Blog of Rights
Chris
Anders

Christopher Anders is senior legislative counsel in the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington Legislative Office, where he represents the ACLU before Congress and the Executive Branch. Since joining the ACLU legislative team in 1997, Anders has represented the ACLU on a wide range of civil liberties and civil rights issues. For the past eight years, Anders has led the ACLU’s Washington, D.C. advocacy on torture, detention, war authority, and Guantanamo issues. Since 2006, he has led a national coalition of human rights, civil liberties, and religious groups working on detention and Guantanamo issues. He also has served as a human rights observer at military commission proceedings held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Prior to joining the ACLU’s Washington office, Anders spent eleven years with Washington law and lobbying firms.

11/21/2008

Cooking as a Crime, and Other Guantánamo Observations

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:02pm

(Originally posted on Daily Kos.)

After sitting through two military commission hearings here at Guantánamo today, I started asking military officers whether any members of Congress or staff have seen any of the military commission proceedings so far. It was easy to get an answer because so few people have seen any of the military commission hearings. The answer is no.

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11/19/2008
Guantánamo

Time Running Out At Guantanamo?

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 11:53am

Almost precisely 36 hours after President-elect Obama declared on 60 Minutes that he will shut the Guantánamo Bay prison and end the sham military commission trials, our Air Force cargo prop plane lumbered down the very same runway at Andrews Air Force Base that the new president will use sometimes daily aboard Air Force One. But the "cargo" and destination of our plane today might be a surprise for anyone who voted for change, is reading about the transition, and watched 60 Minutes. The destination was Guantánamo, and the cargo was lawyers, interpreters, and everyone else needed to keep the military commission show going just a little longer.

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10/17/2008
Guantánamo

MCA, Still Crazy After All These Years

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:23pm

Two years ago today, President Bush signed into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006 (MCA), stripping away the time-honored right of habeas corpus, and thus allowing the federal government to detain anyone it so chooses indefinitely - no charges pressed, no lawyer provided, no contact with family granted.

That day, thousands of ACLU members converged in Washington, D.C. for our biannual Membership Conference. We took out this ad in the Washington Post to bolster our efforts lobbying Congress, calling the MCA "one of the most radical rollbacks of civil liberties in American history." The Supreme Court has since backed us up on this, ruling the stripping of habeas corpus to be unconstitutional.

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07/22/2008

Lame-Duck Attorney General Wants New Declaration of War — and Takes Aim at the Constitution

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 12:39pm

Maybe we should get Attorney General Michael Mukasey a couple of countdown calendars. If he had checked the calendar yesterday before heading out to give a speech at the American Enterprise Institute, he would have realized that there were only 182 days left of the Bush Administration and roughly five weeks left in the congressional calendar (which translates to about 20 days on Capitol Hill).

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06/23/2008
LGBT Discrimination in the Workplace

Congress to Hold Historic Hearing on Gender Identity in the Workplace

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:49pm

This Thursday, June 26, the House Education and Labor Committee's Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor and Pensions will hold a hearing on discrimination against transgender employees. Congressman Robert Andrews (D-NJ) will chair this historic hearing, the first Congressional hearing on transgender issues and gender identity discrimination in the workplace.

Diane Schroer, an ACLU client, will be one of the witnesses. Schroer was an Airborne Ranger qualified Special Forces officer who completed over 450 parachute jumps, received numerous decorations including the Defense Superior Service Medal, and was hand-picked to head up a classified national security operation. She began taking steps to transition from male to female shortly after retiring as a Colonel after 25 years of distinguished service in the Army. When she interviewed for a job as a terrorism research analyst at the Library of Congress, she thought she'd found the perfect fit, given her background and 16,000-volume home library collection on military history, the art of war, international relations and political philosophy. Schroer accepted the position, but when she told her future supervisor that she was in the process of gender transition, they rescinded the job offer. The ACLU is now representing her in a Title VII sex discrimination lawsuit against the Library of Congress.

Click here to learn more about Diane's case. Her story was also highlighted in the recent ACLU report, "Working in the Shadows: Ending Employment Discrimination For LGBT Americans."

Shannon Minter, the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (who successfully argued the recent marriage case before the California Supreme Court), will discuss some of the legal issues affecting the transgender community. The committee will also hear testimony from a transgender employee working in a Massachusetts HIV/AIDS service organization and a representative from a Fortune 500 company that protects its employees against gender identity discrimination.

The hearing will be broadcast live on the web at 10:30 a.m. on Thursday, June 26. Click here for a link to the webcast.

If your Congressperson serves on the Subcommittee, please call their office and ask that they attend the hearing. Call 202-225-3121 and ask for your representative's office.

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05/21/2008

Chris Anders: The Watchdog Bites at the Torture Administration

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 2:17pm
At last. A report from the Justice Department that is on the correct side of the torture issue. Yesterday morning, the Inspector General of the Justice Department posted a long-awaited report on the FBI's role in interrogations (PDF)—and how the rest of the Bush administration swept aside the concerns of FBI agents who complained about the CIA and Defense Department using torture.
Torture and America
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02/01/2008

Senators Press, Mukasey Equivocates

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 5:32pm
On Wednesday, Attorney General Mukasey went before the Senate Judiciary Committee for his first oversight hearing since heading up the Department of Justice. In the days leading up to the hearing, the AG finally responded to the Committee's request for follow-up regarding his views towards the harsh interrogations that Read More»
01/03/2008

Mukasey Must Appoint a Special Prosecutor

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 3:11pm
Yesterday, Attorney General Michael Mukasey announced that the Department of Justice has opened an investigation into the CIA's destruction of videotapes depicting the "harsh" interrogation of detainees in its custody.

It's good that Mukasey is feeling enough heat that he's forced to do some
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12/19/2007

White House Heavily Involved in CIA Tape Destruction

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 7:44pm
The CIA is on a roll lately with news that it destroyed taped “harsh” interrogations of detainees. The Justice Department recently warned a federal judge to back off of an inquiry as to whether the tapes’ destruction violated a court order. The department also asked congressional committees to back off of their independent investigations – as if Congress does not have
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01/18/2007

Gitmo, Habeas Corpus and the Long Haul to Fix the MCA

By Chris Anders, Senior Legislative Counsel, ACLU Washington Legislative Office at 9:11am
There’s a fight brewing in Congress that goes to the core of the Bush Administration’s entire Guantánamo policy. With Guantánamo, top officials in the White House and Justice Department thought they had found “the legal equivalent of a black hole.” They wanted to put nearly a thousand men seized aroun
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