The war on terror has suffered another blow. A federal judge in Detroit has declared the Bush administration's warrantless eavesdropping program to be illegal and unconstitutional. She wants it halted at once.

An excerpt from the NYT story:

District Judge Anna Diggs Taylor found that President Bush exceeded his proper authority and that the eavesdropping without warrants violated the First and Fourth Amendment protections of free speech and privacy.

“It was never the intent of the Framers to give the president such unfettered control, particularly where his actions blatantly disregard the parameters clearly enumerated in the Bill of Rights,” she wrote.In becoming the first federal judge to declare the eavesdropping program unconstitutional, Judge Taylor rejected the administration’s assertion that to defend itself against a lawsuit would force it to divulge information that should be kept secret in the name of national security.

“Predictably, the war on terror of this administration has produced a vast number of cases, in which the states secrets privilege has been invoked,” Judge Taylor wrote. She noted that the Supreme Court has held that because the president’s power to withhold secrets is so powerful, “it is not to be lightly invoked.” In any event, she said, she is convinced that the administration could defend itself in this case without disclosing state secrets.Judge Taylor’s ruling came in a suit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of journalists, scholars, lawyers and various nonprofit organizations who argued that the possibility of eavesdropping by the National Security Agency interfered with their work.

Although she ordered an immediate halt to the eavesdropping program, no one who has followed the controversy expects the litigation to end quickly. The Justice Department said it was preparing its response to the ruling, and it was widely assumed that that response would include a request to postpone enforcement of Judge Taylor’s decree pending appeals.