Well, there’s not much we can do now, but if anyone bothered to call their representatives and register their displeasure, I appreciate it. I know everyone’s suffering from scandal fatigue, but this one’s kind of a doozy:

Also, a lawyer in the al-Haramain case wrote a disturbing and bizarre story on Salon today about the difficulty of proving a charge when no one is allowed to see the proof. Al-Haramain, for those who haven’t been following, is an ongoing court battle between the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, alleged evil-doers, and the Bush Administration. The short story is that al-Haramain was accused of financing terrorist plots (in full disclosure, accused by many people), the Bush administration froze their assets, and al-Haramain sued. During the course of their lawsuit, a government employee accidentally gave logs of al-Haramain’s tapped phone conversations to al-Haramain’s lawyers.

These logs were immediately deemed confidential, and since then, al-Haramain’s lawyers have been fighting tooth and nail to use this proof as, well, proof. Let’s make this part perfectly clear: there is no question that the Bush administration broke the law. That’s not up for debate. And I don’t just say that as a flaming lefty — The New York Times reported on the illegal wiretapping and Bush admitted it. It’s what’s known in the legal profession as a “no-brainer.” The actual fight that’s happening right now is whether or not it’s okay that the President broke the law.

Anyway, so the al-Haramain lawyers saw the secret document but had to destroy it in the interest of national security. After that, they were allowed to object to the document on memory, so long as they also destroyed anything that assisted in their memory. In this section of the Salon article, their government liaison has brought in her IT person to help the author destroy a hard drive that may have lingering secrets on it:

Hogarty brought someone she introduced simply as “Miguel.” By this time, alas, my laptop, which was old, was in its death throes. After Miguel tried logging onto the laptop and encountered fatal errors, he pronounced it dead. Hogarty asked me whether it would be OK if they physically destroyed the hard drive. I’d bought a new laptop and had managed to retrieve from the old one everything that I cared about, so I agreed.

They had brought no tools with them. Hogarty was about to canvass the building for a screwdriver, but I had a pending meeting elsewhere, so Miguel made do by fashioning a crude implement from the metal clip of his pen. He pried the back cover off the computer and removed the hard drive and memory board.

The situation grew darkly comic. They didn’t have a hammer, so they started debating how to smash the hard drive. I suggested they smack it against the corner of the table that was in the room. That didn’t do much. Hogarty then had an idea to put the thing on the floor and use a table leg on it. Miguel put down the hard drive, picked up the table and brought it down several times forcefully. The noise resounded, but the hard drive was impervious. One of the table legs became bent from the procedure.

Next, Miguel tried attacking the hard drive with his homemade tool. Soon he’d managed to pry off the hard drive cover and commenced scratching at the components. Meanwhile, Hogarty took the memory board and began banging on it on the floor with a chair leg. The memory board was weaker than the hard drive and cracked in several places. Then she held the memory board in her hands and tried bending it, but Miguel stopped her, warning that he’d seen someone get cut badly doing that — evidently they’d done this sort of thing before.

I found myself thinking of the Samsonite Gorilla, the TV commercial from the 1970s in which a gorilla stomps on a piece of luggage that just won’t break. I thought: “These people are entrusted with our national security?”

I don’t want to compare apples and oranges, but do you remember when the LA Times reported that stolen hard drives from the US military were on sale at an Afghan bazaar? It’s nice to know where the administration’s priorities lie. Maybe we need to send Miguel to Afghanistan.

Update: One more note, from Russ Feingold today:

“I sit on the Intelligence and Judiciary Committees, and I am one of the few members of this body who has been fully briefed on the warrantless wiretapping program. And, based on what I know, I can promise that if more information is declassified about the program in the future, as is likely to happen either due to the Inspector General report, the election of a new President, or simply the passage of time, members of this body will regret that we passed this legislation. I am also familiar with the collection activities that have been conducted under the Protect America Act and will continue under this bill. I invite any of my colleagues who wish to know more about those activities to come speak to me in a classified setting. Publicly, all I can say is that I have serious concerns about how those activities may have impacted the civil liberties of Americans. If we grant these new powers to the government and the effects become known to the American people, we will realize what a mistake it was, of that I am sure.”

Update II: It’s official, America lost

The Senate has approved a bill overhauling the rules on secret government eavesdropping and granting immunity to telecom companies that helped listen in on Americans after Sept. 11.

The Senate passed the bill Wednesday, 69-28. It turned back three amendments that would have watered down, delayed or stripped away the immunity provision demanded by President Bush.

When the president signs the bill, as expected, it will effectively dismiss some 40 lawsuits filed against telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping and privacy laws.

In particular, I’d like to call out my senators Barbara Boxer for being an excellent senator and voting her liberal conscience, and Dianne Feinstein, for being a total asshole.