Thanks Guys

By breaking the law and running roughshod over the Constitution, the Bush Administration has now put a good deal of their terrorist criminal trials in legal jeopardy:

Defense lawyers in some of the country's biggest terrorism cases say they plan to bring legal challenges to determine whether the National Security Agency used illegal wiretaps against several dozen Muslim men tied to Al Qaeda.

The lawyers said in interviews that they wanted to learn whether the men were monitored by the agency and, if so, whether the government withheld critical information or misled judges and defense lawyers about how and why the men were singled out.

The expected legal challenges, in cases from Florida, Ohio, Oregon and Virginia, add another dimension to the growing controversy over the agency's domestic surveillance program and could jeopardize some of the Bush administration's most important courtroom victories in terror cases, legal analysts say.

The question of whether the N.S.A. program was used in criminal prosecutions and whether it improperly influenced them raises "fascinating and difficult questions," said Carl W. Tobias, a law professor at the University of Richmond who has studied terrorism prosecutions [...]

Government officials, in defending the value of the security agency's surveillance program, have said in interviews that it played a critical part in at least two cases that led to the convictions of Qaeda associates, Iyman Faris of Ohio, who admitted taking part in a failed plot to bring down the Brooklyn Bridge, and Mohammed Junaid Babar of Queens, who was implicated in a failed plot to bomb British targets.

David B. Smith, a lawyer for Mr. Faris, said he planned to file a motion in part to determine whether information about the surveillance program should have been turned over. Lawyers said they were also considering a civil case against the president, saying that Mr. Faris was the target of an illegal wiretap ordered by Mr. Bush. A lawyer for Mr. Babar declined to comment.

Did anyone else snicker that we've caught a terror suspect named Babar? Did we get the rest of his elephant family?

Now, if the lower courts did reverse or hold up some of these terror convictions, the Bush Administration would be faced with a dilemma: do they accept the decision and let a terrorist suspect go free on a technicality, or do they appeal to the SCOTUS, getting a precedent-forming ruling on Presidential power, potentially risking the dismantling of their entire domestic spying operation?

It's no different than illegally gaining intelligence through torture, which is a prime reason why so many enemy combatants haven't been charged with anything, because their convictions would almost certainly be overturned on the basis of imadmissable evidence.

In both cases, the legal hurdles were completely avoidable if the Administration decided to act under the law rather than go around it, a choice which would have impacted none of these investigations in the slightest. You have to ask yourself why they would want to keep something so secret that they would jeopardize their own cases. You have to ask what else they were doing.