"A three-judge panel of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals seemed skeptical of the Bush administration's defense of secret laws and regulations but stopped short of suggesting that such a rule would be necessarily unconstitutional.
"How do we know there's an order?" Judge Thomas Nelson asked. "Because you said there was?"
Replied Joshua Waldman, a staff attorney for the Department of Justice: "We couldn't confirm or deny the existence of an order." Even though government regulations required his silence, Waldman said, the situation did seem a "bit peculiar."
"This is America," said James Harrison, a lawyer representing Gilmore. "We do not have secret laws. Period." Harrison stressed that Gilmore was happy to go through a metal detector.
Gilmore sued the federal government after being told he could not fly without ID from Oakland, Calif., to Washington, D.C., which he said he was doing to exercise his First Amendment right to petition the government for a redress of grievances."Secret laws now? So this administration is working towards the ability to charge you for crimes without laws. That's great. This country gets better every day.




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