By Ben Wizner, Staff Attorney, ACLU National Security Project

It's been a riveting month at Guantánamo.  First was the sad spectacle of the "arraignment" of alleged 9/11 conspirators — in a courtroom expressly designed to suppress their statements about brutal torture in CIA custody, and in a system expressly fashioned to permit their execution on the basis of evidence extracted through that torture.  The embarrassing proceedings were rushed forward in a last-ditch Bush administration effort to turn Guantánamo to its political advantage, but, as usual, it was the administration that endured ridicule for the very public collapse of its "full and fair" military commission system.

By Noam Biale, Advocacy Coordinator, ACLU Technology and Liberty Program

I blogged here last month about new rules from the Department of Justice that would allow the government to collect and permanently retain DNA samples from anyone arrested for a federal crime. That’s right, we’re not talking convicted felons here, but anyone merely arrested for a minor crime like trespassing on federal property during a peaceful protest.  This issue has reared its ugly head in the states as well, most spectacularly in Maryland where the Legislative Black Caucus walked out of a floor debate on an expansion bill that would have subjected Maryland’s minority community to genetic racial profiling.

By Anthony D. Romero, Executive Director, American Civil Liberties Union

On Thursday, I will be at Guantánamo Bay watching five men appear before a  military commission as they hear the charges read against them. The charges are  dire: the men are accused of participating in one of the worst and most tragic  crimes of all time — the September 11 attacks. The sentence could be death.

By Jamil Dakwar, Director, ACLU Human Rights Program. Jamil was in Guantánamo this week for the arraignment of Mohammad Kamin and the pre-trial hearing of Ibrahim al-Qosi.

The events at today's hearing suggest distrust and suspicion from the  handful of Guantánamo detainees who have been charged by the Bush  administration toward the military commissions system. Guantánamo is a place  where basic rights, like the right to effective access to counsel, which in a  normal court is taken for granted, have to be fought for. Meanwhile, the U.S. government  spends an enormous amount of resources constantly reinventing its skewed wheel  of justice.

By Joanne Lin, Michelle Richardson, and Deborah J. Vagins of the ACLU Washington Legislative Office. Cross-posted at Pam's House Blend.

A new law finally enacted today after a dozen years of fighting will protect us from discrimination based on our genes - the genes which may determine whether or not we may be destined to fall ill. But its passage also may add a little irony to our nation’s workplace protections.

By Matt Coles, Director, ACLU LGBT & AIDS Project

We won the marriage case in California. No need for  hyperbole here; this is big; big in terms of what it does, big in terms of what  it means, and big in terms of the opportunity for progress it gives us (I'll  suggest some of the ways to take advantage of that opportunity below).

By Noam Biale, Advocacy Coordinator for the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program

It’s not a good day to be Tim Pawlenty.  

The Republican governor of Minnesota distinguished himself earlier this month by becoming the only governor in the country to veto an anti-Real ID bill. Eighteen other states had already rejected this Bush administration boondoggle, which would turn state driver’s licenses into national identity cards. By a bipartisan majority, the Minnesota legislature passed a provision to its transportation budget that would have allowed the Governor to delay implementation of Real ID until funding could be secured from the federal government, and the law’s multiple privacy and security problems could be fixed.  

By Jag Davies, Policy Researcher, ACLU Drug Law Reform Project

What do you get when you combine the use of heavily armed paramilitary units for routine police work with a lack of prosecutorial and judicial oversight?

By ACLU Staff Attorney Amrit Singh

This morning I attended the military commission hearings of Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee who has been held in U.S. custody for over five years, most of that time in Guantánamo Bay. Like Mohammed Jawad, another detainee held at this prison, Khadr has also grown up at Guantánamo Bay. He was captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan when he was 15 years old. The U.S. government has alleged that he conspired with and provided material support to al-Qaeda and that he killed a U.S. soldier by throwing a grenade at him.

By ACLU Staff Attorney Amrit Singh. Amrit is at Guantánamo Bay this week overseeing the military commissions as a human rights observer.

Guantánamo Bay is an eerie place. With its blue skies and even bluer waters it could be mistaken for paradise. But beneath this natural beauty lurks an ugly truth — for more than seven years now, Guantánamo has been the place where the United States government has hidden its prisoners from world view with the express purpose of denying them the most basic elements of due process.

By Brian Stull, Staff Attorney, ACLU Capital Punishment Project. Brian helped represent Levon "Bo" Jones, an innocent man who was released from prison on May 2, 2008, after unjustly and erroneously spending 14 years on North Carolina's death row.

I've always known Bo Jones was innocent. But I had seen too much injustice in the last eight years working as a criminal defense lawyer to trust that his innocence alone  would set him free.

By Larry Frankel, State Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office

The anti-Real ID movement just took a big step forward, with the Arizona Senate’s 21-7 vote to bar implementation of Real ID in Arizona. The bill (H.B. 2677) still has to go back to the Arizona House for another vote and then on to Governor Janet Napolitano for her signature. But as of this writing, Arizona is poised to join the growing number of states who have recognized that Real ID is an expensive and unworkable invasion of our privacy.

By Noam Biale, Advocacy Coordinator for the ACLU Technology and Liberty Program

The struggle to fortify privacy rights in America is often like the proverbial frog trying to escape from a well: two steps forward then one step back – or maybe it’s V.I. Lenin’s slightly more Sisyphean formulation: one step forward, two steps back. Case in point for the last few weeks: genetic privacy.

By Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. Ben arrived in Guantánamo Bay Sunday evening to attend this week's military commission hearings involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

Tuesday's military commission hearing began with additional testimony and evidence regarding the defense's contention that the commission system is marred by improper political influence. The defense, citing former chief prosecutor Morris Davis's testimony, maintained that Salim Ahmed Hamdan could "not be prosecuted in a system where politicians hold the final say on who will be charged and what the outcome will be." The prosecution — while insisting that it was "not the government's position that Colonel Davis is an untruthful person" (call that the watch-your-back double negative) — suggested that Davis was pursuing a personal agenda and that the commission system was fair and independent.

By Ben Wizner, staff attorney with the ACLU National Security Project. Ben arrived in Guantánamo Bay Sunday evening to attend this week's military commission hearings involving Salim Ahmed Hamdan, which are slated to conclude today.

It’s become almost cliché to observe that each time a detainee is brought before a military commission at Guantánamo, it’s the commission system itself that is truly on trial. On Monday, however, that talking point achieved a more concrete reality with the extraordinary spectacle of the commissions’ former chief prosecutor appearing as star witness — for the defense.

By Christopher Hill, state strategies coordinator with the ACLU Capital Punishment Project.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, which produced the groundbreaking Kerner Commission Report. Wanting to understand why uprisings happened in places like Newark and Detroit, President Lyndon Johnson gave the commission a set of questions: "What happened? Why did it happen? What can be done to prevent it from happening again and again?" The most quoted line from the report is that the United States is "moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal."  

By Gouri Bhat, senior staff attorney with the ACLU National Prison Project.

Earlier this week U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) invited a group of reporters on a media tour of the new and improved T. Don Hutto Family Detention Center in Taylor, Texas. The Hutto facility houses immigrant children and families detained by the government and was the subject of multiple ACLU lawsuits filed against ICE last year, challenging the harsh, prison-like environment at the facility.

By Deborah J. Vagins, ACLU Policy Counsel for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties

I wish I could tell you that today we were going to have a vote in the U.S. Senate to establish a new and ground-breaking civil rights law. In a perfect world, I could tell you we are protecting new groups of employees, removing unfair limitations on damages for our workers, or creating new employment laws for a new workforce.