American Civil Liberties Union

There is a lot of last-minute scrambling at Guantánamo in the waning days of the Bush administration. Some of it involves 17 prisoners of Uighur descent. The Uighurs are an ethnic Muslim minority who face persecution at home in the Xianjiang province of China. Although the Department of Defense concedes that these 17 men were never enemies of the United States, it continued to imprison them, holding them in cells 22 hours a day without any natural light, while the U.S. looked for somewhere to send them.

In the course of the NSA spying saga that has unfolded over the past three years, the Bush administration has benefited from the tangling of plain language and the byzantine inner-workings of Executive branch bureaucracy to shield it from public outrage.

Unlike Watergate or even the Clinton impeachment, there are no burglars or stained dresses to hook the news story onto. Those very colorful details were often used to start a discussion about the underlying issues of importance (okay, maybe the dress was pretty much the whole focus of that story, but you get the idea.) It’s just harder to follow a story when it takes three paragraphs to explain that the Undersecretary of Agency X spoke to the Junior Assistant Solicitor Y who reported to the General Counsel of the Office of Confusing.

Okay so you may know that we sued the government last week (you know it never really gets old, suing the government) when President Bush signed the FISA Amendments Act into law. This was not a "compromise bill" or a "modernization" bill, which is how they tried to sell it. Instead Congress basically handed the President even more power to spy on Americans than he was using under the illegal warrantless wiretapping program. Super, right?

Huzaifa Parhat, well into his seventh year at Guantánamo, had a civilian judge review the evidence for his detention for the first time last week. The court ruled that the Pentagon's Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) declaration that Parhat was an unlawful enemy combatant is "invalid." They declared that Parhat must be released or given a new hearing.