On Wednesday pretrial hearings continued in the case of Canadian Omar Khadr. Captured at age 15 in Afghanistan and now held for fully a third of his life in U.S. detention, Khadr is currently scheduled for trial by military commission in July. Unless a plea bargain is reached, Khadr's case will be the first prosecution in U.S. history of a person for war crimes allegedly committed as a child.
Wednesday's hearing included dramatic testimony from a notorious interrogator who befriended Omar Khadr during Khadr's three months of detention at Bagram. The former Army interrogator, , was known to Bagram detainees as "The Monster," but was acquitted of charges of detainee abuse in a 2006 court-martial and honorably discharged from the army. Corsetti in January 2009 of his desire to testify as a witness for the defense about his knowledge of abuse at Bagram, "I firmly believe it was torture and unfortunately I took part in it," adding "I guess this is just me trying to make it a little bit right."
Corsetti told the court Wednesday that he wasn't Khadr's interrogator, but was present for an intelligence interview conducted two days after Khadr's capture, while the 15-year-old Khadr was gravely injured and flat on a stretcher in Bagram's Army field hospital. Frightened, Khadr was hooked up to heart rate or respiration monitors that jumped during questioning, according to Corsetti.
Corsetti said that once Khadr was transferred from the Bagram hospital to the detention facility two weeks later, he felt compassion for Khadr and chatted with him about cars and video games. Corsetti explained:
He was a child. That's it. He was a 15-year-old child who had been blown up, shot, grenaded, and he was in probably one of the worst places on earth. How could you not have compassion for him? He was in the wrong place for a 15-year-old child to be.
He observed that Khadr "went from a smiling young kid to a look of defeat by the time he left" for transfer to Guantánamo.
During Corsetti's testimony, the government military prosecutor, U.S. Marine Maj. Jeff Groharing, made frequent, strenuous objections whenever the defense asked Corsetti about abuse practices at Bagram while Khadr was detained there. In the few instances when the judge overruled the government prosecutor's objections, Corsetti testified about the rampant abuse that was approved for use by interrogators. Corsetti described approved interrogation techniques at Bagram, which included screaming, breaking furniture, shackling detainees in stress positions for hours, and threatening to send detainees to interrogation in Israel or Egypt. He also said that during the period of Khadr's detention at Bagram in 2002, interrogators were under tremendous pressure from the Secretary of Defense's office and other commanders to extract information from detainees. He said, "There was a ton of pressure on us to get information to save lives and generate reports… If there came a time when we were stagnant and not generating 20, 30 reports a week, we would get a call asking what was going on."
Corsetti's was dramatic testimony, but the judge, Col. Patrick Parrish, frequently sustained the government prosecutor's objections, and shut down lines of inquiry about standard operating procedures for interrogators or abuse at Bagram that Corsetti didn't specifically see being used on Khadr.
The question of torture is at the center of these proceedings, but.even with the revelations of the past three days about Khadr's abuse at Bagram, there may have been a lot left unsaid by witnesses. Throughout the hearings of the past week, with few exceptions, the judge refused to allow witnesses to testify about patterns and practices of abuse of other detainees at Bagram — even by Khadr's own interrogators. So although some witnesses who testified at the proceedings had participated in interrogations at Bagram while Khadr was imprisoned there and would have knowledge about , defense lawyers generally couldn't ask about it.
This is extremely problematic, because Khadr's lawyers have faced obstacles to interviewing and compelling testimony from all of Khadr's interrogators at Bagram and Guantánamo. Khadr's lawyers argue that self-incriminating statements he at Bagram and Guantánamo are false confessions and should be excluded from trial because they are . To prove this, they need evidence that corroborates their client's allegations of abuse.
But Khadr's lawyers say they still don't have the names and details of some of Khadr's interrogators six years after Khadr was first charged under the first military commission system. And only seven of the at least 31 interrogators who conducted over 100 hours of interrogation of Khadr at Bagram and Guantánamo will testify in these proceedings. Defense lawyers have argued the military judge should compel some of the remaining interrogators to testify, but the judge has extremely limited ability to punish nonmilitary witnesses for refusing to appear, so we may never hear from some of Khadr's interrogators. This makes it all the more important that Khadr's lawyers be given the opportunity to ask those interrogators who do testify about general interrogation patterns and practices at Bagram at the time.
It is chilling to watch government prosecutors argue that Khadr's coerced statements — and subsequent statements tainted by prior abuse — should be used against him at trial. We believe this is why the military commissions were revived to prosecute cases like Khadr's. It is time for the Obama administration to recognize the folly of prosecuting an abused child soldier before the discredited military commissions.
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Press ReleaseDec 2024
Free Speech
National Security
ACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok BanACLU and Partners Urge Supreme Court to Block TikTok Ban
WASHINGTON — Today, the American Civil Liberties Union, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University filed an amicus brief urging the Supreme Court to block the enforcement of a law that would effectively ban people in America from using TikTok as soon as January 19, 2025. Earlier this month, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit rejected TikTok’s challenge to the law. TikTok has asked the Supreme Court for a temporary injunction to prevent the app from being banned while the court considers whether to take the case, saying that unless the justices intervene, the law will “shutter one of America’s most popular speech platforms the day before a presidential inauguration.” “The Constitution imposes an extraordinarily high bar on this kind of mass censorship,”said Patrick Toomey, deputy director of ACLU’s National Security Project. “The Supreme Court should take up this important case and protect the rights of millions of Americans to freely express themselves and engage with others around the world.” The brief argues that the D.C. Circuit failed to fully address the law’s profound implications for the First Amendment rights of the 170 million Americans who use TikTok. While the lower court’s decision correctly recognized that the statute triggers First Amendment scrutiny, it barely addressed users’ First Amendment interests in speaking, sharing, and receiving information on the platform. The court also perplexingly attempted to cast the government’s ban on TikTok as a vindication of users’ First Amendment rights, which it is not. The rights groups also explain that the law was intended to suppress certain content and viewpoints that many legislators believe could be amplified on TikTok, including the risk of foreign “propaganda.” But under the First Amendment, the government must meet a very high bar to restrict speech based on concerns about its “motivating ideology” or “perspective,” and the government has not come close to meeting that bar here. “The government should not be able to restrict speech, especially to the extent here, based on guessing about the mere possibility of uncertain future harm,” said David Greene, civil liberties director at EFF. “The Supreme Court should put the TikTok ban on hold while it considers the DC Circuit’s erroneous ruling.” Finally, the brief underscores that the government can’t impose this type of sweeping ban unless it’s necessary to prevent extremely serious and imminent harm to national security. But the government has not provided evidence of impending harm, or evidence that banning TikTok is the only available way to address its concerns. As the brief explains, the D.C. Circuit improperly treated the government’s invocation of “national security” as a trump card and failed to hold the government to its burden. “Restricting citizens’ access to foreign media is a practice that has long been associated with repressive regimes, and we should be very wary of letting the practice take root here,” said Jameel Jaffer, executive director at the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University. “It would do lasting damage to the First Amendment and our democracy if the Supreme Court let this ban go into effect even temporarily.” You can find the brief online here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/DocketPDF/24/24A587/335380/20241217144322392_24A587%20TikTok%20v%20Garland%20Amicus%20Brief%20pdfa.pdf -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Religious Liberty
ACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter IslamophobiaACLU Statement on New White House Strategy to Counter Islamophobia
WASHINGTON – The Biden administration today released the first-ever national strategy to counter Islamophobia and related forms of bias and discrimination, including hate against Arab, Sikh, and South Asian Americans. In advance of the strategy, American Civil Liberties Union and its partners had urged the administration to overhaul government programs that reflect anti-Muslim discrimination. In particular, we have called for urgent action to constrain governmental agencies from continuing to exercise their authorities and technology to wrongly surveil and investigate, watchlist, and question and detain Muslims at the border, as well as deny immigration benefits to people from Muslim-majority countries. While the White House raised expectations that many of these issues would be addressed, the final strategy ended up falling far short. The following is a statement from Hina Shamsi, director of the ACLU’s National Security Project: “While this strategy acknowledges discrimination and its harms, it does little to end them and is a squandered opportunity. For decades, American officials have invoked national security to pass laws and implement programs that disproportionately harm Muslims and people perceived to be Muslim. A serious anti-discrimination strategy would concretely address multiple bias-infused government practices that deny our communities equal participation in civic life and our democracy, like federal watchlisting, surveillance, and investigation. We’re profoundly frustrated that the administration didn’t take even the basic, overdue step of recognizing that anti-Muslim discrimination is uniquely normalized and embedded in government policies.” -
VirginiaDec 2024
National Security
Trabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted ManTrabelsi v. Crawford, et al. – Lawsuit Challenging Unlawful Detention and Inhumane Treatment of Acquitted Man
Our client, Nizar Trabelsi, is in the United States against his will. The federal government brought him here from Belgium more than a decade ago and charged him with terrorism-related crimes. At trial, the government’s case failed: a federal jury found Mr. Trabelsi not guilty. But instead of allowing Mr. Trabelsi to return to Belgium after his acquittal, the United States placed him in highly restrictive immigration detention and began an ongoing effort to force him to Tunisia, where he was born and where he will very likely be tortured. Mr. Trabelsi’s detention violates the Constitution, immigration law, and the extradition treaty between the United States and Belgium. Through this lawsuit, he seeks to return to Belgium, and he demands an immediate improvement of his detention conditions. -
Press ReleaseDec 2024
National Security
Immigrants' Rights
Federal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is UnlawfulFederal Judge Rejects Acquitted Man’s Argument That His Immigration Detention Is Unlawful
ALEXANDRIA, Va. — This week, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia ruled that the court does not have jurisdiction to decide whether the government can continue to detain Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national who was brought to the United States against his will for prosecution and was cleared of all charges last year. The ruling means the United States will be able to continue to detain Mr. Trabelsi while it attempts to deport him to Tunisia, where he was born and where, as an immigration judge ruled earlier this year, he will likely face torture. The court also concluded that even if it did have jurisdiction over Mr. Trabelsi’s case, his claims challenging the government’s detention of him would fail. “Reviewing claims that the government is holding someone unlawfully is at the core of the judicial function, and we’re heartbroken for our client that the court got this so wrong,” said Brett Max Kaufman, senior staff attorney with the ACLU’s Center for Democracy. “The government’s arguments in defense of Mr. Trabelsi’s detention makes a hash of the Constitution, immigration laws, and its own extradition treaty.” In 2013, the United States forcibly extradited Mr. Trabelsi from Belgium to face criminal charges in the United States. In July 2023, after almost 10 years of highly restrictive pretrial detention, a federal jury cleared Mr. Trabelsi of all charges. But instead of releasing Mr. Trabelsi or returning him to Belgium, the U.S. transferred him to immigration detention, wrongly treating him as an applicant for admission and placing him in the deportation process. Over the years, the Belgian government has issued multiple formal diplomatic requests asking the U.S. to facilitate his return, but the U.S. has refused to send him back. Mr. Trabelsi filed a lawsuit challenging the government's authority to detain him. He also sought immediate improvements to his detention conditions. Those claims were not part of the court’s ruling today, and will continue to be litigated on a separate track. “Mr. Trabelsi only wants to return to Belgium after being illegally extradited to the United States, held for ten years, and then acquitted by a jury of any crimes,” said Nicole Hallett, clinical professor of law and director of the Immigrants’ Rights Clinic at the University of Chicago Law School. “He cannot be held indefinitely and we will continue to fight to make sure that justice ultimately prevails.” Mr. Trabelsi is represented by the American Civil Liberties Union, the University of Chicago Law School’s Immigrants’ Rights Clinic, the ACLU of Virginia, and Professor Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School. The complaint in Trabelsi v. Crawford was filed against Jeffrey Crawford, warden of the Farmville Detention Center where Mr. Trabelsi is being held; Liana Castano, ICE field office director for the Washington Field Office; Alejandro Mayorkas, secretary of the Department of Homeland Security; and Merrick Garland, U.S. attorney general.