American Civil Liberties Union

We just marked the 40^th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, when five burglars associated with the White House were caught in the Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate office complex in Washington, DC. The burglary unleashed a series of revelations of misdeeds that eventually led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon on August 9, 1974.

Earlier this week, a federal appeals court ruled that the CIA can effectively decide for itself what Americans are allowed to learn about the torture committed in their name. At issue in the ACLU’s long-running Freedom of Information Act lawsuit was the agency’s right to withhold secret cables describing waterboarding; a photograph of a detainee, Abu Zubaydah, taken around the time that he was subjected to the “enhanced interrogation techniques”; and a short phrase that appears in several Justice Department memos referring to a “source of authority.”

Tomorrow, the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), Europe's top human rights court based in Strasbourg, France, will hear arguments in El-Masri v. "the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia." Tomorrow's hearing marks the first case to come before the court against a European nation for complicity in the CIA's "extraordinary rendition" program.

In the United States, there are over 3,000 people serving life sentences without the possibility of parole for offenses committed when they were children. Among them is Matthew Bentley from Michigan who committed his crime when he was 14 years-old, an age when the law deemed him too young to legally drive, smoke or join the military but old enough to be sentenced to die in prison,