Today, a federal court ruled that the government can continue suppressing transcripts in which former CIA prisoners now held at Guantánamo Bay describe abuse and torture suffered in CIA custody. The ruling came in a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit we filed to obtain uncensored transcripts from Combatant Status Review Tribunals (CSRTs) used to determine if Guantánamo detainees qualify as “enemy combatants.”

Back in June, the CIA released heavily-redacted versions of the documents, but it continues to suppress major portions of the documents, including detainees’ allegations of torture. In August, the government filed a motion arguing that it should be able to continue suppressing the documents because releasing them would reveal “intelligence sources and methods” and might aid enemy “propaganda.” In today’s ruling, the judge declined to review “in camera” the documents the government is withholding in order to determine if they should remain classified.

Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project, stated in a press release:

The court’s ruling allows the government to continue suppressing these first-hand accounts of torture – not to protect any legitimate national security interest, but to protect current and former government officials from accountability. While much is known about the Bush administration’s torture program, the CIA continues to censor the most important eyewitnesses – the torture victims themselves.

The public has a right to a comprehensive record of what took place in the CIA’s secret prisons. The CSRT records will provide critical missing information about how the CIA’s torture program was actually carried out and whether interrogators followed, or exceeded, Justice Department legal guidance that purported to authorize brutal interrogations.

The courts have the authority and the responsibility to ensure that the administration does not deprive the public of critical information for improper purposes. The ACLU will appeal today’s decision.

To learn more about the ACLU’s CSRT FOIA visit: www.aclu.org/safefree/torture/csrtfoia.html

Earlier this week, we teamed up with PEN American Center to present Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror.”  A crowd of around 700 people came out on Tuesday night to hear writers, artists, lawyers, a former CIA officer and a former military interrogator read from documents that detail the sadistic treatment of detainees in the Bush administration’s “War on Terror.”

BOMB Magazine’s blog has a great review of the evening’s program. They write:

The evening began with brief opening remarks by K. Anthony Appiah, the President of Pen American Center, and Jameel Jaffer, the Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project, then moved into readings from declassified texts by prominent writers and artists as well as lawyers, a former military interrogator, and a former CIA agent. Readers included established literary heavyweights such as Don DeLillo, A.M. Holmes, Paul Auster, and Art Spiegelman as well as young writers of great acclaim such as Nell Freudenberger and Ishmael Beah. All of the readings were shocking for what they contained and how much remained classified and thus redacted. Eve Ensler’s vigorous reading of a speech delivered by President George W. Bush commemorating the United Nations Day in Support of Victims of Torture highlighted his administration’s hypocrisy; and Susana Moore’s compassionate delivery of a detainee’s response during a tribunal demonstrated how trumped up charges against some detainees were. To further support the baseless nature of numerous detentions and the scale of torture, never-before-seen video interviews with former wrongfully detained Guantanamo prisoners (a British national who moved to Kabul to open a school for girls, two childhood friends and British nationals that were detained while traveling in Afghanistan, a Libyan national and British resident who lost his right eye while being tortured) were interspersed between readings. In addition, a continuous loop of imagery by New York based artist Jenny Holzer in which altered, blotted out, and marked up handprints of detainees and American soldiers accused of crimes in Iraq played on three screens at the back of the stage.

And constitutional law professor, and a featured reader at our event, David Cole, blogged about the event for the New York Review of Books, writing:

The readings painted a chilling picture of a meticulously planned system of deliberate cruelty—devised by psychologists, sanctioned by lawyers, administered by contractors and CIA agents, overseen by doctors, and specifically authorized by members of Bush’s Cabinet. Indeed, it is in part because the system was administered by professionals that it is so well documented—but that of course makes it only more disturbing.

Many of the texts read on Tuesday night were uncovered through our lawsuit for information about treatment of detainees in U.S. custody. Since 2004, we’ve been fighting under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to unearth government documents that would show the origins and the scope of the Bush administration’s torture program. So far, that litigation has yielded more than 130,000 pages of government documents related to the rendition, detention and interrogation program. Collectively, these documents – some of which were read aloud on Tuesday night – make undeniably clear that prisoners were tortured, abused, and in some cases even killed in U.S. custody, and that those at the very highest levels of our government authorized, encouraged or tolerated the mistreatment.

The United States has some reckoning to do. To restore the rule of law, we must condemn these violations of our Constitution, domestic and international law, and seek to hold accountable those who authorized the abuse and torture of prisoners in America’s name. We hope that the evening served as both an opportunity for profound reflection, and as a strong reminder that accountability for torture is a legal, political and moral imperative.

You can view photos from our event on Tuesday online here. To learn more about accountability for torture, read the documents and to take action today, visit the ACLU’s Accountability for Torture site.

Today we post Chapter 2 of the report, “Experimenting with Torture.”

The chapter chronicles the development of the so-called “Enhanced Interrogation Techniques” and their carefully-orchestrated application during the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah in a CIA black site in Thailand in the spring and summer of 2002. In it, Zubaydah himself speaks; his statement to the International Committee of the Red Cross (PDF), which was finally allowed to visit 14 “high value” detainees after they were transferred to Guantanamo in 2006, is one of the few first-hand accounts we have describing interrogations in the secret CIA prisons.

“I was told during this period that I was one of the first to receive these interrogation techniques, so no rules applied,” Zubaydah tells the ICRC. “It felt like they were experimenting and trying out techniques to be used later on other people.”

The more we learn about his interrogation, the more we see how right he was.

Check out The Torture Report at www.thetorturereport.org

Salon’s Glenn Greenwald pointed out an interesting coincidence today. He writes:

The ACLU has long had as its motto for  its National Security Project: “Keep America Safe and Free.” Here is their new logo:

Liz Cheney and Bill Kristol just created a new organization…Its name is Keep America Safe and this is its logo:

It’s as though they took the ACLU’s logo and wrote the “Free” out of it, depicting America as nothing more than a single-minded, fear-based Security State.

The ACLU is committed to keeping American safe and free. We reject the false notion that there is a trade-off between liberty and security; we must stand by the values that make America “America” at all times.

Chalk up another victory for Indian voters in South Dakota. On September 30, the South Dakota Department of Public Safety announced that it was reversing a prior decision to close driver licensing stations in Todd and Charles Mix counties, home to the Rosebud and Yankton Sioux reservations, respectively. Residents of those counties had complained that the closures would force them to drive great distances to get a driver’s license or photo identification card necessary to vote in South Dakota, and they argued that the closures would have disparate impact on Native American voters.

In announcing the reversal, Public Safety Secretary Tom Dravland noted that the Voting Rights Act required Todd County to preclear any changes that could affect voting rights and that the City of Wagner in Charles Mix County had been subject to voting-rights litigation in the past. “The potential for litigation because of the closure, coupled with the Governor’s further review of the levels of use and the geographic location served, prompted him to direct us to continue servies in Wagner,” Dravland said. The closures were set to take effect on October 1.

The reversal came just weeks after news stories about the closure mentioned that the ACLU’s Voting Rights Project was investigating the matter. As part of that investigation, the ACLU requested the Department of Justice to ask the State for a formal preclearance submission under the Voting Rights Act prior to any closure. The ACLU pointed out that the burden of the closures would fall disproportionately on Native Americans, who have less access to cars and gas money than their white counterparts in Todd and Charles Mix counties and who would therefore have less access to the identification required to vote in person or by absentee ballot in South Dakota.

It is unclear whether the Department of Justice did, in fact, intervene on behalf of Indian voters, but the episode demonstrates the continuing need for the Voting Rights Act — and particularly the preclearance provisions of Section 5 — in South Dakota. The Supreme Court upheld Section 5 last June, but some on the court have questioned its continuing relevance.

South Dakota received relatively little attention in the congressional debates over Section 5, but it has been ground zero for voting discrimination in recent years. Since 1999, the ACLU has brought eight lawsuits in federal court on behalf of Native American voters in South Dakota. To date, seven of these cases have been resolved in favor of the Native American plaintiffs, and one case remains pending.

(Originally posted on The Marietta Daily Journal Online)

The Cobb County Board of Commissioners voted Tuesday to accept Sheriff Neil Warren’s recommendation on the re-signing of the 287(g) Agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. They should reconsider this decision.

The 287(g) program delegates immigration enforcement authority to specific local police agencies. The Cobb Sheriff’s Office is one of the five agencies in Georgia that has entered into a Memorandum of Agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement to participate in enforcement of federal civil immigration laws.

Though initially intended as a measure to combat violent crime and other felonies such as gang activity and drug trafficking, 287(g) programs have in fact undermined public safety, as immigrant communities, fearful of being deported, hesitate to report crime. The Major Cities Chiefs Association and the Police Foundation have both found that participating in 287(g) programs has harmed community policing efforts.

This trend is documented by the ACLU of Georgia report released Monday titled: “Terror and Isolation in Cobb: How Unchecked Police Power under 287(g) had Torn Families Apart and Threatened Public Safety.” The report is based on interviews with 10 community members affected by the program as well as five community advocates and attorneys based in Cobb.

As the report documents, in Cobb specifically, there has been a widespread increase in fear to report crime and mistrust in law enforcement as a result of 287(g). Immigrants feel afraid to seek assistance from law enforcement, even when they are the victims of crimes themselves. This factor poses a public safety threat to all county residents. One community member named Joanna mentioned to us that she once even put out the fire in her kitchen herself, because she was afraid to call 911.

In addition, law enforcement agencies that reallocate limited resources towards cracking down on violations such as driving without a license or lack of insurance may have scarce means left with which to combat crimes of violence and other felonies. In Cobb, immigrants disappear into detention for violations such as having a broken tail light or tinted windows on their car. In 2008, Cobb County turned over 3,180 detainees to ICE for deportation. Of those, 2,180, about 69 percent, were arrested for traffic violations.

In addition, the program has encouraged and served as a justification for racial profiling and human rights violations by some police acting as immigration agents. As the ACLU of Georgia report shows, Cobb officers have misused the power granted to them under the agreement by engaging in racial profiling of Latino communities and detaining individuals in the Cobb jail for unconstitutionally prolonged time periods. A telling example is the case of Jonathan, a Latino man who was shopping for jewelry for his girlfriend at Macy’s when he was followed by a security guard who then called the Cobb Police. Jonathan was detained by the officer without being informed about the reason. He was subsequently charged with loitering and deported. The loitering charge was later dismissed by the district attorney without a hearing. His family now lives in constant fear of the “seemingly unlimited power of the police to arrest a Latino person for any or no reason at all.”

There is currently no meaningful check in place to ensure that local law enforcement do not abuse the program by intimidating and racially profiling immigrant communities in Cobb. A Government Accountability Office investigation earlier this year found ICE was not exercising proper oversight over local or state agencies. This problem is compounded in Georgia, as there is no state legislation banning racial profiling and mandating accountability and transparency for law enforcement.

The minor changes in the program recently announced by the Department of Homeland Security make no serious attempt at discouraging profiling or reducing its negative impact on public safety. In addition, the new MOA actually takes a step backwards in the area of transparency, as it attempts to further shield 287(g) from public scrutiny by declaring that documents related to 287(g) are no longer public records.

In late August, more than 521 organizations across the country, many of which in Georgia, called on the Obama Administration to end 287(g), citing the serious problems associated with the program, including racial profiling. The groups were recently joined in this demand by the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. In addition, in a recent letter to the Obama administration, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged the administration and Congress to do more to end racial profiling by reconsidering the 287(g) program.

The ACLU of Georgia was joined Monday by faith and community leaders from Cobb and around the state in reiterating this demand. 287(g) programs waste local resources and hinder local police ability to effectively protect public safety in Cobb and other communities around the State. It is time for Cobb to walk away from 287(g).

Read the ACLU of Georgia’s report on Cobb County here.

Tuesday night, almost 600 New Yorkers came out to hear a diverse line-up of writers, artists, a former CIA agent and former military interrogator reading from pages of documents that detail the Bush administration’s torture program.

We teamed up with PEN American Center to present Reckoning with Torture: Memos and Testimonies from the “War on Terror.”  We’ll have more details about the event tomorrow, but in the meantime, you can see some photos from the event here.

The U.S. is the world’s leading incarcerator with over 2.3 million people – or 1 in 99 adults – in prisons and jails across the country. Our incarceration rate of 760 per 100,000 people is the highest in the world — five to ten times that of other Western democracies. In addition, because of increased reliance on detention as an immigration enforcement strategy, the number of immigrant detainees has tripled in the last ten years.

Massive incarceration in the U.S. undoubtedly causes much human suffering and, when coupled with overcrowding, mistreatment of vulnerable populations and other threatening conditions of confinement, greatly hinders the rehabilitation and reformation of those detained. For those in supermax prisons, extreme social isolation, sensory deprivation and other cruel forms of treatment or punishment also threaten their basic rights.

When U.S. law falls flat, lawyers and advocates often look to international law to protect the rights of detainees. Last week, in front of a large audience at Columbia Law School, human rights lawyers and advocates gathered to discuss the importance of a human rights framework.

Sir Nigel Rodley, human rights expert and author of The Treatment of Prisoners Under International Law, described his research and work on behalf of those in detention. He discussed how much the landscape had changed since he began to study the rights of people in detention, and the dramatic breakthroughs he’s seen in the human rights field to address violations. Today, there are better norms and mechanisms available to monitor and address abuses, and the protections afforded in international human rights law often surpass protections available under U.S. law.

Speakers noted that there were many moments when they looked to the human rights framework because the Constitution didn’t provide enough specific protections, using international human rights law to reinforce core American values. The panelists pointed out that human rights law (especially the rights outlined in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights [ICCPR] and the Convention against Torture) can be a much more powerful tool to address prison conditions and rights violations. For example, if you take a close look at the ICCPR, it clearly states that incarcerated juveniles must be kept separate from adults, and that the aim of detention shall be rehabilitation. As the ACLU learned when it investigated the conditions of girls in confinement in juvenile detention facilities in New York, this was always not the case.

The speakers from last week’s panel also brought up how the U.S.’ deviations from international human rights law have had serious ramifications around the world. Specifically, in the war on terror, U.S. actions have discredited us as a worldwide human rights leader and put us in the company of countries that routinely abuse human rights. Torture, secret detention, rendition, disappearances and holding people incommunicado threatened not only our security and safety but our standing in the world.

Sir Nigel summarized the mood of the entire panel when he noted, “We’ve come so far, but we have so much farther to go.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Watch this space for video of the event!

A malicious and factually inaccurate e-mail accusing the ACLU of not standing solidly on the side of religious liberty – an e-mail that was first circulated six years ago – has once again reared its ugly head and popped up in the e-mail inboxes of people across the country. In an effort to set the record straight, below are two myths the e-mail passes off as truth, followed by the facts which effectively debunk the e-mail’s claims.

MYTH: The ACLU has filed a lawsuit to have all cross-shaped headstones removed from federal cemeteries.

FACT: The ACLU has never once advocated for or initiated any litigation in favor of removing cross-shaped headstones from federal cemeteries. In fact, as the website Politifact.com makes clear, there are no cross-shaped headstones at VA national cemeteries. The headstones and markers the government issues are rectangular.

What the ACLU did do in 2006 was file a lawsuit seeking to protect the right of veterans and their families to choose religious symbols to engrave on headstones in federal cemeteries. The result of this litigation was not the forced removal of any crosses, but rather an expansion of the official government list of religious symbols allowed on headstones by the National Cemeteries Administration of the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs to include the Wiccan pentacle.

There are military cemeteries with rows of crosses in them, but most of those are in Europe, the final resting place of some American troops killed during World War I and World War II. Those cemeteries are maintained by the American Battle Monuments Commission and, according to Politifact.com, are technically owned by the foreign country in which they are located but sit on land given to the U.S. for use in perpetuity as commemorative cemeteries. Politifact.com further reports that commission officials are not aware of any effort – by the ACLU or anyone else – to remove cross-shaped headstones from those sites.

MYTH: The ACLU filed a lawsuit to end prayer in the military completely.

FACT: The ACLU has filed no such lawsuit. This totally false assertion is likely misrepresenting a letter the ACLU and the ACLU of Maryland sent in June 2008 to officials at the U.S. Naval Academy at Annapolis asking them to stop forcing midshipmen to participate in the Academy’s compulsory “noon meal prayers.” A New York Times article very effectively details why forcing midshipmen to stand in attendance at the daily “noon meal prayer” is a violation of their religious freedom and rights of conscience.

In the letter sent to the Academy, ACLU of Maryland Legal Director Deborah A. Jeon makes clear that the ACLU opposes compulsory religious services mandated by the government, not voluntary religious exercises by Academy midshipmen. As Jeon writes: “[T]his request is not motivated by any hostility to voluntary religious exercises by Academy midshipmen, nor do we fail to recognize the important place religious faith holds among many in the military. Indeed, the ACLU has long defended the fundamental right of religious communities, families and individuals – including those in the armed services – to practice their faith freely and openly.” Let there be no question that the ACLU vigorously defends the right of all Americans to practice religion (PDF).

We at the ACLU sincerely hope that providing you with this factual information regarding the erroneous claims made in the e-mail will not only help you avoid bearing false witness, but, should you desire, also empower you to set the record straight should it find its way to you.

(Originally posted on ACSBlog.)

The Supreme Court heard argument last Wednesday in Salazar v. Buono, an Establishment Clause challenge to the federal government’s display of a Latin cross in the Mojave National Preserve. The Court’s questions focused largely on esoteric procedural doctrine, and while it’s always risky to predict the outcome of a case based on oral argument, it seems unlikely the Court will rule on the broader constitutional issues in the case – namely, whether the plaintiff, a devout Catholic and former National Park Service employee, had standing to challenge the display of the cross; and whether, before it tried to transfer the cross to a private party, the government violated the First Amendment by displaying the sectarian symbol on federal land. (The lower courts decided those issues in favor of the plaintiff in the first round of the case, and the Bush Administration chose not to seek Supreme Court review at the time. As a result, the Court now appears disinclined to revisit those rulings.)

But while the Supreme Court ultimately may pass on the loftier constitutional questions in Buono, Wednesday’s argument did have some dramatic moments. In the most heated exchange of the morning, Justice Antonin Scalia peppered Peter Eliasberg, the ACLU attorney arguing for the plaintiff, with questions about the significance of the cross. Justice Scalia bristled at Eliasberg’s suggestion that a World War I memorial featuring only a Christian cross sends a message of exclusion and religious favoritism, asking, "The cross doesn’t honor non-Christians who fought in the war?" After Eliasberg responded that the cross "is the predominant symbol of Christianity," Justice Scalia pushed back, suggesting that there was no constitutional problem with the display because "the cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of the dead." Eliasberg resisted, explaining that "the cross is the most common symbol of the resting place of Christians." "I have been in Jewish cemeteries," continued Eliasberg, the son of a Jewish World War II Navy veteran. "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

The notion that a war memorial featuring a stand-alone Latin cross serves to honor only Christian war dead – a notion Justice Scalia called "outrageous" – was echoed in a series of amicus briefs filed in the case by various veterans groups, including the Jewish War Veterans, the American Muslim Armed Forces and Veterans Affairs Council, the Muslim American Veterans Association, and a group of high-ranking retired military officers. However the Buono case is resolved, it will be difficult, if not impossible, to convince many non-Christian veterans that an isolated, freestanding cross expressly recognizes their service to the country. And Congress’s designation of the Mojave cross as one of only 49 national memorials (and the only one commemorating World War I), joining such iconic symbols as the Washington Monument and Mount Rushmore, only compounds the problem. As one retired Army brigadier general recently put it, "The cross is unquestionably a sectarian religious symbol that, as a congressionally designated national memorial to veterans, would convey the message that the military values the sacrifices of Christian war dead over those of service members belonging to other faiths.

The U.S. military has always been religiously diverse, from the Revolutionary War, through World War I (when, for example, an estimated 250,000 Jews served in the U.S. Army), to the present (11 percent of current active members of the military say they belong to a non-Christian faith, and an additional 21 percent are atheists or report no religion). But unlike individual headstones for fallen American soldiers – which appropriately reflect the varied, personal religious preferences of those brave men and women, – the Mojave cross claims to speak for all veterans. Surely, there are other government-sponsored, national symbols that can serve that purpose admirably (the American flag comes to mind), without dividing the country along religious lines.