A Washington Post reporter obtained a document that revealed the existence of the controversial NSA eavesdropping program, but gave it back when FBI officials said it contained “highly sensitive national security information,” according to a report today in the Post itself. The reporter gave it back because he said, “it was not relevant to what I was working on at the time.” Apparently he didn’t realize what he had:

Leonard Downie Jr., executive editor of The Post, also declined to discuss the document but said it did not directly aid Ottaway’s reporting.
“At the time we had this document, it was before we had any knowledge of the eavesdropping program. Without that knowledge, the document provided no useful information,” Downie said. “At the time, all we knew was that this document was not relevant to David’s reporting.”

The WaPo report reveals some of the damage that the New York Times’s exposure of the program has done — groups with terrorist ties are now suing, claiming that the evidence against them was gathered illegally:

According to a source familiar with the case, the document indicated that the National Security Agency intercepted telephone conversations in the spring of 2004 between a director of the al-Haramain Islamic Foundation and lawyers for the foundation in the District.
Al-Haramain, a Saudi group that once operated in Oregon, sued the Bush administration in federal court this week, alleging it was a victim of President Bush’s secret domestic eavesdropping program. Its lawyers asked a judge to privately review the classified material, which the organization contends would help prove its claim.

Al-Haramain had various assets frozen and blocked between 2002 and 2004 as investigations revealed its ties to al-Qaeda. Here’s the U.S. Treasury Department’s summary of the case against al-Haramain. Then there’s this from an AP report:

Evidence linking Kenya’s Al-Haramain branch to al Qaeda emerged following the 1998 bombings of the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, simultaneous attacks that killed 231 people, including 12 Americans.
The al Qaeda cell that orchestrated the bombings was in part financed by profits from a wholesale fish business set up with funds from Al-Haramain and at least one other charity, said another U.S. official, also speaking on condition of anonymity.
Al Qaeda used money from charities to buy a small fiberglass fishing boat for Mohammed Sadiq Odeh, now serving a life sentence in a U.S. prison for the embassy attack, said the official, who spoke from Washington.
Following his arrest in the days after the bombings, Odeh told U.S. and Kenyan investigators that “the business was for al Qaeda.” He said he was permitted to take from the profits what he needed to live on and “give the rest to al Qaeda and employees who were in al Qaeda,” according to an FBI report of his interrogation.

Al-Haramain is now suing the U.S. on the grounds that its Fourth Amendment rights were violated. A little luck runs its way, maybe it’ll be back up and running soon, courtesy of the NYT.