A federal district judge in Detroit today struck down the Presidents warrantless domestic spying program operated by the National Security Agency. The decision by Judge Anna Diggs Taylor is yet another setback for the Presidents claim of unchecked executive power, and an important victory for the rule of law.

The U.S. Government has made the unprecedented claim that it can hold a U.S. citizen virtually incommunicado and then hand him over to potential torture. A brief filed last Friday by lawyers for a U.S. citizen detained in Iraq for more than nineteen months decisively responds to this extraordinary claim of unchecked executive power.

Today, the NAACP and five other leading civil rights organizations joined the growing challenge to the Administrations illegal National Security Agency spying program.

The Brennan Center for Justice and the law firm of Jenner & Block LLP filed a brief yesterday on behalf of former federal judges in Qassim v. Bush. The brief argues that our federal courts have the power to end the four-year-plus detention of two men in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base who the Government concedes are innocent, but who remain imprisoned. Such an arbitrary exercise of executive authority, contend the former judges, cannot go unchecked by the courts.