NYT: Many legal experts who agree with conclusion slam judge's reasoning and rhetoric in wire-tapping opinion

RAW STORY
Published: Friday August 18, 2006

Many legal experts who agree with the conclusion slam the "reasoning and rhetoric" in a federal judge's opinion on the unlawfulness of the National Security Administration surveillance program, according to a story slated for Saturday's New York Times, RAW STORY has learned.

"Even legal experts who agreed with a federal judge's conclusion on Thursday that a National Security Administration surveillance program is unlawful were distancing themselves from the decision's reasoning and rhetoric on Friday," reports Adam Liptak for The Times.

"They said the opinion overlooked important precedents, failed to engage the government's major arguments, used circular reasoning, substituted passion for analysis and did not even offer the best reasons for its own conclusions," the article continues.

Excerpts from the article:

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Discomfort with the quality of the decision is almost universal, said Howard J. Bashman, a Pennsylvania lawyer whose Web log [How Appealing] provides comprehensive and nonpartisan reports on legal developments.

"It does appear," Bashman said, "that folks on all sides of the spectrum, both those who support it and those who oppose it, say the decision is not strongly grounded in legal authority."

The main problems, scholars sympathetic to the decision's bottom line said, is that the judge, Anna Diggs Taylor, relied on novel and questionable constitutional arguments when more straightforward statutory ones were available.

She ruled, for instance, that the NSA program, which eavesdrops on international communications of people in the United States without court permission, violated the First Amendment because it might have chilled the speech of people who feared they might have been monitored. That ruling is "rather innovative" and "not a particularly good argument," Jack Balkin, a law professor at Yale who believes the program is illegal, wrote on his Web log.

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FULL TIMES ARTICLE AT THIS LINK