The NSA Decision Was an Amateur Effort

Bryan Cunningham is a former CIA analyst and was a federal prosecutor during the Clinton Administration. He writes today at National Review Online and total destroys the decision by a Carter-appointed judge to stop the terrorist surveillance program:

The Honorable Anna Diggs-Taylor probably means well. The lone judge in American history to order a president to halt in wartime a foreign-intelligence-collection program that has undoubtedly saved lives probably sympathizes with the journalists, and others, who are suing to stop the Terrorist Surveillance Program (TSP) in which NSA intercepts foreign-U.S. terrorist communications. She probably feels in her heart the program is wrong, and undoubtedly hears the footsteps of the federal judicial panel moving towards taking this case away from her and consolidating it with others.

We can sympathize with her motives, and even share some of her gut feelings of uneasiness about the program. But we cannot accept the stunningly amateurish piece of, I hesitate even to call it legal work, by which she purports to make our government go deaf and dumb to those would murder us en masse. Her bosses on the Court of Appeals and/or the United States Supreme Court will not accept it.

Much will be said about this opinion in the coming days. I’ll start with this: I wouldn’t accept this utterly unsupported, constitutionally and logically bankrupt collection of musings from a first-year law student, much less a new lawyer at my firm.

That's going to leave a mark. You can read the rest of his dismantling of the opinion here.

It's important that the Sixth Circuit act on this case (and reverse her decision) as quickly as possible. As one lawyer explained yesterday, once you have one judge jump the shark and make an idiotic decision, it makes it easier for other like-minded judges to do the same. There are other cases pending out there, but I doubt if any of them will be using Diggs-Taylor's opinion as a foundation for their decision.