1. Wilner v. NSA (2d Cir. Dec. 30, 2009) (affirming judgment dismissing FOIA request re TSP surveillance)
A Second Circuit panel has affirmed summary judgment against a group of GTMO habeas attorneys who had sought to acquire information from NSA and DOJ, pursuant to FOIA, as to whether the government had intercepted their communications with their clients. The government filed a Glomar response, and the panel in this opinion upholds the legitimacy and sufficiency of their doing so. Posted here:
From the opinion’s preface:
We affirm the judgment of the District Court upholding the NSA’s Glomar response and hold that: (1) a Glomar response is available to agencies as a valid response to FOIA requests; (2) an agency may issue a Glomar response to FOIA requests seeking information obtained pursuant to a “publicly acknowledged” intelligence program such as the TSP, at least when the existence of such information has not already been publicly disclosed; (3) the NSA properly invoked the Glomar doctrine in response to plaintiffs’ request for information pursuant to FOIA Exemption 3; (4) the government’s affidavits sufficiently allege the necessity of a Glomar response in this case, making it unnecessary for us to review or to require the District Court to review ex parte and in camera any classified affidavits that the NSA might proffer in support of its Glomar response; and (5) we find no evidence in the record that the NSA invoked Glomar for the purpose of concealing activities that violate the Constitution or are otherwise illegal. We agree with counsel for all parties that we need not reach the legality of the underlying TSP because that question is outside of the scope of this FOIA action.
Another interesting passage concerns the court’s perception of a very strong deference obligation in this context:
When, as here, a court finds that the government’s public affidavits sufficiently allege the necessity of a Glomar response, ex parte and in camera review of additional, confidential material is unnecessary and beyond the role assigned to the judiciary by applicable law. “[W]e have consistently referred to executive affidavits predicting harm to the national security, and have found it unwise to undertake searching judicial review.” Ctr. for Nat’l Sec. Studies, 331 F.3d at 927. We affirm our “deferential posture in FOIA cases regarding the uniquely executive purview of national security.” Larson, 565 F.3d at 865 (internal quotation marks omitted). Recognizing the relative competencies of the executive and judiciary, we believe that it is bad law and bad policy to “second-guess the predictive judgments made by the government’s intelligence agencies,” id. (internal quotation marks omitted), regarding questions such as whether disclosure of terrorist-related surveillance records would pose a threat to national security.
I’ve mentioned in prior posts my view that judicial deference to executive factual judgments (whether predictive, as in this case, or retrospective/historical) is a deeply significant but often unappreciated concept, one that plays an important role across a range of doctrinal settings. My thoughts on the topic appear in this recent article: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1348804.
2. United States v. Slough (D.D.C. Dec. 31, 2009) (dismissing indictment against Blackwater employees in re Nisur Square shootings)
Judge Urbina has dismissed the indictment against a group of Blackwater employees involved in the September 2007 Nisur Square shootings. The opinion is here:
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2008cr0360-217
From the opening pages:
The defendants have been charged with voluntary manslaughter and firearms violations arising out of a shooting that occurred in Baghdad, Iraq on September 16, 2007. They contend that in the course of this prosecution, the government violated their constitutional rights by utilizing statements they made to Department of State investigators, which were compelled under a threat of job loss. The government has acknowledged that many of these statements qualify as compelled statements under Garrity v. New Jersey, 385 U.S. 493 (1967), which held that the Fifth Amendment privilege against self-incrimination bars the government from using statements compelled under a threat of job loss in a subsequent criminal prosecution. The Fifth Amendment automatically confers use and derivative use immunity on statements compelled under Garrity; this means that in seeking an indictment from a grand jury or a conviction at trial, the government is prohibited from using such compelled statements or any evidence obtained as a result of those statements.
The government has also acknowledged that its investigators, prosecutors and key witnesses were exposed to (and, indeed, aggressively sought out) many of the statements given by the defendants to State Department investigators. Under the binding precedent of the Supreme Court in Kastigar v. United States, 406 U.S. 441 (1971) and this Circuit in United States v. North, 910 F.2d 843 (D.C. Cir. 1990), the burden fell to the government to prove that it made no use whatsoever of these immunized statements or that any such use was harmless beyond any reasonable doubt.
Beginning on October 14, 2009, this court convened a Kastigar hearing to explore whether the government had made any use of compelled statements during its prosecution of the defendants. During this hearing, which spanned three weeks, the parties presented testimony from twenty-five witnesses, including the government’s entire prosecution team, the lead FBI agents in charge of the investigation and all five defendants. The parties offered hundreds of Exhibits into evidence and submitted voluminous pre- and post-hearing memoranda.
From this extensive presentation of evidence and argument, the following conclusions ineluctably emerge. In their zeal to bring charges against the defendants in this case, the prosecutors and investigators aggressively sought out statements the defendants had been compelled to make to government investigators in the immediate aftermath of the shooting and in the subsequent investigation. In so doing, the government’s trial team repeatedly disregarded the warnings of experienced, senior prosecutors, assigned to the case specifically to advise the trial team on Garrity and Kastigar issues, that this course of action threatened the viability of the prosecution. The government used the defendants’ compelled statements to guide its charging decisions, to formulate its theory of the case, to develop investigatory leads and, ultimately, to obtain the indictment in this case. The government’s key witnesses immersed themselves in the defendants’ compelled statements, and the evidence adduced at the Kastigar hearing plainly demonstrated that these compelled statements shaped portions of the witnesses’ testimony to the indicting grand jury.2 The explanations offered by the prosecutors and investigators in an attempt to justify their actions and persuade the court that they did not use the defendants’ compelled testimony were all too often contradictory, unbelievable and lacking in credibility.
In short, the government has utterly failed to prove that it made no impermissible use of the defendants’ statements or that such use was harmless beyond a reasonable doubt. Accordingly, the court must dismiss the indictment against all of the defendants.