Today, the majority in a federal Court of Appeals ruled 2-1 against Center for Constitutional Rights client Maher Arar's case against U.S. officials for their role in sending him to Syria to be tortured and interrogated for a year under the extraordinary rendition program.

Maher Arar is not available to comment in person, but is issuing the following statement: "The Court's 2-1 ruling is outrageous. It basically legitimizes what was done to me, and permits the government to use immigration law as a disguise to send people to torture without regard for due process."

The majority ruled that Mr. Arar's constitutional claims that it was a violation of due process to lock him up for two weeks, obstruct his access to a lawyer and a court, and then to ship him to Syria for the purpose of having him interrogated under torture could not be heard in federal court for two reasons. It concluded that adjudicating the claims would interfere with sensitive matters of foreign policy and national security, and that Arar, as a foreigner who had not been formally admitted to the U.S., had no constitutional due process rights with respect to the government's interference with his access to a lawyer and the decision to send him to Syria to be tortured.

The Supreme Court has ruled that foreign terrorism suspects held at Guantanamo Bay have rights under the U.S. Constitution to challenge their detention in civilian courts.

The justices, in a 5-4 ruling Thursday, handed the Bush administration its third setback at the high court since 2004 over its treatment of prisoners who are being held indefinitely and without charges at the U.S. naval base in Cuba.

"We hold these petitioners do have the habeas corpus privilege," Justice Anthony Kennedy wrote for the court majority in the 70-page opinion.

President George W. Bush's successor should renounce his monarchy. It betters the instruction of King George III, which provoked the Declaration of Independence. Among other things, the 44th president of the United States should do the following promptly upon taking office: Transfer the impending trials of six "high-value" al-Qaida detainees before Spanish Inquisition-like military commissions to civilian courts; repudiate President Bush's kidnappings, secret imprisonments, and maltreatments of suspected al-Qaida supporters abroad on his say-so alone--a page from Hobbes' state of nature; denounce signing statements that declare the president's intent to disregard provisions of bills he has signed into law because he disputes their constitutionality; and end the snobbish custom of former government Brahmins preening in their honorifics after leaving office. The Founding Fathers prohibited titles of nobility to encourage a nonhierarchical culture that honors equality before the law.

While the newly released memo focuses on "asserting that federal laws prohibiting assault, maiming and other crimes did not apply to military interrogators," it contains a footnote referencing another Administration memo that caught our eye:

... our Office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations.

"If a government defendant were to harm an enemy combatant during an interrogation in a manner that might arguably violate a criminal prohibition, he would be doing so in order to prevent further attacks on the United States by the al Qaeda terrorist network," Yoo wrote. "In that case, we believe that he could argue that the executive branch's constitutional authority to protect the nation from attack justified his actions."

I love how the ends now justify the means.

JOHN YOO'S hitherto secret memo justifying the use of harsh interrogation tactics has finally been declassified and released. As legal scholar Marty Lederman observes, it is hard to see any real justification for having kept the document under lock and key for so long--except, I suppose, that it makes clear there's no wondrous legal proof lurking behind the curtains here, just Mr Yoo's rather extreme (and by now depressingly familiar) view that there is no law higher than presidential whim in time of war. Or, as he puts it, "it is for the President alone to decide what methods to use to best prevail against the enemy."

Local mirror of John Yoo's memo authorizing torture

In the first decision of its kind, a federal judge today ordered the government to stop the deportation of Egyptian national Sameh Khouzam based on a secret and unreliable "assurance" from the Egyptian government that it will not torture him upon his return. The judge called for Khouzam's immediate release from jail under reasonable conditions of supervision and granted his habeas corpus petition. The American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a lawsuit on Khouzam's behalf, applauded the judge's ruling.

...

The U.S. State Department has documented widespread Egyptian persecution and discrimination against Christians and other religious minorities, as well as widespread use of torture in Egypt. A State Department report on the matter is available at:
www.state.gov/g/drl/rls/hrrpt/2006/78851.htm

Senator Robert Casey, Jr. (D-PA) sent a letter to Homeland Security Director Michael Chertoff supporting Khouzam and denouncing Egypt’s diplomatic assurances. That letter is available at:
www.aclupa.org/downloads/CaseytoChertoffonKhouzam.pdf

Congressman Joseph Pitts (R-PA) also sent a letter to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice requesting Khouzam’s deportation be cancelled. That letter is available at:
www.aclu.org/immigrants/gen/29982prs20070604.html

More here:

Mr. Khouzam's lawyers say he was detained and beaten by Egyptian authorities after he refused to convert to Islam. They say he escaped from a hospital, went straight to the airport and got on a plane to the United States. While he was in the air, Egyptian officials called U.S. officials and said Mr. Khouzam was wanted for killing a woman, and the U.S. canceled his visa.

"The issue in this case does not concern any right of Khouzam to remain in the United States," Judge Vanaskie wrote. "The right at stake here is to be free from torture."

Local mirror of Judge Vanaskie's decision freeing Khouzam and barring his deportation

According to a document that was one of many declassified [PDF] by The State Department yesterday, "Former FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a plan to suspend the rules against illegal detention and arrest up to 12,000 Americans he suspected of being disloyal....The plan called for the FBI to apprehend all potentially dangerous individuals whose names were on a list Hoover had been compiling for years. 'The index now contains approximately twelve thousand individuals, of which approximately ninety-seven percent are citizens of the United States,' Hoover wrote in the now-declassified document. ‘In order to make effective these apprehensions, the proclamation suspends the writ of habeas corpus.'"

Local mirror of declassified document in which Hoover planned to suspend habeas corpus and arrest thousands

During a hearing last month Lord Justice Moses, one of the Court of Appeal judges, asked Alun Jones QC, representing the US government, about its treatment of Gavin, Tollman's nephew. Gavin Tollman was the subject of an attempted abduction during a visit to Canada in 2005.

Jones replied that it was acceptable under American law to kidnap people if they were wanted for offences in America. "The United States does have a view about procuring people to its own shores which is not shared," he said.

He said that if a person was kidnapped by the US authorities in another country and was brought back to face charges in America, no US court could rule that the abduction was illegal and free him: "If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s."

The first Gitmo trial has ended, but not before the defendant was stripped of two of his attorneys. Detainee #002 entered a guilty plea and will serve 9 months in an Australian prison. In return, he signed a statement stipulating that he had never been tortured or mistreated by the Americans -- despite previously reporting being beaten and deprived of sleep during his more than five years at the prison. The agreement bars him from suing the U.S. government for alleged abuse, forfeits any right to appeal, and imposes a gag order that prevents him speaking with news media for a year.