IT'S ABOUT FUCKING TIME

ACLU Sues Ex-Psychologists Who Designed CIA Torture Program

Hate, fear, and money

Operational words for Republicans:

Fear of tolerance: ACLU’s Holiday Message Labeled ‘Suspicious Activity’ By Tennessee Counter-Terrorism Officials

Fear of gays: Group Opposed To DADT Repeal To Fight On Against Shower Policy

Fear of the poor: GOP Turns To K Street Veterans To Help Unravel Health Care Law

If only those 'lucky duckies' had some 'skin in the game'

Love of money: Lobbyist In Charge Of ‘Trying To Kill’ Financial Reform Hired By GOP Chair To Oversee Financial Regulations

A petition to stop indefinite detention

The ACLU's letter:

Stop Indefinite Detention

A debate over the fundamental character of our democracy is heating up: whether or not we can imprison people for an indefinite amount of time without charging them with a crime and without holding trial.

We need everyone who believes in the Constitution and the American system of justice to let the President know that preserving our values and the rule of law is a top priority -- before indefinite detention becomes a reality.

Send President Obama a message. Let him know that -- whether through legislation or executive order -- you are firmly opposed to indefinite detention. We will also send the message to your members of Congress, letting them know of your concern.

The petition:

The debate over indefinite detention is heating up in Washington and I want you to know of my concerns. I believe that the administration is going down the wrong path in putting forth a policy which would indefinitely imprison individuals without charge or the chance of a trial, beginning with the detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

Indefinite detention is a violation of due process and the American principles of justice and fairness. Therefore, I urge you to reject any policy or proposal that would indefinitely imprison individuals without charge or the chance of a trial.

The issues surrounding the closing of Guantánamo are difficult and incredibly complex, but we cannot afford to go down a path that violates our own Constitution. I respectfully ask that you do what is in your power to reject indefinite detention -- whether through legislation or executive order.

Thank you for your time and consideration.

Just how loyal is the CIA to Cheney?

On Friday, there may be a major development in the torture wars: The CIA is set to release portions of a 2004 report that reportedly found no proof that torture foiled any terror plots, which would dramatically undercut Dick Cheney’s claims that torture worked.

But a news story this morning raises the question: Is the CIA trying to keep chunks that would undermine Cheney under wraps?

Who can we trust to tell us the truth? Anybody?

Putting our trust in one single company

What could possibly go wrong?:

The ACLU has taken on a patent case for the first time in its nearly 90-year history. The government’s been allowing private companies to patent human genes. The ACLU thinks that violates the First Amendment and patent law. This is heady, complicated stuff. But when a patent creates a monopoly that restricts the free flow of information, a lot is at stake, and when we’re talking about something like genes associated with breast and ovarian cancer, real women are hurt. This video about the case features some of those women’s stories.

Thank you, ACLU!

They just slipped into the shredder

92 times... oops!:

WASHINGTON – The CIA destroyed nearly 100 videotapes of interrogations and other U.S. treatment of terror suspects, far more than previously acknowledged, the Obama administration said Monday as it began disclosing details of post-Sept. 11 Bush-era actions.

The interrogations were a highly contentious issue during the administration of President George W. Bush, with many Democrats and other critics saying that some methods used amounted to torture — a contention Bush and other officials rejected. A criminal prosecutor is wrapping up his investigation in the matter.

Monday's acknowledgment, however, involved a civil lawsuit filed in New York by the American Civil Liberties Union seeking more details of the interrogation programs following the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

"The CIA can now identify the number of videotapes that were destroyed," said the letter submitted in that case by Acting U.S. Attorney Lev Dassin. "Ninety-two videotapes were destroyed."

It is not clear what exactly was on the recordings. The government's letter cites interrogation videos, but the lawsuit against the Defense Department also seeks records related to treatment of detainees, any deaths of detainees and the CIA's sending of suspects overseas, known as "extraordinary rendition."

At the White House, press secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters he hadn't spoken to the president about the report, but called the news about the videotapes "sad," and said Obama was committed to ending torture while also protecting American values.

ACLU attorney Amrit Singh said the CIA should be held in contempt of court for holding back the information for so long.

"The large number of videotapes destroyed confirms that the agency engaged in a systematic attempt to hide evidence of its illegal interrogations and to evade the court's order," Singh said.

For copies I suggest they check the charred remains in Cheney's man-sized safes or in the back of Georgie's sock drawer. It's getting more and more clear they were really into that kind of thing.

I read the news today, oh boy....

Dubai circles the drain? Really? Dubai?:

With Dubai’s economy in free fall, newspapers have reported that more than 3,000 cars sit abandoned in the parking lot at the Dubai Airport, left by fleeing, debt-ridden foreigners (who could in fact be imprisoned if they failed to pay their bills). Some are said to have maxed-out credit cards inside and notes of apology taped to the windshield.

The government says the real number is much lower. But the stories contain at least a grain of truth: jobless people here lose their work visas and then must leave the country within a month. That in turn reduces spending, creates housing vacancies and lowers real estate prices, in a downward spiral that has left parts of Dubai — once hailed as the economic superpower of the Middle East — looking like a ghost town.

No one knows how bad things have become, though it is clear that tens of thousands have left, real estate prices have crashed and scores of Dubai’s major construction projects have been suspended or canceled. But with the government unwilling to provide data, rumors are bound to flourish, damaging confidence and further undermining the economy.

We've killed people in our concentration camps:

The American Civil Liberties Union has released previously classified excerpts of a government report on harsh interrogation techniques used in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay. These previously unreported pages detail repeated use of "abusive" behavior, even to the point of prisoner deaths.

The documents, obtained by the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request, contain a report by Vice Admiral Albert T. Church, who was tapped to conduct a comprehensive review of Defense Department interrogation operations. Church specifically calls out interrogations at Bagram Air base in Afghanistan as "clearly abusive, and clearly not in keeping with any approved interrogation policy or guidance."

The two unredacted pages from the Church report may be found here.

The ACLU's release comes on the same day as a major FOIA document dump by three other leading human rights groups: Documents which reveal the Pentagon ran secret prisons in Bagram and Iraq, that it cooperated with the CIA's "ghost detention" program and that Defense personnel delayed a prisoner's release to avoid bad press.

And just what ELSE are the thieves walking out with?:

WASHINGTON (AP) - The Los Alamos nuclear weapons laboratory in New Mexico is missing 67 computers, including 13 that were lost or stolen in the past year. Officials say no classified information has been lost.

The watchdog group Project on Government Oversight on Wednesday released a memo dated Feb. 3 from the Energy Department's National Nuclear Security Administration outlining the loss of the computers.

Kevin Roark, a spokesman for Los Alamos, on Wednesday confirmed the computers were missing and said the lab was initiating a monthlong inventory to account for every computer. He said the computers were a cybersecurity issue because they may contain personal information like names and addresses, but they did not contain any classified information.

We're still unaware Tasers can kill?

A man in the northern California city of San Jose died after being jolted with a Taser, police said Thursday, apparently the sixth such death since the department began using the stun guns in 2004.

The man, who police said appeared to be in his 20s, got into a struggle with two officers when they tried to arrest him in the backyard of a home late Wednesday.

I think I'll go dig that bunker in my backyard....

Update: Canada is rewriting its rules about Tasers because the Canadians get it:

OTTAWA — Given the "high risk of death" in some cases, RCMP officers are now limited in their use of tasers to individuals who pose a clear threat to the public or police, RCMP Commissioner William Elliott„© said yesterday.

Mr. Elliott used two public appearances to provide new details on the RCMP's taser policy, which has come under fire after the death of Polish traveller Robert Dziekanski„© at Vancouver's airport in 2007.

The new restrictions have been in place since last June, but were laid out in full only yesterday, two months after the announcement that four Mounties who used a taser to subdue Mr. Dziekanski would not face criminal charges.

Speaking to reporters in Ottawa, Mr. Elliott said the weapons can no longer be used against people who are simply refusing to co-operate with Mounties.

How truly American.

The public humiliation and hanging of witches.



PZ Myers of Pharyngula:

The ACLU is suing Union Public School Independent District No. 9 of Oklahoma. The reason is bizarre: administrators at the school have harrassed and violated the civil rights of a young woman named Brandi Blackbear because — and I'm a bit ashamed to admit this can go on in my country — they accused her of witchcraft. They say she used a magic spell to make one of her teachers sick. In retaliation, she has been subjected to searches and public humiliation, and the school has banned the wearing of non-Christian paraphernalia.

From the ACLU site:

In its legal complaint filed today in U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Oklahoma, the ACLU said that school officials not only suspended Blackbear for 15 days in December 1999 for allegedly casting spells, but also violated her religious freedom when they told her that she could not wear or draw in school any symbols related to the Wicca religion.

The ACLU lawsuit also accuses school officials of violating the young woman's due process rights when, in the spring of 1999, they suspended her for 19 days over the content of private writings taken from her book bag. Officials had searched her possessions based on a rumor that Blackbear was carrying a gun, although no weapon of any sort was ever found. To date, school officials have not returned Blackbear's writings to her.

Before these incidents, the ACLU complaint said, Brandi Blackbear had no discipline problems and had a perfect attendance record. Since being accused, she has "suffered continuous ridicule and humiliation," and "become an outcast among her fellow students," according to the complaint. She has also fallen behind in her school work because of the suspensions.

"It's hard for me to believe that in the year 2000 I am walking into court to defend my daughter against charges of witchcraft brought by her own school," said Timothy Blackbear. "But if that's what it takes to clear her record and get her life back to normal, that's what we'll do."

The ACLU is seeking an undisclosed amount of punitive and financial damages on the Blackbear family's behalf, a declaration that the school violated the student's rights, an injunction preventing the school from banning the wearing of any non-Christian religious paraphernalia and an order expunging her school record.

"The actions of the school have inflicted severe emotional damage on a very sensitive young woman. This lawsuit will allow her to reclaim some of her self-esteem by vindicating the violation of her rights in a court of law," said John M. Butler, an ACLU cooperating attorney.

The case is Blackbear v. Union Public School Independent District No. 9, et al. Defendants named in the lawsuit are Union Eighth Grade Center Principal Jack Ojala, Speech Therapist/Counselor Catherine Miller, Union High School Assistant Principal Charlie Bushyhead and Counselor Sandy Franklin.

Truly a tradition to be proud of...

crossposted at SteveAudio

Even if Obama becomes president

Things will not really change unless we demand it. Fascinating video from the NetRoots Nation meeting in July.

If you have an hour and a half, listen as if your Constitution and your country depend on it, because they do.

(side note, after the speakers are through, there are odd silences. The mic did not pick up people asking questions.)

On Saturday, July 19th 2008, at the NetRoots Nation conference in Austin, Texas, Jen Nessel (CCR) moderated a panel of speakers including Vince Warren (CCR), Jameel Jaffer (ACLU), Jeremy Scahill (DemocracyNow), and Dahlia Lithwick (Slate.com) who spoke and answered questions about Constitutional Rights.

Considering the fact that the Bush administration has worked systematically over the last seven years to violate U.S. and international law, and that legal advocates and journalists have uncovered the facts and identified those responsible, this panel explored what accountability should now look like. Additionally they discussed what the courts and the next administration must do in its first 100 days to make things right.

Why we should always keep an eye on our government

And those we hire to protect us. They think our own citizens are the terrorists:

Undercover Maryland State Police officers repeatedly spied on peace activists and anti-death penalty groups in recent years and entered the names of some in a law-enforcement database of people thought to be terrorists or drug traffickers, newly released documents show.

The files, made public Thursday by the American Civil Liberties Union of Maryland, depict a pattern of infiltration of the activists' organizations in 2005 and 2006. The activists contend that the authorities were trying to determine whether they posed a security threat to the United States. But none of the 43 pages of summaries and computer logs - some with agents' names and whole paragraphs blacked out - mention criminal or even potentially criminal acts, the legal standard for initiating such surveillance.

State police officials said they did not curtail the protesters' freedoms.

The spying, detailed in logs of at least 288 hours of surveillance over a 14-month period, recalls similar infiltration by FBI agents of civil rights and anti-war groups decades ago, particularly under the administration of President Richard M. Nixon.

[snip]

In February 2006, the national ACLU and its affiliates filed multiple federal Freedom of Information requests seeking records of Pentagon surveillance of anti-war groups around the country. Using information from a secret Pentagon database, NBC News reported that a unit of the Department of Defense had been accumulating intelligence about domestic organizations and their protest activities as part of a mission to track "potential terrorist threats."

"It serves no security purpose to infiltrate peaceful groups," said Michael German, a former FBI agent who specialized in counter-terrorism and who joined the ACLU two years ago as policy counsel in its Washington legislative office. "It completely misuses law enforcement resources."

Since the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, German said, the government has "actively encouraged" local police agencies to become intelligence gatherers and to compile information that does not necessarily have a connection to criminal activity.

Demand accountability

In a stunning admission to ABC news Friday night, President Bush declared that he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details of the CIA's use of torture. Bush also defended the use of waterboarding - simulated drowning where the victim feels like they are about to die.

Congress should long ago have gotten to the bottom of which top officials approved, condoned and authorized U.S. involvement in torture. But, now that the President has admitted to a policy of top-down torture, it's even more critical that Congress get involved. Take action: tell your members of Congress you demand accountability for torture now!

Sign the petition!

Six years of Gitmo

Hasn't made us safer. Hasn't made us stronger. Hasn't made us more respected. Hasn't made us more feared. More hated, yes. More alone, yes. More disgraced, yes.

Six years of a homegrown concentration camp. Six years:

Six long years ago today, “the first orange-clad, shackled and blindfolded prisoners arrived at Guantanamo’s Camp X-Ray.” Since that “dark day in recent American history, more than 700 people have been detained without due process and not a single trial has been completed,” notes the ACLU.

As the world-wide protests go on, here is what an US appeals court decided:

A U.S. appeals court ruled today that “four former Guantanamo prisoners, all British citizens, have no right to sue top Pentagon officials and military officers for torture, abuse and violations of their religious rights.” The judge ruled that the defendants — including Donald Rumsfeld — “enjoyed qualified immunity for acts taken within the scope of their government jobs.”

Excuse me, your honor, judge, sir. Torture is against the Geneva Conventions. This administration eagerly urged our soldiers and the CIA to torture prisoners. Actions which sent Japanese and Germans to prison after WWII. Torture is illegal. There should be no 'qualified immunity for acts' that were ILLEGAL and MORALLY WRONG.

'Tis the season to be tasered

Fa la la la la la ow ow ow...

Digby of Hullabaloo quoting The Daytona Beach News:

Can running your mouth off at a police officer during a confrontation in a crowded store get you blasted with a Taser?

It happened last month when a Daytona Beach police officer stunned a yoga instructor. The officer used her Taser when the teacher refused to pipe down inside the Best Buy store on West International Speedway Boulevard.

Sounds ok until you read further.

The interaction with the police was less than one minute from start to tasering....

And then there is this: (my bold)

A News-Journal review of all Taser incidents by Daytona Beach police in November shows officers used the weapons 10 times. Beeland's was the only incident that did not involve violence or a fleeing criminal suspect.

Officials with the ACLU and Amnesty International USA say other tactics should have been used, especially because Beeland was not acting violently or threatening the officer in any way.

"In my view, a Taser should be used only as an alternative to a gun," said Glenn Katon, director of the Central Region of the ACLU in Orlando. "Is yelling (at an officer) enough resistance to cause someone to be Tasered?

"People are getting killed with Tasers," he said.
Taser use has become so commonplace, Katon said, that officers no longer employ other training tactics they've learned to subdue people.

"I certainly don't want to see an officer get hurt, but a cop should have enough training to be able to use something other than a Taser to calm someone down," Katon said.

It's so quick just to taser somebody into submission and then figure out what the problem is. Why on earth do police need any training at all?



Could it be this policewoman went to the Blackwater camp for training?

There's a really good acreage out in Owen's Valley in California

They used to call it Manzanar, the Japanese internment camp during WWII. Because it looks like that's where we're headed:

LOS ANGELES, Nov. 9 (UPI) -- The Los Angeles Police Department announced a mapping program used by its anti-terrorism bureau to identity likely terrorist breeding grounds in Muslim areas.

Michael P. Downing, a deputy Los Angeles police chief, detailed a joint program with the University of Southern California to compile mapping data demarcating Muslim areas deemed "at-risk communities," the Los Angeles Times reported Friday.

"We are looking for communities and enclaves based on risk factors that are likely to become isolated," Downing said.

Civil liberties and Muslim groups decried the project saying it is "nothing short of racial profiling."

"When the starting point for a police investigation is 'let's look at all Muslims,' we are going down a dangerous road," said Peter Bibring, a lawyer with the ACLU of Southern California, in an interview with The New York Times.

Hussam Ayloush, the head of the Council on American-Islamic Relations in Los Angeles, said the project "turns the LAPD officers into religious political analysts, while their role is to fight crime and enforce the laws."

Downing said the Muslim Public Affairs Council accepted the program "in concept."

"We will work with the LAPD and give them input, while at the same time making sure that people's civil liberties are protected," Salam Al-Marayati, the group's director, said in the Los Angeles Times.

Or maybe we should make every Muslim wear a red crescent on their clothes.

Does anybody else get this weird deja vu feeling? Is this what we get to do because our preznit was a failure in college? Repeat every fucking bad idea through history just because he wasn't paying attention in class?

I have an idea, instead of making our own citizens hostile, hurt and disassociated from the larger community, how about we educate everyone on different religions? How about we have a Muslim open Congress with a prayer? How about we learn how tolerance and understanding lets disparate communities and religions live together in peace?

Then how about we address the real problems that create terrorism in the first place? How about we take a look at WHY people think it's a good idea to bomb a federal building in Kansas or send bombs through the mail to scientists or go on a shooting rampage on the east coast? Timothy James McVeigh, Dr. Theodore John Kaczynski, and John Allen Muhammad all had completely different reasons for the horror they worked to produce. The Muslim community on the whole is pacifistic, as is the Christian community. Should we infiltrate the enclaves of fundamentalist Christians because of the bizarre rantings of Pat Robertson?

Find disaffected youth willing to cause harm, find hate-filled diatribes against the Constitution and the American way of life, and you will pretty much need to go to every part and every section of society in this country. The forementioned terrorists were all educated, and two were white, two were ex-military, all three were male.

Hmmmm. Maybe we need to profile every single male in this country. Starting with the twit in the White House....

Why don't they just tell us who is so totally patriotic and beyond reproach

That they can fly. Then give all the rest of us little yellow stars....

Washington, D.C. (AHN) - A senior FBI official has testified before Congress, detailing to Washington the current progress of the Terrorist Screening Center (TSC), which was recently audited by the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

The TSC has combined 12 existing terror lists which were kept by different departments and agencies within the federal government, and compiled a consolidated Terrorist Screening Data Base (TSDB).

However, according to the GAO report, the number of names in the TSDB has reached over 755,000.

Civil liberties groups and some lawmakers have called on the FBI and the White House to impose stricter oversight measures in an effort to make sure the terror list doesn't grow to encompass innocent people.

"As the number of people on our global watch lists steadily gallops towards one million, we should reevaluate how effective these lists are. If we must live with these blacklists, the very least we should ask for is that they remain relevant and functional," American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Senior Legislative Counsel Timothy Sparapani said. "Congress needs to intensify its oversight of these lists before we all become suspects in the eyes of the Terrorist Screening Center."

Nonetheless, TSC Director Leonard Boyle testified before the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and explained their critical role "in securing our borders and the safety of the American people by providing to the nation's entire screening and law enforcement communities the identities of known and suspected terrorists."

Boyle told lawmakers that the TSDB has "a process for removing names from the watchlist when it has been conclusively determined they do not have a nexus to terrorism," as well as "a redress process for any individuals who believe they have been improperly delayed or otherwise inconvenienced because of the watchlist."

"The TSC has significantly enhanced interagency cooperation in the post-9/11 culture where information sharing is a must," Boyle said. "In fact, as the GAO report cites, 'The TSC plays a central role in the real-time sharing of information, creating a bridge among screening agencies.' The TSC has... provided a physical mechanism to ensure information sharing is done in an efficient manner."

You've gotta be fucking kidding me. It was ... what... two years ago that 60minutes ran their article about the ten Tom Johnsons (Thompson...Smith.. whatever) who CONTINUALLY were stopped at the airport. Nothing has changed. Nothing has been made more efficient, except maybe we aren't threatened by terrorist sippy cups.

The Bush administration likes corralling people and demanding papers, look at how they treated protesters. They like harassing citizens and making them cower. Maybe they even dream of dressing the airport security in uniforms and high black boots and dramatic insignias. The PNAC neocons love this kind of shit.

They're not going to change anything.

Show us your papers, please...

Americans may need passports to board domestic flights or to picnic in a national park next year if they live in one of the states defying the federal Real ID Act.

The act, signed in 2005 as part of an emergency military spending and tsunami relief bill, aims to weave driver's licenses and state ID cards into a sort of national identification system by May 2008. The law sets baseline criteria for how driver's licenses will be issued and what information they must contain.

The Department of Homeland Security insists Real ID is an essential weapon in the war on terror, but privacy and civil liberties watchdogs are calling the initiative an overly intrusive measure that smacks of Big Brother.

More than half the nation's state legislatures have passed symbolic legislation denouncing the plan, and some have penned bills expressly forbidding compliance.

Several states have begun making arrangements for the new requirements -- four have passed legislation applauding the measure -- but even they may have trouble meeting the act's deadline.

The cards would be mandatory for all "federal purposes," which include boarding an airplane or walking into a federal building, nuclear facility or national park, Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff told the National Conference of State Legislatures last week. Citizens in states that don't comply with the new rules will have to use passports for federal purposes.

[snip]

Privacy concerns raised

Colorado and New Hampshire lawmakers are not alone. Groups like the American Civil Liberties Union and Electronic Frontier Foundation say the IDs and supporting databases -- which Chertoff said would eventually be federally interconnected -- will infringe on privacy.

EFF says on its Web site that the information in the databases will lay the groundwork for "a wide range of surveillance activities" by government and businesses that "will be able to easily read your private information" because of the bar code required on each card.

The databases will provide a one-stop shop for identity thieves, adds the ACLU on its Web site, and the U.S. "surveillance society" and private sector will have access to the system "for the routine tracking, monitoring and regulation of individuals' movements and activities."

The civil liberties watchdog dubs the IDs "internal passports" and claims it wouldn't be long before office buildings, gas stations, toll booths, subways and buses begin accessing the system.

Update 8/17: Other posts I have done on Real ID.

Somehow I think Abu will ignore this letter

Don't you?

The Honorable Alberto Gonzales
Attorney General
United States Department of Justice
Washington, DC 20530-0001

Dear Mr. Attorney General:

Today, my staff was briefed by the Justice Department regarding guidelines to institute the new foreign to domestic wiretapping authority Congress granted to you this month by The Protect America Act.

Regrettably, my colleagues reported that they learned virtually nothing new about how you intend to use the broad new authority to intercept emails and phone calls when one party is in the U.S., or how those U.S. people will be protected from unwarranted government intrusion. With so much at stake, the public needs to have a fuller understanding of what its Justice Department will be doing with its most private communications.

In particular, the Act confers on you the authority to issue year long orders for entire spying programs that identify neither the people nor the facilities that will be tapped. The only requirement is that the communications be of an international character - that at least one leg of the email or call is overseas. By definition, this new program will sweep in all those calls where the other leg is in the U.S., and will do so without court or congressional review. While we have long supported legislation that would allow our government to intercept foreign to foreign calls, this new, warrantless interception of Americans' international communications is far more than what the Administration asked for and what we believe the Constitution allows.

Further, the legislation was silent on how to treat these communications to which someone in the U.S. is a party. We are gravely concerned that Congress chose not to include mandatory protections for American communications, and instead left all such decisions to the Justice Department without further guidance.

Because you are solely responsible for determining how U.S. persons will be protected in this new program, we respectfully request a meeting with you to discuss in more depth how the Justice Department will be using its new authority. In particular, we would like to discuss:

• Whether your new authority will be used to collect all international communications coming into and out of the United States,
  
• Whether you plan to return to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court when you discover that a certain line or person has significant contact with the United States, and
  
• How information gathered on people in the United States will be used and what civil liberties safeguards will be put in place for instances in which information is collected on individuals who have no intelligence value to the government.

Congress left all of these questions to your discretion and we eagerly look forward to discussing with you how the Justice Department intends to deal with the serious civil liberties issues implicated by this new law.

Sincerely,

Anthony D. Romero
Executive Director
American Civil Liberties Union

OOooohhhh. THIS is why Abu Gonzales hurried to get the FISA coverage for his spying

So he could say this:

CINCINNATI, Jan. 26 The U.S. Justice Department filed court papers in Cincinnati arguing a lawsuit challenging the Bush administration's wiretap program should be dismissed.

The department claims the lawsuit, filed by the American Civil Liberties Union and other plaintiffs, is no longer significant because the National Security Agency's warrantless surveillance program is now being conducted under the supervision of a secret intelligence court, The Washington Post reported Friday.

Justice Department lawyers argued in papers filed with the 6th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals the suit should be dismissed because it no longer has any live significance.The move follows an announcement last week by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales the program, which had allowed the NSA to monitor calls made between the United States and foreign countries without court approval if one of the parties was determined to be linked to terrorism, is being terminated and replaced by a surveillance program overseen by a secret 11-member court.

ACLU action pack!

Petitions to sign, places to go.

Stop the Gitmo boondoggle.

The ACLU sues intelligence agencies on behalf of innocent men tortured by the CIA.

"Khaled El-Masri was innoncently detained in a secret CIA prison. Now US civil liberties advocates are helping him take the intelligence service to court. His chances of winning the trial are slim -- but his case is stirring up negative publicity for the Bush administration."
[snip]
"The ACLU has succeeded in legally representing two victims from the CIA's shadow realm until now: Masri and Canadian citizen Maher Arar. Arar was deported to Syria in September of 2002 and tortured there. His innoncence has since been established, just like Masri's. That's just what makes the two cases so valuable for the ACLU -- and so dangerous for the White House."