It's always so exciting when I'm enoying Sunday morning coffee and I see a victory for civil liberties (and the ACLU) in a Sunday paper.
In response to a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the ACLU, the US military released the names of 645 detainees at Bagram Air Base, the main detention center in Afghanistan. This step towards transparency, in an area our government has been unbelievably secretive, is important. It is just one step, though. The FOIA lawsuit also sought documents revealing more information about detainees, like how long they've been detained, and the treatment of detainees at the Base. This information was not released with the names.
Melissa Goodman, Staff Attorney with the National Security Project of the ACLU, notes that "... Hundreds of people have languished at Bagram for years in horrid and
abusive conditions, without even being told why they’re detained or
given a fair chance to argue for release. The information the
government continues to withhold, however, is just as vital as the
names of prisoners. Full transparency and accountability about Bagram
requires disclosing how long these people have been imprisoned, where
they are from and whether they were captured far from any battlefield
or in other countries far from Afghanistan."
As seems to be the trend, this victory for civil liberties is tempered with a need for urgent further action. Without the other information requested, lawyers making an effort to represent detainees have no room to move forward. The ACLU will continue to request information about the secretive prison in Afghanistan until we can see clearly that the practices there honor the Constitution and our rights held within it - the rights to know why you're being held and to challenge being held in a court of law.