Gitmo Attorneys Sue NSA and DOJ

A civil liberties group representing 16 attorneys of detainees at Guantanamo Bay on Thursday sued the National Security Agency and the Justice Department, claiming that the government illegally spied on the lawyers with warrantless wiretaps and has refused to turn over records of the snooping.

The Center for Constitutional Rights filed the FOIA suit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. The group wants all records related to government eavesdropping on the lawyers' conversations with their clients, which would usually be considered legally protected privileged communication.

The suit alleges that the government failed to meet its FOIA
obligations to turn over records the lawyers want in timely fashion.
Here's the FOIA complaint (.pdf) and some details:

"By law, the government is obliged to produce responsive documents within 20 days of the FOIA request. Both the DOJ and the NSA provided inadequate responses to the requests - refusing to provide relevant documents within the required time period and refusing to even acknowledge the existence of documents related to whether the individual lawyers were being subjected to warrantless surveillance.
The NSA produced only two documents, both of which had already been made public, and said that another document was being processed. The
DOJ provided 85 pages of unredacted documents and two redacted documents, much of which had already been made public, and stated that it was withholding 84 pages and an e-mail."

The lawyers, who work at some powerful and deep-pocketed law firms such as Shearman & Sterling and Dorsey & Whitney have essentially been turned into de facto terror suspects simply for doing their jobs.

New York lawyer Wells Dixon, one of the plaintiffs, had this to say to the LA Times: "I am outraged that the NSA and DOJ have categorically refused to say whether they have eavesdropped — without a warrant — on me or other attorneys simply because we have fought for basic due process for men imprisoned without charge or trial at Guantanamo."

It stands to reason that the lawyers want the spying documents in order to pursue a larger case against the NSA. This may be one fight the government shouldn't have picked.