The key is the PATRIOT Act’s extension of “material support for terrorism” to include associational and speech crimes, even where the defendants had no intention of supporting violence. In Humanitarian Law Project v. Holder (2010), the Supreme Court denied a First Amendment defense to the terror prosecution of a charity whose offence entailed funding workshops encouraging non-violence in Turkey (in the same Term that the Supreme Court held that corporations do enjoy a First Amendment right to buy elections).

In other words: Combatant Status Review Tribunals/Administrative Review Boards 2.0: Now With Lawyers. And that means the executive is going to have to come up with another series of rules, from scratch, to govern this review process. The courts have accepted — to the dismay of civil libertarians — wide prerogative for the executive in detention. But they’ve taken a dim view of ad-hoc solutions.

In a country founded on “self evident truths” such as life, liberty, equality, and due process of law, the timeless quote from Ben Franklin speaks to the peril imposed when the founding principles are discarded or compromised …

The ACLU and CCR just had a conference call to talk about their suit challenging the licensing scheme the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Asset Control uses to prevent lawyers from representing those on OFAC’s designated terrorist list. Much of the discussion pertained to whether Anwar al-Awlaki could be legitimately considered an enemy combatant given his alleged incitement of attacks on the US. What’s most interesting is the timing.

The full text of Omar Khadr’s letter to his attorney from Guantanamo, with commentary. “Dennis you always say that I have an obligation to show the world what is going on down here and it seems that we’ve done every thing but the world doesn’t get it….”

Welcome to the lonely battle of fighting for the rule of law, right winger Andrew Napolitano. But the time for the right wing to make these arguments was probably 2004, not 2010.

Obama’s top Terrorism adviser John Brennan recently suggested that there could be “dozens” of Americans who have been targeted for assassination, and Glenn Greenwald appeared on the Dylan Ratigan show today to discuss the implications.

In a ruling that anticipates how the government will ignore torture as it tries alleged detainees in civilian court, Judge Lewis Kaplan rejected Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani’s efforts to get his indictment for contributing to the 1998 embassy bombings dismissed because he was tortured while in US custody.

New rules being developed for the handling of detained suspected terrorists fit well with the overall Obama administration commitment to injustice.