One month after the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program was disclosed by the New York Times in December 2005, we sued to put an end to it. In the two and a half years since then, an ACLU suit (brought on the same day as ours) was essentially dismissed on technicalities....

Salim Hamdan's 66-month sentence for providing material support for terrorism hardly marks closure to this first chapter in the sorry history of the Bush administration's military commissions. A slew of questions remain: Was his trial legal? Will he be freed once he serves his five remaining months? And, having floundered...

Attorney General Mukasey gave a speech at the American Enterprise Institute on Monday morning (repeated before Congress yesterday) in which he issued an "urgent" call for a third round of Congressional legislation to ensure that this administration will never have to explain to a federal court why they have...

In my last post, I gave in to the temptation to respond to John McCain's comments on Friday, calling the Supreme Court's Guantánamo decision "one of the worst decisions in the history of this country," by asking how it might compare to several other horribles--Dred Scott v. Sandford (the...

Here's John McCain's initial reaction to the Supreme Court's decision in the Guantánamo detainees case, Boumediene v. Bush, on Thursday, the day of the decision:

"It obviously concerns me . . . but it is a decision the Supreme Court has made. Now we need to move forward. As you...

Six and a half years ago, we at the Center for Constitutional Rights brought the first case in federal court on behalf of detainees held at Guantanamo. At first, the administration successfully argued that the detainees were in a legal black hole, without any right of access to the...

Well, it's been a few months and we're still waiting for a decision from the Supreme Court in the Guantánamo detainee cases. But things are happening on other fronts. For starters, the Harold and Kumar movie -- Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay -- is out. Here's my two...

Today marks six years since the detention camp at the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station was opened. The first 20 men arrived on January 11, 2002. Almost 800 men have been held there since then; around 500 have been sent home; only five have seen formal charges under the Military Commissions...

Well, the long awaited Mitchell Report on steroid use in baseball is out, two years and $20 million dollars after it began. Lack of a broad sample of outside sources or players willing to talk means that the most interesting questions (how widespread was cheating? was it mainly...

As some you may have read, the military recently accused two lawyers for Guantanamo detainees with the London-based human rights group Reprieve of smuggling underwear to their clients. I really have nothing to add to the two letters detailing the dispute, reprinted below. The Times and the...

Are we the only ones who are ready to retch at the constant stream of praise for the president's choice for attorney general? First of all, this is a guy who despises the legal left. Here's how he describes my organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, in an...

While the left is winning the debate on the Iraq war (it's hard not to), the conduct of that other war--on terrorism--still seems popular with a large swath of the public. I fear that over the last six years we've been consistently underplaying our hand in the debate about terrorism...

The "FISA Modernization" bill that passed both houses and was signed into law by the President on Sunday night was far worse than the compromise version I'd described in an earlier posting. Unlike the versions described in the media, the bill that passed does not merely allow the government...

A story has emerged this week that seems to have escaped the headlines in the major papers entirely: the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, which had approved of some close variant on the NSA Program in January, changed its mind sometime in the last few months and decided the program was...

Amidst the wave of near-daily doping confessions from the world of professional cycling, this one was less teary and far more poignant: Bjarne Riis, the 1996 winner of the Tour, became the first champion to confess to using banned drugs -- EPO, corticosteroids, HGH -- on a daily basis...

On Friday, professional administration apologist Douglas Kmiec published an op-ed in the Washington Post in which he criticizes former Deputy AG James Comey's testimony as "staggeringly histrionic," claims the media's analogies between the threatened mass resignations (of Comey, Ashcroft and FBI Director Mueller) to Watergate's Friday Night Massacre...

The astonishing story of Alberto Gonzales' March 2004 bedside visit with John Ashcroft (then in intensive care after having his gall bladder removed during a bout with pancreatitis) in order to force him to reauthorize the NSA warrantless surveillance program has been all over the news today after former Deputy...

Yesterday morning in Washington, I was lucky enough to witness oral arguments in the latest chapter in the Guantánamo litigation saga. Jeff Lang of Debevoise & Plimpton and Sabin Willett of Bingham McCutchen, lawyers for eight of the detainees, argued before the federal Court of Appeals in...

A few minutes ago, the New York Times reports that "The Bush administration, in what appears to be a concession to its critics, said today it will allow an independent court to monitor its warrantless electronic-eavesdropping program." While it would be great if the current administration had in fact...

January 11, 2002: Four months after 9/11, the United States flew the first twenty men into a makeshift prison in the Guantánamo Bay Naval Station. Today marks five years since the detention camp there was opened. Over those five years, the camp has proved to be both a public relations...