Judge's bottomline on King George’s Spying Case: ‘The King Can Do No Wrong’

From Thinkprogress:

Yesterday, a federal appeals court “appeared skeptical of and sometimes hostile” towards the Bush administration’s argument that legal challenges to the NSA’s surveillance programs should be dismissed on “state secrets” and national security grounds, with one judge saying the government’s argument was tantamount to “the king can do no wrong.”

“The bottom line” of the administration’s argument “is the government declares something is a state secret, that’s the end of it. No cases,” said Judge Judge Harry Pregerson. “The king can do no wrong.”

The two cases argued yesterday — the first to reach the court out of fifty lawsuits consolidated before the 9th Circuit court — concern two separate, but related secret programs:

1) A program where AT&T allegedly provides “the NSA its customers’ phone and Internet communications for a vast data-mining operation,” in a program that “the government has not acknowledged,” but plaintiff’s lawyers call a “content dragnet.”

2) A program disclosed by The New York Times in December 2005, which the administration calls the Terrorist Surveillance Program,” where the NSA bypasses “court warrants in monitoring international communications involving people in the United States.”