Al-Marri

Turns out that even conservatives can’t stomach the indefinite detention of a lawful U.S. resident, without charge, in an American prison.
In an amicus brief filed today in federal court, the libertarian Cato Institute and the conservative Rutherford Institute, along with the bipartisan Constitution Project, are urging the Obama administration to reverse course on the case [...]

As Adam Liptak wrote in The New York Times on Saturday, the President-elect Barack Obama’s Justice Department is going to have to quickly figure out what positions it will take in some thorny legal cases involving the indefinite detention and torture of “war on terror” detainees.
The Al-Marri case Liptak writes about, and which I’ve been [...]

Legal Times made an interesting observation today about President-elect Barack Obama’s opportunity to shift the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, a notoriously conservative court that hears many important national security cases, far to the left of where it now stands.  The 15-judge court has four vacancies; when he fills them, Obama could instantaneously switch the [...]

By now you’ve probably heard that the Supreme Court has decided to hear the case of the sole legal U.S. resident detained indefinitely — yes, that means potentially forever — without charges, right here on U.S. soil.  All because President Bush decided on his own authority, that this 28-year-old father of five, who was then [...]

As Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey busily works to bury the abuses of the Bush administration, the Supreme Court may be getting ready to hand President George W. Bush yet another repudiation of his handling of detainees in the so-called global war on terror.
The high court decided today to review the case of Ali Saleh Kahlah [...]

Can the United States hold a lawful U.S. resident indefinitely without charges in a U.S. prison on American soil?
Normally, the answer is an unequivocal no. Federal law places strict time limits on how long the government can hold someone without charges (30 days), and how long the suspect may have to wait for a [...]

At a call-in “town hall” meeting tonight, the American Civil Liberties Union reiterated its call for the new Obama administration to close the Guantanamo Bay prison on the president’s first day in office. With the help of the filmmaker Robert Greenwald, the ACLU is even distributing a short film to persuade people to join [...]