1. Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, “Who Is A Terrorist? Government Failure to Define Terrorism Undermines Enforcement, Puts Civil Liberties at Risk”
TRAC’s latest report based on government data provided under FOIA is posted here (and useful commentary from Greg McNeal (VAP, Penn State) is here). My own sense of this one, briefly stated, is that TRAC has again drawn useful attention to the data-collection problems associated with case-coding practices for federal prosecutors and to the larger dilemma of identifying which cases ought to count as “terrorism-related,” but also that TRAC has again overstated the conclusions to be drawn from these problems. In any event, it is worth reading the document, which prints out to about 10 pages.
2. Abdullah v. Bush (D.D.C. Sep. 28, 2009) (GTMO habeas discovery order)
Judge Roberts has granted a discovery request by a GTMO detainee who sought all recordings, original notes, and other memoranda of interrogation sessions that produced statements upon which the government now seeks to rely, rejecting the government’s argument that it was sufficient to produce copies of the statements in question as part of the factual return (and also rejecting the argument that the searches involved in obtaining these other iterations of the statement would be unduly burdensome).