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In This Issue:
The fight for Tariq’s life -- and his freedom -- continuesLast week CCR yet again urged the court to release Tariq Ba Odah, filing a reply brief and supplemental expert declarations renewing our argument that Tariq – who has been hunger striking to protest his unjust detention since 2007 and is “on the precipice of death” according to three medical experts – must be released on humanitarian grounds. Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, despite never having been charged with any crime and having been cleared for release more than five years ago. And despite being brutally force fed 2,600 calories a day, he weighs just 74 pounds now. In its opposition to our June motion for Tariq’s release, the Department of Justice, shockingly, trotted out Bush administration arguments about how he was not covered under the Geneva Convention and does not have prisoner-of-war status. Tariq’s case has come to epitomize the incoherence and dysfunction of the Obama administration’s Guantánamo policy and has garnered major media attention as a result. Meanwhile, for CCR client Zaher Hamdoun, who like Tariq has been detained at Guantánamo for over 13 years, it is his soul rather than his body that has been crushed nearly to death by injustice. In a heart-rending letter to his attorney, CCR’s Pardiss Kebriaei, he writes: I have become a body without a soul. I breathe, eat and drink, but I don’t belong to the world of living creatures. I rather belong to another world, a world that is buried in a grave called Guantánamo. Pardiss and Bertha Justice Institute fellow Omar Shakir are in Guantánamo this week to visit Zaher and to prepare for his upcoming Periodic Review Board hearing. In our commitment to do whatever we can to close GITMO, CCR has taken on several cases of prisoners in the “indefinite detention” category who are seeking clearance through the administrative process; Zaher, like Mohammed Kamin, is one of those.
Brief on 9/11 abuses filed... on September 11Back in June, the Second Circuit Court of Appeals handed a stinging rebuke to the federal government and a significant victory to CCR in Turkmen v. Ashcroft. In a case we brought over 13 years ago in the dark days after 9/11, the court reinstated claims against high-level government officials – former Attorney General John Ashcroft, former FBI director Robert Mueller, and former INS Commissioner James Ziglar – for their roles in the post-9/11 immigration detentions, abuse, and religious profiling of Muslim, Arab, and South Asian men. Not surprisingly, the defendants are fighting this ruling. They filed a motion for the Second Circuit to rehear the case en banc, arguing that people should never be able to sue government officials for money damages for setting executive policy – even if that policy is unconstitutional. An en banc rehearing is a relatively rare occurrence, where all the active judges on the court decide the issue (as opposed to a three-judge panel, like the one that issued the decision in June). The court ordered CCR to respond to the en banc request. And in the “you can’t make this up” category, our brief was due last Friday… September 11. 
Social justice and art, brought together by CCR’s Freedom FlicksAt CCR, we believe in the transformative power of art and culture to fuel social justice movements by opening hearts and minds to new possibilities. We believe that stories of struggle and courage, be it in film, journalism, music, or a legal case, have the power to challenge paradigms of oppression and inspire people to seek change. Through CCR's Bertha Justice Institute, we are bringing some of these stories to new audiences every month with Freedom Flicks, a film series designed to engage people across disciplines in the defining stories of political and social unrest that shape our world, past and present. Each month the BJI hosts a free screening of a cutting-edge, socially engaged documentary, harnessing the power of film to educate, activate, and build community. Each screening is followed by a short conversation with a combination of prominent artists, filmmakers, lawyers, and activists – and the audience – where we discuss the film's themes, criticisms, and intersections with CCR’s work. Though the screenings are only in New York City (check the CCR calendar for upcoming dates) we wanted all CCR supporters to know about the Freedom Flicks series. And if you have family or friend in the New York area, please share with them! Check out this blog by CCR’s Chase Quinn on September’s Freedom Flicks, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution.
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