American Civil Liberties Union

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.

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.

I was just doing a little light reading this morning, on the New York Times website, about Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay when something caught my eye. Right there, atop a photo of Kal Penn and John Cho in orange jumpsuits was this:



A CIA recruitment ad. Odd.

So I did a little more poking and went

So the plan this morning was to infiltrate the Today show viewing audience. We wanted millions of home viewers to see people wearing orange today and make sure people took note that this is the six-year anniversary of the arrival of the first prisoners at Guantanamo Bay's detention facility. The Today show has an outdoor studio audience, visible through the windows behind the anchors. The only problem was - we had to be subtle because the Today show screens out "political" protest. They also run on a time lag, ostensibly to keep streakers away, but which is also handy for switching camera shots and making sure no one with a message that might matter (not that "HI MOM" isn't an important sentiment, but you can always call the lady after the show).

I arrived at a very prompt 5:51 a.m. Here's how it went down after that: