The suit against Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and other military officials names the plaintiff as John Doe.
The report cited as its source for the officials' names an unnamed Syrian who lives in Lebanon and has had contact with high-level Syrian officers posted there.
A frequent speaker for government and industry audiences, his writing has appeared in The New York Times (under senior U.S. government officials' names), The Christian Science Monitor, Mint, TODAY, and Literary Hub.
Back in the buccaneering 1970s, cable systems would twist the arms of local governments with whom they were negotiating rates by cutting all programming, and screening instead the officials' names and addresses.
Groups seeking the energy officials' names -- Judicial Watch, a conservative legal organization, and the Sierra Club, a liberal environmental group -- won a lower-court ruling entitling them to pretrial discovery of the names and roles of the private citizens who consulted with the panel.
As one strategy, the group buys voter rolls from states and counties, then disseminates the lists to thousands of largely unsupervised volunteers, who are urged to submit to election officials names from the rolls that may be improperly registered.
