New Yorker reporter Patrick Radden Keefe writes in this issue about the Al Haramain Islamic Foundation, the Ashland chapter of which was designated a terrorist organization by the government, based on classified evidence.

We covered the case in Federal Court on April 14, but Keefe’s story does a good job of bringing out the inherent dangers of the government’s ability to rely on secret evidence in order to designate people terrorists. There’s an Orwellian scene in a government facility where lawyers for a designated terrorist have to draft a response to classified evidence, not having seen it, on a secret computer. Afterwards they have to destroy their own arguments, because they relate to presumed classified arguments, even though they’ve never actually seen them. They do so by destroying a computer:

After the drafting session, Hogarty and Eisenberge met once more, to wipe his computer of any classified information. As it happened, the laptop had died of its own accord; Eisenberg and Hogarty agreed to destroy the hard drive. Hogarty had brought a technician with her, an he extracted the hard drrive and memory board from the laptop. Then he and Hogartyy placed the hard drive on the floor and pounded it with a table leg.

What an image for doublethink. It’s a thorough and eerie piece of investigative journalism, well worth twenty minutes of your attention.