Center for Constitutional Rights

The U.S. government has agreed to pay a total of $1.26 million dollars to five men who claim they were illegally detained and mistreated after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, as part of a settlement agreement reached between the Justice Department and the Center for Constitutional Rights.

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 [...]

That’s one of the questions coming up in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit being argued today by the Center for Constitutional Rights on behalf of 23 lawyers who believe they may have been wiretapped without a warrant by the National Security Agency during the Bush administration. But the government won’t answer the question.
The NSA [...]

The news that Mohammed Jawad plans to sue the U.S. government for his unlawful detention and torture raises the question of whether he can get beyond the hurdles so many other torture victims have faced in similar lawsuits.
Previous cases have been dismissed on grounds that government officials had “qualified immunity” for their actions — meaning [...]

The Center for Constitutional Rights, which has been a leading critic of the Bush administration’s interrogation tactics, is not pleased with today’s report that Attorney General Eric Holder plans to investigate only whether the actions of low-level CIA operatives broke the law.
Here’s CCR’s statement:
Responsibility for the torture program cannot be laid at the feet of [...]

So just who are those “civil liberties groups” that have encouraged the Obama administration to issue an executive order creating a system of prolonged preventive detention?
As Spencer wrote today, someone in the administration told ProPublica’s Dafna Linzner and The Washington Post’s Peter Finn that yes, civil liberties groups support the idea of an order that [...]

Other judges will not be bound by the decision, but there are reasons for advocates to be hopeful.

President Obama’s decision to promise not to prosecute the CIA officers who carried out the range of freakish conduct and torture described in the latest set of Office of Legal Counsel memos released today could be seen as either 1) fair, because the CIA officers were following the advice of Department of Justice lawyers; or [...]

When the news broke last week that the United States had tried to prevent Binyam Mohamed from suing the U.S. government — or even talking about his treatment at the hands of U.S. authorities before they would allow him to return to the United Kingdom — I wondered how many more former detainees deemed “enemy [...]

When President Obama declared early in his presidency that he plans to close the prison at Guantanamo Bay, that was hardly the end of the matter. Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder must now figure out what to do with the 240 or so people still held there. And perhaps no cases cry out more [...]