The Administration has reserved some of its most punitive uses of their prosecutorial discretion for government leakers and whistleblowers. Government information gets leaked all the time, often by official sources doing so on behalf of the Administration for political reasons. But no Administration has prosecuted as many government officials for leaking as this one. The chilling effect on whistleblowers damages the rule of law.

Seven hundred and seventy-five people have been imprisoned at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba. One hundred and seventy-one people remain in the American military detention and interrogation facility. On the tenth anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo, here are some stories from detainees who have been freed from Guantanamo.

Edwin Meese III, who served as Attorney General under President Ronald Reagan, has written a defense of the military detention and interrogation facility at Guantanamo. He asserts it continues to serve an “important role in the war against terrorists.” But Gitmo continues to be and be seen by the international community as a blot on the US and legal and moral black hole.

Prisoners at Guantanamo are marking the tenth anniversary of the opening of the prison with a hunger strike and peaceful protests. A counsel to a number of detainees at Guantanamo, Ramzi Kassem, told Democracy Now! and UK-based journalist Andy Worthington that for a three-day period they will engage in “sit-ins” in “communal areas” of the prison.

This is the second part of a 3-part series about the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that began with “Another Assault in the Dead of Night“. As I concluded there:

“[B]elieve the hype: the NDAA’s detention provisions represent a frontal assault on the Bill of Rights. They are noxious now. They will be worse in the future. We will live to regret ever even considering this law, and our leaders will be judged harshly for allowing it to become law without even a single congressional hearing and over the objections of concerned Americans all over the country.”

Unbelievably, in 2011 this question has not yet been settled in the courts of the United States. Human rights attorneys are headed back to court in the coming month to argue that, yes, victims of war crimes and torture by contractors should have a path to justice. Attorneys from my organization, the Center for Constitutional Rights, along with co-counsel, are representing Iraqi civilians who were horribly tortured in Abu Ghraib and other detention centers in Iraq in seeking to hold accountable two private contractors for their violations of international, federal and state law.

What could possibly make a human being torture another human being?

That’s a question that, as a young boy, I recall asking my grandparents—Holocaust survivors—after they described to me in vivid detail the torture they and other members of my extended family were subjected to by the Nazis during World War II.

It’s a question I returned to earlier this year when I had the opportunity to interview a veteran of the US Army Reserves who was torn up about the torture he says he witnessed and participated in against some “war on terror” detainees while serving as a guard at the Guantanamo Bay prison facility. [That guard, Pfc. Albert Melise, has since been barred from reenlistment for speaking to me.]

Cherubic torture fanboy Marc Thiessen does not like people talking smack about his weekend hobby and he uses the valuable space given to him by genocidal maniac enabler Fred Hiatt to continue to argue that even though “waterboarding can cause extreme pain, dry drowning, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, lasting psychological damage and death” it’s totally cool when we do it because …. U-S-A! U-S-A!

Not yet 30, Evan Knappenberger has already lived several lives. His story destroys the U.S. government’s case against whistleblower Bradley Manning, exposes the toxic mix of fraud and incompetence that creates U.S. war policies, and highlights the damage so often done to soldiers who come home without visible injuries.

“Your father is a murderer”

Was he? Or did William Colby act for what he saw as the highest good for America and the the world? Are the two mutually exclusive? Can we ever really know our families? These questions and more are at the center of The Man Nobody Knew, a portrait of William Colby, by his son and Emmy-award winning director, Carl Colby, our guest tonight.