Washington, April 01: A federal judge has ruled that the government is liable for illegally wiretapping an Islamic charity without a valid search warrant.
US District Judge Vaughn Walker in San Francisco said on Wednesday that attorneys for the Al-Haramain Islamic Foundation, once based in Oregon, could pursue civil remedies for being subjected in 2004 to warrantless domestic surveillance under an anti-terrorism program put into place by the Bush administration after the September 11, 2001, attacks on the US.
The Court’s ruling reaffirmed an earlier decision that the warrantless wiretaps conducted on an Oregon-based Islamic non-profit organization were illegal.
The US has designated the Oregon-based al-Haramain Islamic Foundation as a terrorist organization.
The al-Haramain Islamic Foundation was a target of a Treasury Department program to track financing of terrorism activities, Walker’s ruling said.
Telephone conversations between people identified as foundation officials in Saudi Arabia and their lawyers in the US were tapped in 2004.
———-Agencies