American Civil Liberties Union

What do Colombian novelist Gabriel García Márquez, Chilean poet Pablo Neruda and British novelist Doris Lessing have in common (besides being Nobel Prize-winning writers who have all given us so many literary treasures)? During the Cold War, the U.S. government used "ideological exclusion" laws to ban them from this country because they were suspected of being communist sympathizers. In other words, the U.S. government barred them from the country not because of their actions, but because of their ideas. Sounds like one of those misguided schemes we look back on now with scorn, right? Oh that that were true…in actuality, the Bush administration revived the practice of ideological exclusion to deny visas to dozens more scholars, artists and writers who have been vocal critics of U.S. foreign policy.

Mohamed et al. v. Jeppesen was brought on behalf of five men who were kidnapped, flown to CIA black sites and other overseas locations, and tortured. The Bush administration intervened in the case, inappropriately asserting the "state secrets" privilege and claiming further litigation would undermine national security, and the lawsuit was thrown out in February 2008. Last week, the new Justice Department repeated the Bush administration claims of "state secrets" during oral arguments in the ACLU's appeal of the dismissal.

Several press reports this week quoted people who lost loved ones on 9/11 and who were selected by the Pentagon to travel to Gitmo and attend legal proceedings for detainees accused of planning the terrorist attacks. The articles included statements attributed to those family members that the tribunals provided a fair hearing for these prosecutions and that family members "were struck by the extensive rights accorded the accused men."

No one can imagine what it’s been like for these families and how it felt for them to sit through these proceedings. But the truth is that there are many other 9/11 families with many different viewpoints who weren’t afforded the opportunity to be there, and whose opinions weren’t represented in the initial press coverage. Many of them strongly believe that the prison and the military commissions are a miscarriage of justice that have been politically motivated from the start.

Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU National Security Project and a frequent observer at the Guantánamo military commissions proceedings, was featured in a live chat on Firedoglake today in which she fielded questions about Guantánamo and the military commissions system.

Hina says:

In the years my colleagues and I have been observing the military commission proceedings, we've never seen one that hasn't been marked by chaos or dogged by concerns about coerced and secret evidence and other fundamental due process concerns.

That's a pretty good reason to go read the chat and learn more.