Last night, 60 Minutes profiled Murat Kurnaz, who recently published the book Five Years of My Life: An Innocent Man in Guantanamo. In it, he retells the story of being arrested by a Pakistani police officer on his way home to Germany in 2001. U.S. intelligence paid $3,000 for him, then rendered him to Afghanistan, then Guantanamo; he was repeatedly tortured and interrogated in both locations. All the while, U.S. and German intelligence was trying to build a case against him as being a member of al-Qaeda, to no avail. So U.S. intelligence made stuff up:

[Kurnaz's lawyer] dug into the case and found that the military seemed to have invented some of the charges. Military prosecutors said one of Kurnaz’s friends was a suicide bomber, but the friend turned up alive and well in Germany.

The profile also reveals that six months after arriving at Guantanamo, U.S. military intelligence authored a memo that found no link between Kurnaz and al-Qaeda or any other terrorist organization. But did they release Kurnaz immediately?

Of course not. They held onto him for 3 ½ more years:

They kept him, Kurnaz says, by inventing new charges. In a makeshift courthouse, Kurnaz claims that a military judge charged that Kurnaz had been picked up near Osama bin Laden’s hideout in Afghanistan while fighting for the Taliban. Ironic, since it was the U.S. that flew him to Afghanistan to begin with.

Apparently the U.S. military has no qualms over throwing crap against a wall and seeing what will stick. Kurnaz’s story, like that of fellow German citizen and victim of extraordinary rendition Khaled el-Masri, is a shameful indictment of the inhumane practices and policies of the Bush administration’s so-called war on terror.

On March 13, the ACLU of Northern California filed a Public Records Act request for information about the procedures the city of San Francisco intends to follow during the expected public demonstrations when the Olympic Torch passes through town on April 9.

In response they received almost identical letters from the Mayor’s Office and the San Francisco Police Department which indicate that the city doesn’t intend to restrict protestors along the torch route. Unfortunately, the city still hasn’t released the details of the exact location of the route - so, intentionally or not, they’re making it hard for people to organize.

Also not so encouraging: the SFPD response included sections of a Power Point presentation about crowd management and control, with text that apparently concerns ‘details of specific security procedures’ redacted.

The ACLU of Northern California will keep pushing for the city to release that route, and when the time comes they’ll be standing by to make sure any security procedures are in line with the Constitution. Let’s hope the city of San Francisco has more respect for the First Amendment than the White House.

CORRECTION: The ACLU of Northern California filed the Public Records Act request on March 13, not the week of March 21.

Heads up, Californians. Your state’s death row is a money pit, and the government is throwing tons of taxpayer cash into it despite a wealth of evidence that it is a bad investment.

On Friday, the ACLU of Northern California released two reports on the state’s capital punishment system. The Hidden Death Tax reveals for the first time the exorbitant cost of death penalty trials. In its analysis, the report tallies up a total post-conviction prosecution and law enforcement bill of $117 million to California taxpayers every year.

And it’s no wonder the price is so steep, when you consider all of the hours prosecutors work on these cases. In the death penalty trial of Scott Peterson, for example, prosecution staff spent more than 20,000 hours on the case. In the death penalty trial of Rex Allen Krebs, prosecution staff spent more than 8,700 hours on the case. In the non-death penalty trial, prosecution staff logged only 1,600 hours.

The report also finds that executing all of the people currently on death row, or waiting for them to die there of other causes,will cost Californians an estimated $4 billion more than if they had been sentenced to life in prison. In fact, merely housing prisoners on death row costs the state $90,000 more per year, per inmate, than housing them with the general prison population.

The Hidden Death Tax also reveals some startling figures that you wouldn’t expect to find on an expense sheet for prosecuting a death penalty case. But there it is, on Page 26 of the report, a dry-cleaning bill of $937.45, and a $387 worth of oil changes, car washes and smog checks.

The second report, Death by Geography, looks at county-by-county disparities in death sentencing. For instance, the report finds that a resident of Alameda county is eight times more likely to be sentenced to death than a resident of nearby Santa Clara. And counties that sentence people to death do not experience lower homicide rates or higher rates of solving homicides. What pursuing a death sentence does do is waste money that could be used for important programs that are proven to effect positive changes in crime and violence, like hiring more teachers for the public schools or more CHP officers to stop drunk drivers.

California’s death penalty is arbitrary, ineffective and a waste of critical resources. What’s that other familiar saying? Three strikes and you’re out?

While the military lawyer for Salim Ahmed Hamdan filed his motion to dismiss on Thursday citing unlawful political interference into the military commissions system, it wasn’t until this weekend that this story really caught fire, and yielded some great commentary on the blogs.

In Saturday’s No Comment column in Harper’s blog, Scott Horton delved into Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer’s motion to dismiss and highlighted some of the pressure coming from Bush administration officials to prosecute some Gitmo detainees around the time the elections ramp up this year. On Page 3 of the brief:

On September 29, 2006, Colonel Davis attended a meeting of the Special Detainee Follow-Up Group. The meeting was held in Deputy Secretary of Defense Gordon England’s office and was attended by Mr. England and Mr. Haynes. During the meeting, Mr. England raised the issue of charging so-called high value detainees: ‘We need to think about charging some of the high-value detainees because there could be strategic political value to charging some of these detainees before the election.’

There you have it, ladies and gents: the GOP is casting the detainees who have been languishing at Guantanamo, many for as long as six years, in the political theater known as the 2008 Election. Or as Horton put it: “Apparently, the Gitmo defendants were to be trotted out for a prime-time kill midway in the election cycle, like victims dragged into the Roman circus maximus to be devoured by the lions.”

Horton also points to the Bush administration’s dissatisfaction with the JAG lawyers who are running the military commissions: they’re not loyal enough to the GOP (sound familiar?), and are putting professionalism and dedication to justice and the law before their political affiliation. The nerve!

In the view of the Bush Administration, this is all about securing convictions according to the proper broadcast and election timetable. Acquittals must be excluded. Hence, the rules are rewritten to bring all these lawyers under the ‘command’ of Republican hacks in the Defense Department.

Horton concludes: “Perhaps you thought the worst Gitmo embarrassments were now past. Brace yourself: the worst is yet to come.”

The Olympic Torch is set to touch down in San Francisco, its only North American stop, on April 9. Citing security concerns, the city has yet to release details of the path the torch will take through the city by the Bay.

People who want to cheer are anxious to know where to be, but equally important, people who want to protest China’s hosting of this year’s games won’t have enough time to plan:

Michael Risher, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union, which has asked the city to hurry up and publicize its plans for the April 9 event, said his concern was that fans of the Games, due to begin in Beijing on Aug. 8, would be tipped off while protesters would be left wondering.

The ACLU knows a little bit about protests: we’ve sued the Office of Presidential Advance for shielding President Bush from those with dissenting opinions of his policies. In January, we furthered this litigation by suing the City of Albuquerque for prohibiting anti-Bush protestors from being seen at a Presidential fundraiser, while giving Bush supporters prime, media-friendly positions.

As Slate points out, the Olympics and all of its surrounding events are the perfect opportunity for protest. Protest is as American as the stars and stripes and apple pie. A city with a population as ethnically, culturally and politically diverse as San Francisco should encourage it, not stifle it.

Researchers from the University of Washington found that adolescents who receive comprehensive sex education are significantly less likely to become pregnant than adolescents who receive abstinence-only-until-marriage or no formal sex education. The study, based on a national survey of 1,719 teens ages 15 to 19, is the first population-level evaluation of the effectiveness of both abstinence-only and comprehensive sex education programs. The results are very promising for comprehensive sex education.

According to Pamela Kohler, the study’s lead author, “It is not harmful to teach teens about birth control in addition to abstinence.”

This study joins a host of others that prove that abstinence-only does little and comprehensive sex education does much for our teens. The dangers of abstinence-only are nothing new – one well-known study by Mathematica found that students who participated in abstinence-only programs are just as likely to have sex as their peers who did not participate.

Yet in the face of this overwhelming evidence, 1 in 4 teens receive only abstinence-only instruction. On top of that, 9 percent of teens receive no sex education at all, particularly those in rural or poor areas. Thankfully, that leaves two-thirds of students in comprehensive sex ed. As temporarily reassuring as that might be, we cannot also lose sight of the fact that 1 in 4 teen girls have an STD.

This sobering fact also points to how much work we have left to do. The University of Washington study does not speak to how comprehensive sex ed should be implemented. Clearly this is a question to be handled carefully by both parents and administrators alike, as we continue to improve and expand the reach of comprehensive sex education programs.

Col. Morris Davis, an Air Force Judge Advocate and the Pentagon’s former chief prosecutor responsible for bringing charges against the detainees at Guantanamo, has retired from the Air Force, effective November 1, according to the Air Force Times. In October, Davis resigned as chief prosecutor for the military commissions at Guantanamo after he revealed the over-politicization of the tribunals in a series of newspaper and magazine editorials and maintains that the commissions are essentially rigged. (Davis wasn’t the first to say so, either.) The article continues:

Davis also raised eyebrows in February when he said he plans to testify in the defense for Salim Ahmed Hamdan, Osama bin Laden’s driver and bodyguard. He said he has been asked by the defense to testify at pre-trial hearings that begin April 28. Davis will not testify that the defendant is innocent, he said, but that there are problems with the military commissions process.

Today the Los Angeles Times reports that Hamdan’s attorney, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, has moved for a dismissal of Hamdan’s case on the grounds that his superior is pressuring military lawyers for quick convictions as this election year ramps up:

Mizer accused Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann - legal advisor to the White House official overseeing terrorism trials at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba - of exercising “unlawful command influence” over both the prosecution and defense. Lawyers participating in the tribunals are members of the U.S. military, and all are subordinate in rank to Hartmann.

Susan Crawford, the commissions’ convening authority, is also named in Mizer’s motion for dismissal. Hartmann and Crawford are the same pair that Davis calls out for over-politicizing the military commissions in his op-eds.

In related Guantanamo news, the Canadian Supreme Court heard oral arguments this week over whether Omar Khadr and his attorneys will be given access to the evidence and testimony against him that the Canadian government has been denying him during his six-year detention at Guantanamo. Included in that evidence are “summaries of interviews Canadian security agents held with Mr. Khadr in 2002.” The Globe & Mail writes:

[Canadian Supreme Court Justice] Louise Charron asked [Canadian justice department lawyer Robert] Frater whether his stance imposed “an impossible burden” on the Khadr lawyers, since they cannot show the role the Canadian information played in U.S. prosecutorial decision-making if they are not told the most basic context of who was given it and the circumstances.

… The [Canadian government's] position is that the charges against Mr. Khadr are an America[n] affair and lack any genuine connection to Canada that would justify the court’s imposing disclosure obligations under Canadian law.

The Leader-Post quoted Frater:

“You’re not a trial court,” federal lawyer Robert Frater said in his closing argument. Throughout his presentation to the court, Frater said Khadr should be seeking the disclosure of documents from U.S. courts, not Canadian ones, because that’s where the prosecution is taking place.

We couldn’t agree more. Omar Khadr should be tried in U.S. courts, not the sham legal proceedings that continue at Guantanamo Bay.

The L.A. Times also reported today that five former Secretaries of State - Colin Powell, Henry A. Kissinger, James A. Baker III, Warren Christopher and Madeleine K. Albright - called on the next president to close Guantanamo. Baker said:

“It gives us a very, very bad name, not just internationally,” he said. “I have a great deal of difficulty understanding how we can hold someone, pick someone up, particularly someone who might be an American citizen - even if they were caught somewhere abroad, acting against American interests - and hold them without ever giving them an opportunity to appear before a magistrate.”

Obviously Baker, Secretary of State to our current president’s father, has a very good grasp of the concept of habeas corpus - perhaps he could swing by the White House and give President Bush some pointers.

Last week, Montana Attorney General Mike McGrath sent a letter (PDF) to Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff that touted the super security features on the state’s drivers’ licenses, and said that state residents should not be barred from boarding planes or entering federal buildings, as DHS has threatened, if the state doesn’t comply with the Real ID Act.

Was McGrath’s letter in some strange foreign language that Chertoff didn’t understand? No, but that didn’t stop DHS from interpreting the letter as a request for an extension of the state’s compliance with the Real ID act, even though the state passed a statute last year that said it would never comply with Real ID.

Yesterday New Hampshire Governor John Lynch received notice from DHS that the state had been granted an extension for Real ID compliance, even though, like Montana, it didn’t ask for one and has also passed a state law prohibiting enactment of the Real ID Act.

Maine has sent a Montana-style letter to DHS; South Carolina hasn’t done anything yet. Both states have refused to comply with Real ID. South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford is now under pressure to act. Jim Harper of the Cato Institute urges Sanford to stand up to DHS in an op-ed in Charleston’s Post and Courier.

In addition to protecting their citizens’ rights, these governors are also making an invaluable point with their actions: That DHS is more about giving the appearance of security over real security. This multibillion-dollar law was attached as a rider to a military spending and tsunami relief bill that was hastily passed through Congress in 2005; it never received real Congressional oversight or debate. It’s time Congress asserted its authority, stepped in, and scrapped Real ID once and for all.

As Lou Dobbs likes to say (over…and over again), "Doesn’t anyone deserve a government that works?" We would certainly like a government that works too, but a government that repeatedly shoots itself in the foot when it comes to its own unlawful programs strikes us as ridiculous.

The latest gaffe: Wired’s Threat Level reports that the FBI’s $500 million fund to retrofit existing landline telephone switches so they can be wiretapped has run dry. But cell phone users rest assured: All cell carriers’ switches are fully wiretap-compliant.

This bungling recalls the revelation last year that the FBI has failed to pay their wiretapping bills. Wired reports:

[T]he feds biggest complaint remains that wiretaps are too expensive.

Cox Communications, for instance, charges $1,500 for a 30 day wiretap or for 60 days of real-time call record information.

…Separately, the FBI also has secret contracts with a few carriers, paying each around $1.5 million a year to store telephone records for longer periods and to respond quicker to subpoenas and court orders.

Who knew flouting the Constitution could be so…expensive?

Last August, the AFL-CIO, ACLU and National Immigration Law Center (NILC) teamed together in a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) No-Match policy; a policy that attempts to turn the Social Security Administration into an immigration law enforcement agency. This rule would threaten the jobs of millions of Americans who are lawfully allowed to work in the U.S. We were successful in our effort to stop this rule from taking effect on its original start date, September 4, 2007. In an attempt to weasel its way out of this lawsuit, DHS said it would “revise” the rule to better protect American workers; the new revised rule was just issued last Friday, and what do you know? It was essentially the same bad rule.

Jenny Chang, co-counsel in the case, blogged in The Hill about the new rule, and how it still doesn’t adequately protect American workers:

The reissued rule fails to substantively change the original rule that was blocked last October when a federal court found that it would cause irreparable harm to both innocent American workers and employers. Instead, it unsuccessfully attempts to explain away the inherent problems caused by relying on the error-ridden Social Security Administration (SSA) database to verify legal authorization to work.

…Rather than penalizing American workers for typographical errors in the SSA’s own database, the Administration should work to enforce existing laws protecting all workers against discrimination and exploitation. Enforcing protections for all workers will reduce the incentives for unscrupulous employers to evade the immigration laws.”

The New York Times agreed in an op-ed entitled “A Foolish Immigration Purge,” published today. The Times writes:

Leave it to the Bush administration to throw thousands of law-abiding American workers and companies off a cliff in perilous economic times.

That would be the effect of its decision to press ahead with a bad idea: to force businesses to fire employees whose names don’t match the Social Security database. The purge is part of a campaign - along with scattershot workplace raids and the partial border fence - to make a show of tackling the broken immigration system.

…The Social Security Administration was set up to administer benefits, not to enforce immigration laws. There are many illegal immigrants who use fake IDs, but the sheer abundance of errors - the result of name changes, misspellings and other mix-ups - preclude their use for an immigration crackdown. Native-born workers will pay the price for these mistakes, but the foreign born also will suffer, because they are especially at risk of errors from inconsistent spellings, mistranslations and other language issues.”

You can learn more about this case, AFL-CIO v. Chertoff, at www.aclu.org/nomatch.