Inside the Al Haramain Charity Case

From Zombietime (ht lgf):

Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, Inc. was the Ashland, Oregon-based American branch of Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, a huge international Islamic charity founded and headquartered in Saudi Arabia, with subsidiaries in countries around the world. After 9/11, several governments (including the U.S., the U.K., and even the United Nations) began investigating the terror funding network, and found evidence that money from Al-Haramain was used not just for charity projects but also to finance Al Qaeda and specific terrorist plots. Various foreign branches of Al-Haramain were broken up or shut down, but it was not apparently until 2004 that the U.S. branch of Al-Haramain came under intense investigation.

In early 2004, government intelligence services supposedly (or has been alleged) began electronic surveillance of phone calls connected to the Ashland Al-Haramain office. It is not known if warrants were obtained, or if the calls were domestic or international. Partly based on intelligence gathered during this surveillance, The U.S. government declared the Oregon branch of Al-Haramain a "specially designated global terrorist."

Unexpectedly, Al-Haramain fought back. They contacted lawyers and sued to have the "terrorist" designation revoked. During what is called "discovery" (a legal term in which each side in a civil case must reveal its evidence to the other side), an employee of the U.S. government accidentally included in a stack of documents given to Al-Haramain a Top Secret record of the surveillance logs.

Al-Haramain's lawyers brought in more anti-government lawyers, who recognized a golden opportunity: since this Top Secret document proved that surveillance of specific individuals had taken place, they now had "standing" (the legal right) to challenge the entire underlying lawfulness of government surveillance in principle. And so the case went into overdrive, and suddenly took on much greater significance than just an individual organization fighting for its reputation: legal activists saw a chance to use the courts to stop the Bush administration from surveilling anybody. If they could get the courts to rule that Al-Haramain had been surveilled illegally, then it would set a precedent and prevent any similar surveillance in the future, and also would render unusable any evidence gathered by surveillance in the past. In other words: a very big deal.

The government's legal team sought to forestall this by recalling the document, insisting that its Top Secret status made it unusable in court because revealing its contents would endanger national security.

From here onward, things became bizarre, a dizzying tug-of-war over surrealistic legal technicalities. Both sides were put into completely impossible positions: The government had to suppress a document which revealed Top Secret surveillance without actually admitting that it had conducted any surveillance; whereas Al-Haramain sought to revoke its designation as a terrorist organization by citing the very evidence (the information gathered during the surveillance) that suggested it was a terrorist organization.

In a word: farcical.

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