We are all familiar with how the death penalty works. A crime (usually murder) is committed. It's investigated by law enforcement. A suspect is arrested, charged with the crime, and goes to trial. The government shows the judge or jury the evidence against the accused. The accused can defend against the accusations. The jury delivers a verdict. If it's a guilty verdict, the defendant might be sentenced to death.

The process, from arrest to sentencing, is the Fifth Amendment in action, the part that states: "no person…shall be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process of law."

But earlier this year, the Obama administration asserted it has the authority to carry out "targeted killings" of U.S. citizens outside armed conflict zones. In February, then-Director of National Intelligence Dennis Blair told the House Intelligence Committee that the U.S. was authorized to take “direct action” against suspected terrorists and that “if we think that direct action will involve killing an American, we get specific permission to do that.”

It was reported widely, in fact, that the government keeps secret "kill lists," which function as standing authorizations to use lethal force against anyone on the list, including American citizens.

Yesterday, the ACLU and Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) filed a lawsuit challenging the government's asserted authority to carry out targeted killings of U.S. citizens outside armed conflict zones.

Now, no one disputes that the United States is at war. But wars are waged in specific geographic areas. Currently, the U.S. is at war in Afghanistan and Iraq.

The U.S. is not at war in Somalia. Yet that is where a missile strike killed Ruben Shumpert, a U.S. citizen from Seattle.

The U.S. is also not at war in Yemen. Yet that is where Anwar al-Aulaqi, a U.S. citizen, is purportedly in hiding, and where the government has attempted to assassinate him as many as a dozen times using armed drones.

The Constitution protects all Americans' right to life, whether they're living at home or abroad. If the government thinks you should be dead, it should at least tell you why. The fact that the standard that puts Americans on the "kill list" is a secret is itself unconstitutional. As our complaint states, "U.S. citizens have a right to know what conduct may subject them to execution at the hands of their own government. Due process requires, at a minimum, that citizens be put on notice of what may cause them to be put to death by the state."

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Arizona upended the basic tenets of a free society when its governor signed S.B. 1070, a law that requires police officers in that state to demand papers proving the citizenship or immigration status of people they stop if the officer has some undefined "reasonable suspicion" that they are not in this country legally. Under S.B. 1070, law enforcement will be forced to rely on people's appearance, victimizing citizens and noncitizens alike.

Today, the ACLU, the Mexican-American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the National Immigration Law Center, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, ACLU of Arizona, National Day Laborer Organizing Network and the Asian Pacific American Legal Center (a member of the Asian American Center for Advancing Justice) filed a federal lawsuit against the state's sheriffs and county attorneys, asking the court to find S.B. 1070 unconstitutional. It violates the 14th Amendment's guarantee of equal protection under the law because it unlawfully invites the racial profiling of Latinos and other people who look or sound "foreign-born." It also violates the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution by interfering with the federal government's authority to regulate and enforce immigration. Our lawsuit is on behalf of a diverse coalition of Arizona residents and organizations including the Service Employees International Union (SEIU), the Southside Presbyterian Church, the Asian Chamber of Commerce of Arizona, and the Muslim American Society.

In the video above, Alessandra Soler Meetze, Executive Director of the ACLU of Arizona, explains why we're challenging the law, and the impact the law has already had on Arizona residents.

It is practically impossible to think of any legitimate way police could develop a suspicion that someone is here unlawfully without racial profiling. Under this law, people who look "foreign" are more likely to be stopped for minor infractions like having a broken taillight, jaywalking or having an overgrown lawn – and then asked for their papers if police believe, just by looking at them, that they could be in the country unlawfully. That means that U.S. citizens and noncitizens alike will be required to carry papers on them at all times.

S.B. 1070 would essentially turn Arizona into a police state, where merely looking "foreign" authorizes the police to treat you as potential criminal suspect. Which is why many top law enforcement officials oppose this law. Time reports:

Chief John Harris of Sahuarita, the current president of the Arizona Association of Chiefs of Police, said he opposed the law before Governor Jan Brewer signed it and still does today. He listed his objections: Immigration has traditionally been a federal issue, and the police already have "manpower and budget issues" that will only get worse under the law. "[…] He's also concerned that victims may not report crimes to his officers.

Already, state governments across the country are considering laws similar to Arizona's. It's our hope that the lawsuit filed today will show that such laws will not pass constitutional muster in court, and passing more laws like it will be futile. S.B. 1070 is un-American and undermines our values of fairness and equality for all people. Stand with us, and show that what happens in Arizona stops in Arizona.

Yesterday, the ACLU filed a lawsuit on behalf of Nick George, a Pomona College student who was detained and aggressively interrogated by Transportation Security Administration (TSA) authorities, by the FBI and by Pennsylvania police when he tried to board a plane carrying Arabic language flash cards.

You heard right: Not liquids, not matches, not a bomb. Flash cards.

George, a physics major who's studying Arabic, was pulled aside for secondary screening at the Philadelphia International Airport as he tried to go through security. When he emptied his pockets, the inspector saw his flash cards and he was arrested, handcuffed, locked in a cell for hours and aggressively questioned. Because of some flash cards.

The following exchange took place between George and a TSA supervisor who questioned him:

TSA Supervisor: You know who did 9/11?

George: Osama bin Laden.

TSA Supervisor: Do you know what language he spoke?

George: Arabic.

At that point, the TSA supervisor held up George’s flash cards—which had words such as "to smile" and "funny" and on them—and said: "Do you see why these cards are suspicious?"

Ah, the smoking gun.

Here's the problem: During George's ordeal, no fewer than seven law enforcement officers took part in detaining and questioning him. The unnecessary arrest, detention and questioning of someone who, like George, poses no threat to flight safety, makes everyone less safe by diverting resources away from real threats.

George said yesterday, “As someone who travels by plane, I want TSA agents to do their job to keep flights safe. But I don’t understand how locking me up and harassing me just because I was carrying the flash cards made anybody safer. No one should be treated like a criminal for simply learning one of the most widely-spoken languages in the world.”

One of the FBI agents who questioned him put it best, we think. At the end of his ordeal, he said to George: “The police call us to evaluate whether there is a real threat. You are not a real threat.”

Friday marked the one-year anniversary of President Obama signing an executive order to close the detention center at Guantánamo Bay. We were all cheered and encouraged by this bold move on the president’s second full day in office — it signaled he was ready to make a clean break from the Bush administration's unlawful and shameful detention policies.

But when the Obama administration finally does close Guantánamo, it's vital that the administration also puts an end to the policy of detaining prisoners without charge or trial. Indefinite detention is one of the practices that's made Gitmo a disgrace in the eyes of the rest of the world.

Late last year, we debuted a video that included interviews with five former Guantánamo detainees.

Last week we released four break-out videos featuring the same five men telling their stories in more depth: They talk about their lives before ending up in U.S. custody, their experiences at Guantánamo and other U.S.-run detention facilities, and how they've pieced their lives back together after Gitmo. All of the men featured in our video series, like hundreds of others who were held for years at Guantánamo, were eventually released without any charge.

British citizen Moazzam Begg was in Afghanistan, working to open a school for girls, when he was captured. He says in the video: "My experience of America prior to this was everything I had seen in the films: the concept of the good guys, the concept of people trying to do the right thing. And that was shattered."

Bisher al-Rawi was captured in Gambia, where he hoped to open a peanut factory with his brother.

Omar Deghayes was detained at Guantánamo for six years. He was blinded in his right eye after a Gitmo prison guard jabbed him in the face with his fingers.

Childhood friends Shafiq Rasul and Ruhal Ahmed are two of the "Tipton Three," the subjects of the documentary Road to Guantánamo. They traveled to Afghanistan after attending a friend’s wedding in Pakistan, and were captured there. They both spent 2 ½ years detained by the U.S.

More than 700 men have been detained at Guantánamo since it opened eight years ago; 198 remain. Most of them could tell similar stories about their years-long detention.

To close Gitmo properly, the remaining detainees must either be released, or charged and tried in federal courts, which are better-equipped to handle these cases than the unconstitutional military commissions. Consider the military commissions' track record: A grand total of three cases have been completed since Guantánamo opened as a detention facility in January 2002. Federal courts, on the other hand, have successfully tried more than 200 terrorism cases, including those of the “Blind Sheik” Omar Abdel-Rahman for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, “shoe-bomber” Richard Reid, and Zacarias Moussoui for conspiring in the 9/11 attacks. The so-called underwear bomber, Abdul Farouk Abdulmutallab, was arraigned in federal court on terrorism charges 14 days after he tried to blow up an airplane. In contrast, most detainees at Guantánamo have languished there for years, without charges brought against them and no end to their detention in sight.

Of those detainees who remain at Guantánamo, Bisher al-Rawi says: "If the U.S. thinks somebody is a criminal, that’s fine. Take him to court and let him have his day in court…either you release people or give them justice, true justice, with no deception, no lies."

Eight years ago today, a Department of Defense C-141 transport plane carrying 20 prisoners arrived in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. On that day, January 11, 2002, the naval base began operating as a detention center for men captured in President Bush's so-called "war on terror."

Since that day, nearly 800 prisoners, men as old as 98 and boys as young as 13, have passed through Gitmo. The notorious prison camp has seared into the mind of the world images of hooded, goggled, orange-jumpsuit-clad prisoners shackled in cages. Guantánamo has become synonymous with torture and abuse. Its very existence is a symbol of disregard for the rule of law.

In this video, "Justice Denied," a few of the former detainees tell their stories. They tell of their capture, detention — some for several years — and abuse inside the facility, and their eventual release without explanation or apology.

On his second day in office, President Obama ordered the closure of the prison at Guantánamo by January 22, 2010.

But last Wednesday, the Obama administration announced it will try a sixth Guantánamo detainee in the unconstitutional military commissions system. Congress has stymied plans to move some of the 198 remaining detainees to a prison in Thomson, Illinois, by refusing to fund an upgrade of the prison's facilities. It now seems clear that the president's deadline will pass without any meaningful change in policy for those still held there.

It's been a shameful eight years. It's time to close Guantánamo.

Kidnap subject. Strip off his clothes and dress him in a tracksuit. Blindfold and shackle him. Force headphones over his ears. Fly him to an unknown location to be interrogated, tortured, and imprisoned. Repeat.

This is the practice of "extraordinary rendition," and the experience of 35-year-old U.K. resident Binyam Mohamed on his journey home to London from Pakistan in July 2002. He was kidnapped to Morocco, where he was held for 18 months and tortured repeatedly. "They cut off my clothes with some kind of doctor's scalpel," he wrote in his diary. "I was totally naked…One of them took my penis in his hand and began to make a cut…He did it once, then stood still for maybe a minute, watch my reaction. It was an agony, [I was] crying, trying desperately to suppress my feelings, but I was screaming. There was blood all over."

This was just one of 20 to 30 incidents in which Mohamed was cut on his genitals while detained in Morocco. Interrogators routinely beat him, breaking bones and sometimes knocking him unconscious. He was frequently threatened with rape, electrocution and death, drugged repeatedly, and forced to listen to loud music day and night.

In January 2004, he was handcuffed and blindfolded again, placed in a van and driven to an airfield, then stripped, photographed extensively and put on a plane to a "Dark Prison" in Kabul, Afghanistan. Mohamed endured similar torture and daily interrogations in Kabul. In May, he was sent to Bagram. In September, he was sent to Guantánamo Bay. Mohamed was in Guantánamo for more than four years, and was released in February 2009. His military commission charges were dropped in October 2008.

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(Suzanne Ito writes for and manages Blog of Rights, the blog of the national ACLU.)

June 26 of this year marked the International Day in Support of Torture Victims, and the anniversary of the United Nations' Convention Against Torture. On that day, the ACLU joined countless other human rights groups in calling for Accountability for Torture. We asked people to send Attorney General Eric Holder the Office of Legal Counsel memos—the actual evidence released through ACLU lawsuits that revealed the fact that high-level Bush administration officials had sanctioned these illegal acts—and urged him to appoint a special prosecutor to investigate these crimes.

We were pleased when Newsweek's Daniel Klaidman reported that Holder was indeed considering an investigation. But now a month has passed, we haven't heard much from the Justice Department. So last week, the ACLU renewed its call for accountability by launching a new video, featuring director Oliver Stone, composer Philip Glass, Rosie Perez, and many others reading from the torture memos, and calling for accountability.

The public knows that detainees were tortured during the Bush presidency. From the photos from Abu Ghraib, to congressional reports (PDF), to the torture memos themselves, it's crystal-clear that these abusive interrogation practices were authorized by the highest levels of the Bush administration. Even Dick Cheney couldn't resist a little cheerleading about how effective he thought waterboarding was.

It is a core premise of American democracy that no one—not even the president—is above the law. When we hear Attorney General Holder is considering only investigating those who carried out the torture, not those who authorized the torture in the first place, it sickens us to think how this clashes with the most fundamental American ideals of fairness. Too much evidence of high-level orders exists to limit criminal investigations to "a few bad apples." We cannot compromise the rule of law because we're afraid the outcome might be politically messy, inconvenient or even painful. To not investigate is to tell future presidents and their administrations that they're above the law, and that would render our system of justice meaningless.

So please watch the video, and send it to Attorney General Holder. It's time for a comprehensive investigation of the Bush era torture policies.

(This piece was written by Ateqa Khaki, who is the Advocacy Coordinator for the ACLU's National Security team.)

As you may know by now, yesterday, the Justice Department released four critical legal memos that provided the legal basis for the CIA’s torture program in response to an ACLU lawsuit. The Obama administration should be highly commended for living up to its promise of transparency by releasing the memos with minimal redactions, instead of covering up the Bush administration’s crimes.

The memos are shocking. They describe in excruciating detail barbaric interrogation methods used by the CIA on its prisoners and the legal contortions used by the Office of Legal Counsel to ratify those methods.

In an 18-page memo (PDF) dated August 1, 2002, then-Assistant Attorney General to the Office of Legal Counsel, Jay Bybee, analyzes specific techniques – facial holds and slaps, placing detainees in confinement boxes (including placing one detainee in a box with an insect after he conveyed having a fear of insects), prolonged sleep deprivation, and waterboarding – and concludes that these methods, administered individually and in combination, do not constitute severe physical or mental pain and suffering. Shockingly, Bybee also states that the presence of medical personnel at the time of interrogation implied that “those carrying out these procedures would not have the specific intent to inflict severe physical pain or suffering.” He concludes that the absence of specific intent negates the charge of torture. This memo is considered one of the cornerstones of the torture program, and provides written authorizations to the CIA to use such harsh interrogation techniques.

And that’s just information contained in one of the four memos released yesterday.

In sum, these documents, and other still missing secret memos make clear that the abusive interrogation techniques employed on detainees were part of a choreographed torture program – one that was authorized by high-ranking officials from the Bush administration. As Jameel Jaffer, the Director of our National Security Project stated, the memos “[A]re simply political documents that were meant to provide window dressing for war crimes.” They were written to insulate the torturers and those who authorized the torture from prosecution for acts that are illegal under several domestic and international laws.

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(Suzanne Ito writes for and manages Blog of Rights, the blog of the national ACLU.)

Yesterday was the fourth deadline for the release of the "Bradbury Memos": three memos authored by Steven Bradbury, acting head of the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) from 2005 to 2009. The memos reportedly provided legal justification for the CIA’s use of enhanced interrogation methods that amounted to torture. And they also reportedly provided legal cover for the CIA’s interrogation methods in anticipation of Congress’s expected effort to outlaw “cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment,” which it did in the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005, passed several months after Bradbury issued the memos.

After negotiating with DOJ attorneys, on Thursday the ACLU agreed to a two-week extension for the government to finish its review of the memos. The DOJ has, in return, agreed to review for release another key memo, authored by Jay Bybee, Assistant Attorney General for the OLC from November 2001 to March 2003. (Bybee is now a federal appeals court judge for the 9th Circuit, and the subject of an ethics probe by the DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility.) The Bybee memo, like the Bradbury memos, is critical to understanding the foundations of President Bush’s torture program. The DOJ’s letter to the Judge seeking an extension is available here.

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President-elect Obama has been taking all of us on an emotional roller-coaster ride of late. On Sunday, he told ABC that closing the base at Guantánamo would be very difficult and probably wouldn't happen in the first 100 days of his administration. On Monday afternoon, it was leaked that the transition team is drawing up an executive order to close Gitmo the first week of the presidency. Tumultuous and gut-wrenching? Yes and yes.

On Tuesday morning, Bush administration lawyers appealed a Guantánamo military judge’s decision last October to throw out tainted evidence against Afghan national Mohammed Jawad, evidence the military judge had held was the product of torture. The government has admitted that the torture-derived evidence was the centerpiece of its prosecution.

Jawad has been tortured or abused repeatedly – first by Afghan authorities and then by U.S. personnel, both in Afghanistan and at Guantánamo. In Guantánamo, Jawad was subjected to the now-infamous "frequent-flyer" sleep-deprivation program in which detainees are kept awake and constantly moved from cell to cell. Jawad was moved 112 times in a 14-day period.

ACLU attorney Hina Shamsi attended the hearing before the U.S. Court of Military Commission Review in Washington, D.C. on the Bush administration’s appeal, and reports that the commission judges seemed offended by the government’s assertion that the Fifth Amendment does not apply to detainees in U.S. custody. “Even in the waning days of the Bush administration, government attorneys asked an American court to permit evidence derived from torture,” Shamsi said.Also on Tuesday morning, the ACLU filed a habeas corpus petition in U.S. federal court on behalf of Jawad, challenging his unlawful detention. Most notable in this filing is a statement made in support of the ACLU’s petition by Lt. Col. Darrel Vandeveld, the former lead prosecutor in Jawad’s military commission case. In September last year, Lt. Col. Vandeveld asked to be taken off the case and reassigned because he could not ethically proceed with prosecuting Jawad under the current military commission system, which he found deeply flawed and unethical. In Tuesday's filing, Vandeveld states:

[H]ad I been returned to Afghanistan or Iraq, and had I encountered Mohammed Jawad in either of those hostile lands, where two of my friends have been killed in action and another one of my very best friends in the world had been terribly wounded, I have no doubt at all—none—that Mr. Jawad would pose no threat whatsoever to me, his former prosecutor and now-repentant persecutor. Six years is long enough for a boy of sixteen to serve in virtual solitary confinement, in a distant land, for reasons he may never fully understand...Mr. Jawad should be released to resume his life in a civil society, for his sake, and for our own sense of justice and perhaps to restore a measure of our basic humanity.

Another wrinkle: Unless Obama shuts down Guantánamo and the military commissions immediately upon taking office, his administration will stumble into a major human rights crisis. A mere six days after Obama is sworn in, the military commission trial of Omar Khadr, who, like Jawad, was a teenager when he was captured and detained in U.S. custody, will begin.

If Obama allows the trial to proceed, Khadr will be the first person in recent history to be tried by any western nation for alleged war crimes committed as a child. Such a trial would be in violation of the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child on the involvement of children in armed conflict, which the U.S. signed in 2000 and ratified in 2002.

To avoid such a human rights debacle, we urged the President-elect to drop the military commission charges against Khadr and either repatriate him to Canada or, if there is evidence to support it, to prosecute him in U.S. federal courts in accordance with international child protection and fair trial standards.

President-elect Obama voted against the legislation that authorized the Guantánamo military commissions, calling the law “a betrayal of American values.” And he has co-sponsored legislation designed to stop the use of child soldiers in armed conflict. We're asking that immediately upon taking office, President-elect Obama must stop the travesty of war crimes prosecutions of young men who were children when they were captured. And we’re asking for that change to come immediately, not eventually.

You can join us in this effort: go to www.aclu.org/askobama and send a message to him through the change.gov website. Tell him to end this unlawful system before it's too late.

Suzanne Ito writes for and manages Blog of Rights, the blog of the national ACLU.