Rights

The influential Center for American Progress, which has close ties to the Obama administration, is now calling on President Obama to push back the closing of the Guantanamo Bay detention center to July. That’s despite the president’s day-two directive to close the notorious prison by January. Closure has been impeded by the inability to send [...]

The Justice Department released more documents — or, at least, less-redacted documents — late Friday to the American Civil Liberties Union as part of the government’s obligation in a pending Freedom of Information Act lawsuit.
These latest documents provide a glimpse of the early struggles between the FBI and the Pentagon over just how to conduct [...]

Fouad al Rabiah, a Kuwaiti Airways engineer accused of being an aide to Osama bin Laden who recently won his habeas corpus case in federal court, is a step closer to going home. McClatchy newspapers reports that the 50-year-old father of four was moved to the part of the Guantanamo detention center reserved for detainees [...]

A bipartisan group of more than 120 judges, prosecutors, diplomats, former members of Congress and high-level military and government officials yesterday released a proposed plan for closing the Guantanamo Bay prison camp and trying all suspected terrorists in civilian federal court.
“Some have opposed the closing of Guantanamo because they believe there is no viable alternative [...]

As Marcy Wheeler and Glenn Greenwald both pointed out over the weekend, Eric Holder on Friday once again declared that a case charging government lawbreaking must be dismissed because to let it continue would reveal important “state secrets.” That’s despite the fact that Attorney General Eric Holder not long ago announced that he’d be asserting [...]

The Second Circuit Court of Appeals just dismissed a landmark lawsuit filed by a Canadian victim of “extraordinary rendition” against former U.S. officials, ruling that torture victims have no right to compensation from the U.S. government, even if U.S. officials were complicit in their treatment.
Maher Arar is a Canadian citizen who was seized in 2002 [...]

The Hill reports today that liberal groups are stepping up their pressure on Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) to call a vote on Dawn Johnsen, President Obama’s pick to head the Office of Legal Counsel.
As I reported earlier this week, Republicans have stalled Johnsen’s nomination with their ambivalence about supporting cloture and the leadership’s [...]

Depending on who you ask, the sentencing yesterday of Ali Saleh Kahlah Al-Marri to eight years in prison is either evidence that the civilian federal judicial system can successfully handle terror cases, or evidence that it’s a dismal failure.
Yesterday, Jonathan Hafetz, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who represented Al-Marri in his challenge to military [...]

Among other things in the Homeland Security appropriations bill President Obama signed into law yesterday is a provision that authorizes the Defense Department to continue to conceal photos of the torture and abuse of detainees by U.S. forces. The American Civil Liberties Union had specifically sought those photos, and sued to get them, among other [...]

Lyle Denniston at SCOTUSblog points out that the Supreme Court’s decision to hear the case of 17 Chinese Muslim Uighur detainees who a judge ordered released into the United States will likely also force the Justices to consider the constitutionality of two bills President Obama signed yesterday.
The issue in Kiyemba v. Obama is whether the [...]