Why Were Lawyers Wiretapped?
Soliman Al-Buthi has never read Franz Kafka’s The Trial. The absurdist novel chronicles the last months in the life of banker Joseph K., who is arrested, hauled into court, condemned and put to death without ever learning the charges against him.
Al-Buthi doesn’t need Kafka. That’s because he’s living a variation of Kafka’s theme in a San Francisco federal courtroom.
Al-Buthi served as a director of an Islamic charity that’s suing the National Security Agency—an intelligence-gathering organization run by the U.S. Defense Department—for eavesdropping on privileged telephone conversations between him and his lawyers during the first half of 2004 without obtaining a warrant.
He knows the government did so because it mistakenly gave the lawyers a log of the conversations in August 2004. The Treasury Department turned it over as discovery in its separate post-Sept. 11, 2001, effort to put out of business Muslim charities and others deemed financial supporters of al-Qaida, the terrorist network responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and Pentagon.
The document was stamped “Top Secret” and came with everything but a bow and a gift card.
Continue reading “Secret Sharers” at this link in the January issue of the ABA Journal.
