the matter in Holder’s hands. In February, Rep. Jerold Nadler (D-N.Y.) and several co-sponsors introduced the State Secrets Protection Act of 2009, which would require a federal judge to look at the disputed evidence rather than dismiss the case outright based solely on the government’s assertion that its disclosure would endanger national security. A parallel bill was introduced in the Senate by Sen. Patrick Leahy (D-Vt.) and has six co-sponsors.