Last week, almost five years after we filed our request under the Freedom of Information Act request, we managed to obtain two Bush administration legal memos about government surveillance. The memos are heavily redacted — almost comically so — but they’re interesting nonetheless.

The first...

Weeks after 9/11, Alan Dershowitz notoriously proposed that judges be empowered to issue warrants authorizing interrogators to use torture against suspected terrorists. His theory was that government interrogators would torture prisoners whether or not we authorized them to, and that, given this "fact," it would be better to regulate...

Which secrets should be kept, and which should be exposed? Those questions are at the heart of Doug Liman's new film, Fair Game, which tells the story of Joe Wilson and Valerie Plame. Joe Wilson, remember, was the former U.S. diplomat who exposed one of the many false...

Since 2004, the ACLU and its partners — the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace — have been litigating under the Freedom of Information Act for documents concerning the abuse of prisoners held by the Department of Defense and...

To the record of lawless activity undertaken by the CIA in connection with the detention and interrogation of suspected terrorists, media reports have recently added this entry: Despite repeated requests from the 9/11 Commission for information about the interrogation of prisoners, the CIA failed to turn over videotapes that...

At the Guantánamo Bay military commissions, the only constant -- aside from the desperate prisoners -- is chaos. Attorneys come and go; rules are invalidated and reintroduced; one prison closes and another opens, but pandemonium is ever-present. Since their inception five years ago, the military commissions -- the first war...