SCOTUS decided today to take John Ashcroft’s appeal of a 9th Circuit decision finding that he did not have immunity from suit in using the material witness statute to illegally hold someone without probable cause. The Supreme Court, finishing its first sitting of the new Term, agreed on Monday to hear a single new case, [...]

The most striking aspect of the government’s motion to dismiss the ACLU/CCR lawsuit challenging the use of targeted killing is that the government does not commit to the basis for its authority to kill an American citizen like Anwar al-Awlaki with no review. This starts as soon as the filing tries to lay the ground [...]

The late, but great, news this fine Friday afternoon is the decision of Western District of Washington (WDWA) Judge Ronald Leighton in the case of Air Force Major Margaret Witt finding DADT unconstitutional and reinstating Witt to her military position.

Let me spoil the ending of this series on the IG Report on FBI Investigations of First Amendment Activity. I suspect there are ties between the FBI’s investigations of anti-war activists and CIFA, the DOD program that collected information on anti-war activists in the Talon database. I’ll say more about this in a later post [...]

Glenn Fine–DOJ’s Inspector General–is usually one of the most credible agents of oversight in the federal government. But his last report–examining whether the FBI investigated the First Amendment activities of lefty groups as terrorism–is a masterpiece of obfuscation. It manages to look at three different investigative efforts of the Thomas Merton Center’s anti-war activism, all [...]

Michael Hayden has another tired whine at CNN about Obama’s treatment of the torture program. The entire logic of the piece is predictably silly. It goes something like this: ACLU and CCR are suing the government for targeting American citizen Anwar al-Awlaki with no due process. According to Hayden, the targeting of Awlaki was “Authorized [...]

Go read this entire Charlie Savage article describing the deliberations within the Administration on how to respond to ACLU/CCR’s lawsuit challenging the government’s ability to target American citizens for assassination with no due process. The whole thing makes me want to cry about what our country has become (Congratulations Osama bin Laden! You’ve won!). But [...]

Back in January, Dana Priest first revealed that Anwar al-Awlaki was on a JSOC kill list and was being considered for a CIA kill list. Now, eight months later, DOJ is considering charging him. The Obama administration is considering filing the first criminal charges against radical cleric Anwar al-Awlaki in case the CIA fails to [...]

From a joint press release: The American Civil Liberties Union and the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) today filed a lawsuit challenging the government’s asserted authority to carry out “targeted killings” of U.S. citizens located far from any armed conflict zone. The authority contemplated by the Obama administration is far broader than what the Constitution [...]

While everyone has been focused on the hope that gays and lesbians may soon get the rights straight people enjoy, in Florida a court ruled that womb-bearers have some rights too, specifically to decide their own medical treatment when pregnant. From the ACLU press release: In an important decision for the right of women to [...]