Lawsuit Against Wiretaps Rejected

A federal appeals court removed a serious legal challenge to the Bush administration's warrantless wiretapping program yesterday, overruling the only judge who held that a controversial surveillance effort by the National Security Agency was unconstitutional.

Two members of a three-judge panel of the Cincinnati-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the 6th Circuit ordered the dismissal of a major lawsuit that challenged the wiretapping, which President Bush authorized secretly to eavesdrop on communications involving potential terrorists shortly after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.

The court did not rule on the spying program's legality. Instead, it declared that the American Civil Liberties Union and the others who brought the case -- including academics, lawyers and journalists -- did not have the standing to sue because they could not demonstrate that they had been direct targets of the clandestine surveillance. Washington Post