In a 48-page rejection of the Justice Department's motion for dismissal, U.S. District Judge Ann Aiken also ordered the FBI to open up files showing how agents secretly spied on Mayfield and his family.
Federal law enforcement officials had released some details of the so-called sneak and peak searches of the family's home in the spring of 2004.
However, Mayfield's attorneys have argued that they can't adequately proceed with their challenge to the constitutionality of the Patriot Act without total access.
The federal judge agreed.
Aiken wrote that Mayfield's family is "entitled to the opportunity to determine the nature of the surveillance and searches conducted, and a specific description of the data and documents collected."
The case is being closely watched across the country as a chief test of the constitutionality of the Patriot Act.
In May 2004, a botched FBI analysis of a fingerprint mistakenly linked Mayfield to last year's deadly terror attack in Madrid, Spain. The Portland attorney was jailed for two weeks as a material witness before he was exonerated and received an apology from the FBI.
Mayfield's lawsuit claims agents targeted Mayfield because he is Muslim.
Although Mayfield suspected authorities had conducted sneak-and-peek searches of his home under the Patriot Act, the federal government didn't acknowledge it until earlier this year.
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TIME today suggests the Plame case may have first been discussed within the White House after an enquiry to the CIA from WP journo Walter Pincus in early June. Which, if true, would expose yet another Rove lie:
That prospect increases the chances that White House official Karl Rove and others learned about Plame from within the Administration rather than from media contacts. Rove has told investigators he believes he learned of her directly or indirectly from reporters, according to his lawyer.
The previously undisclosed fact gathering began in the first week of June 2003 at the CIA, when its public-affairs office received an inquiry about Wilson's trip to Africa from veteran Washington Post reporter Walter Pincus. That office then contacted Plame's unit, which had sent Wilson to Niger, but stopped short of drafting an internal report. The same week, Under Secretary of State Marc Grossman asked for and received a memo on the Wilson trip from Carl Ford, head of the State Department's Bureau of Intelligence and Research. Sources familiar with the memo, which disclosed Plame's relationship to Wilson, say Secretary of State Colin Powell read it in mid-June.
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Newsweek has yet another leaked document, this one from an FBI official in Gitmo three years ago, in November 2002, warning that the Bush administration's "rendition" of prisoners to foreign countries was illegal:
"In as much as the intent of this category is to utilize, outside the U.S., interrogation techniques which would violate [U.S. law] if committed in the U.S., it is a per se violation of the U.S. Torture Statute," the agent wrote. "Discussing any plan which includes this category could be seen as a con-spiracy to violate [the Torture Statute]" and "would inculpate" everyone involved.
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Meanwhile, one of the London bombers said his group was motivated by anger at the Iraq War alone. Osman Hussain describes his group's "political conviction that it is necessary to give a signal, to do something." A pity they didn't start a blog instead of turning to violence.
The bomber also said his group had no ties to Al Quaeda:
We never had contacts with the Bin Laden organisation. We knew
that they existed. We had access to their platforms through the internet, but nothing direct.
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Elsewhere, it seems Al Quaeda's websites are mysteriously disappearing. Yet terrorist techniques are still readily available on - guess where? - US rightwing extremist websites:
Ironically, the most readily available sources of accurate online information on bomb-making are the websites of the radical American militia. “I have not seen any Al-Qaeda manuals that look like genuine terrorist training,” claims Clarke.
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