A congressional committee hearing is being held today on the Homeland Security Department’s (DHS) monitoring of social media. The meeting, being convened by the House Subcommittee of Counterterrorism and Intelligence, chaired by Rep. Patrick Meehan (R-PA), is being held as a result of documents on DHS monitoring that were exposed through a Freedom of Information Act request by the Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC), a public research center that focuses attention on emerging issues of privacy and other civil liberties issues.

A poll released by the Washington Post and ABC News provided another opportunity to discuss how important civil liberties and national security issues are to liberals. The poll results showed majority support among liberals for President Barack Obama’s handling of “counterterrorism,” including his use of drone strikes and failure to close Guantanamo Bay prison.

The US Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals is set to rehear a civil suit against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld today. The suit, brought by Donald Vance, a US navy veteran and former defense contractor, and Nathan Ertel, also a former defense contractor, alleges Rumsfeld is responsible for “intentional mistreatment” that occurred when they were tortured in an American-run prison in Iraq for nearly one hundred days. It’s one of several cases brought against Rumsfeld, all of which have been dismissed to avoid courts interfering with the “war on terror.”

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.

Soufan, a long-time special agent working with the FBI, worked on some of the more notorious terrorist cases post-9/11, including the interrogation of Mohamed Al-Qahtani and Abu Zubaydah. According to Soufan, he was pulled off these interrogations when the CIA or military officials wanted to use torture on the detainees. In these cases, and it turns out others, Soufan and his colleagues were pulled out of interrogations at the behest of the Bush administration or the CIA.

A US State Embassy cable marked “confidential” and published by WikiLeaks reveals details on the detention of juveniles held in “Site 4″ in a Iraq Interior Ministry (MOI) detention complex. The juveniles allege sexual abuse by Iraqi interrogators, specifically that rapes were being used in the prison to induce confessions. The discovery of widespread abuse and torture, according to the diplomat who wrote the cable, is the worst since the infamous Jadriyah “Bunker” facility was discovered in 2005.

A Frontier Airlines flight from Denver to Detroit was taken to a “remote area of the airport” and searched for explosives. ABC reported “suspicious behavior,” which in fact was two people “making out” in the bathroom. The local ABC affiliate WXYZ in Detroit was more explicit: “The ABC News National Security team is telling Action News that their sources say the flight was disrupted by two people having intimate relations in one of the bathrooms.”

The FBI’s statement on all this covers up the fact that a couple Americans were trying to join the Mile High Club and that is why NORAD ended up scrambling F-16 jets to “shadow the flight until it landed.” The statement claims they were sent “out of an abundance of caution.”

The deluge of 9/11 reflections and editorials on the aftermath has been overwhelming. It is tempting to contribute more commentary on how the US has responded to terrorism and what the government has treated as “terrorism” since the attacks. It would be easy to go through incident by incident and point to atrocity after atrocity, loss of liberty after loss of liberty to show that the US has responded in a way that likely brought joy to Islamic extremists seeking to wage war against America. But, as I sit and think about 9/11, how it defined my teenage years and transformation into the writer I am today, I find it more appropriate reflect through some the music the event has inspired.

Cassandra Vinograd and Bradley Klapper of the Associated Press conducted a partial review of US State Embassy cables released by WikiLeaks focusing on the sources the State Department “categorized as most risky.” The findings in the report cast further doubt on the official party line the government promotes when commenting on anything WikiLeaks and concludes, US examples of threatened sources have been “strictly theoretical.” The review found “several of them” are “comfortable with their names in the open and no one fearing death.”