With today's announcement that the Justice Department will move five of the men accused of 9/11 crimes to federal court in New York, the question still remains about one of the other high-profile detainees: Omar Khadr.

The world knows Khadr as one of the child soldiers detained at Gitmo since he was 15. (The other child soldier, Mohammed Jawad, was released back to Afghanistan after the government failed to produce enough credible evidence to bring charges against him.) Khadr is accused of throwing a grenade that killed an Army medic in Afghanistan, a charge that the U.S. government itself later threw into question by accident during one of his pre-trial hearings:

During a break in the hearing, members of the press were given copies of legal motions on the issue of whether the military commission has the authority to try Khadr, given his status as a juvenile at the time of his alleged offenses. Included in those papers was a classified attachment, which, according to military commissions officials, should have been redacted, instead of released.

The significance of the document was made clear by Khadr's military defense counsel, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler. Asked to describe it later in the day, Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler said it dispelled what he referred to as a myth propagated by the government: that Khadr was the only person who could have lobbed the grenade that killed U.S. soldier Christopher Speer — the basis of the most serious charge against him. The document, created in 2004, turned out to be an interview of a witness to Khadr's capture. In it, the witness describes finding two people alive in the Afghan compound in which Khadr was captured — the witness shot and killed the first man before he saw Khadr. Then, according to Lt. Cmdr. Kuebler, Khadr, who was 15 years old at the time, "was shot on sight — in the back — twice — while wounded, sitting and leaning against a wall facing away from his attackers." (emphasis ours)

Earlier today, the Supreme Court of Canada heard arguments in an appeal by the Canadian government on two lower court decisions that found Khadr's rights under the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms had been breached when Canadian officials interviewed him at the prison in Guantánamo in 2003 and shared the resulting information with U.S. authorities. Khadr's lawyers argued that Canada was complicit in his abuse and maintain that the Canadian government is obliged under international law to demand the prisoner's return. Since Khadr was only addressed in passing at Attorney General Eric Holder's news conference this morning, Canadian news outlets are reporting the possibility that Khadr could still be repatriated to Canada and tried in a Canadian court.

Or, he could still be tried in the flawed military commission system. But as Dafna Linzer points out today in ProPublica, the evidence against those the government won't transfer is flimsy:

[…]Most of the remaining [Guantánamo] detainees are considered too difficult to prosecute, mostly because the evidence against them is thin or based on statements obtained through coercion.

One defense attorney said federal prosecutors had so little on his client that they asked the detainee to suggest a charge he would be willing to plead guilty to.

The U.S. government has refused to acknowledge his status as a child or to apply universally recognized standards of juvenile justice in his case. According to Human Rights Watch:

No international tribunal since Nuremberg has prosecuted a child for alleged war crimes. The United Nations committee that monitors the rights of children found that the United States has held alleged child soldiers at Guantánamo without giving due account of their status as children and concluded that the “conduct of criminal proceedings against children within the military justice system should be avoided.

It's time for all Guantánamo detainees to be moved to federal court, a system that's successfully prosecuted more than 150 defendants on terrorism-related charges, both before and after 9/11. Compare that to the whopping three convictions achieved by the broken military commissions. Tell Attorney General Eric Holder to send all detainees' cases to federal court.

Khadr grew up in Gitmo. It's time to give him a fair shake at justice, or better yet, repatriate him to Canada for rehabilitation, and reintegration into society and a second chance in life.

Today, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Amir Meshal, an American citizen who was arrested and secretly imprisoned in Kenya, Somalia and Ethiopia for four months. He was held in secret, without access to a lawyer or any process to contest his detention, and was never charged with a crime. He endured more than 30 harsh interrogations by U.S. officials during his detention.

A New Jersey native, Mr. Meshal was studying Islam in Mogadishu, Somalia, in December 2006 when hostilities broke out. Unable to flee the country by air because the airport had been disabled due to bombing, Mr. Meshal fled to neighboring Kenya by boat and wandered in the forest for three weeks seeking shelter and assistance before being arrested by a joint U.S.-Kenyan-Ethiopian task force. He was detained and turned over to U.S. officials, who interrogated him and sought to coerce him to confessing that he was connected to or had supported al Qaeda — connections and actions that Mr. Meshal steadfastly denied. One FBI agent threatened to send him to Egypt, where the Egyptians “had ways of making him talk.” Another FBI agent threatened to send Mr. Meshal to Israel, where, the interrogator said, the Israelis would “make him disappear.”

Mr. Meshal’s lawsuit charges that four U.S. government officials violated his Fifth Amendment right to due process and Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable search and seizure. Mr. Meshal also claims that two of these officials — agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigations — threatened him with torture and disappearance in violation of his rights under the Torture Victim Protection Act of 1991. His complaint states:

The Constitution does not permit U.S. officials to threaten American citizens with forced disappearance, torture, and other serious harm, or otherwise to interrogate them coercively. Nor does the Constitution permit U.S. officials to evade the elementary commands of due process simply by directing, conspiring, and/or actively and substantially participating with a foreign state to detain, interrogate, or render U.S. citizens in a manner that would be patently unlawful if carried out by those U.S. officials themselves.

Nusrat Choudhury, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s National Security Project stated in a press release today:

American citizens abroad who are seeking refuge from hostilities deserve the assistance of their government in getting home safely. It is inexcusable that U.S. officials instead threatened Mr. Meshal with torture, participated in detaining him in secret and inhumane conditions and denied him the chance to contest his detention or contact his family.

The harsh treatment that Mr. Meshal endured should never be experienced by anyone, let alone an American citizen at the hands of his own government. American citizens don't relinquish their constitutional rights or their right to be protected from threats of torture and disappearance by U.S. officials when they're overseas.

Or at least it shouldn't be. Today we filed an appeal of our lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the FISA Amendments Act (FAA), the law passed last summer that essentially legalized former President Bush's warrantless wiretapping of Americans' international phone calls and emails. In August, U.S. District Court Judge John G. Koeltl for the Southern District of New York dismissed our case on "standing" grounds, ruling that the plaintiffs — among them journalists, lawyers and nongovernmental organizations who engage in sensitive international communication which they have reason to fear will be intercepted by the government — did not have the right to challenge the new surveillance law because they could not prove that their own communications had been monitored under it.

But here's the rub: the government conducts surveillance under the statute in secret, and it's not obligated to notify the people it has monitored. So it's possible no one could ever show with any certainty that they've been monitored. As Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU's National Security Program, points out in a statement today:

To say that plaintiffs can't challenge this statute unless they can show that their own communications have been collected under it is to say that this statute may not be subject to judicial review at all. The vast majority of people whose communications are intercepted under this statute will never know about it — in fact, it's possible that no one will ever be able to prove what the court says is required.

So there you have it: if no one can prove they've been spied on, then no one can challenge the law. That gives the executive branch unchecked power, and makes the FAA above judicial scrutiny. That's unconstitutional.

Hopefully you've at least set your Tivo to record Law & Order tonight at 8 p.m. EDT on NBC, because tonight, Jack McCoy and his team of assistant district attorneys attempt to hold high-level Bush administration officials, including Dick Cheney, accountable for torture.

Today, Glenn Greenwald posted an interview with René Balcer, Law & Order's executive producer and lead writer, about why he wrote the episode, which includes lots of real-life details about the Bush torture policy. One reason Balcer gives:

I was kind of embarrassed by how some in my community of writers and producers and television heads sort of irresponsibly embraced torture by having their heroes use it as a supposedly effective means of getting information, and how some of these same writers-producers were sort of peddling lies even in the face of the Defense Department sending experts to talk to them to kind of enlighten them on the realities of torture. So I started doing episodes about the subject about four-five years ago for my other series, Criminal Intent, about the co-opting of the medical community to participate in torture. So, that was all sort of the preamble of what led to my doing this episode.

Greenwald also asked Balcer why he thought mainstream entertainment tends to glorify torture. Balcer responded:

Either ignorance of the whole subject of torture…having your hero twist somebody's arm to find the code to open that secret door is very dramatic, and they do it out of ignorance. Some of them do it out of willful ignorance and the case you cite about 24 when the DOD sent interrogation experts to talk to the producers of 24 to sort of give them a fact basis for their shows, the executive producer of 24 refused to meet with them. He was quite happy to wallow in his own ignorance and really didn't want to hear the facts from the people who are actually conducting the interrogation.

It's a fascinating interview, so be sure to give it a listen. And then tune in and watch Law & Order tonight on NBC at 8 p.m. EDT.