Our Guest Blogger is Billy Corriher, Associate Director of Research for Legal Progress.

House Republicans want the government to use criminal statutes to prosecute reporters who publish sensitive national security information. In a hearing on Wednesday, the leadership of a House Judiciary Sub-Committee said such actions are needed after a series of New York Times stories included information leaked from government sources. In his testimony, Army Col. Ken Allard accused reporter David Sanger of “systematically penetrating the Obama White House as effectively as any foreign agent” and putting Americans at risk by reporting on the government’s cyber-attacks on Iran.

Journalists from the Times have published important stories with information on the assassination of Osama bin Laden and President Obama’s “kill list” of suspected terrorists. The story of the “kill list,” in particular, is vital information for anyone concerned about the government potentially abusing civil liberties in the “War on Terror.” The administration has placed at least one American citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, on the list and killed him in a drone strike. If the Times had not acted, we would know very little about how the “kill list” is composed.

But Republicans charge that publishing leaked national security information is endangering the American public. Rep. Trey Gowdy (R-SC) called for subpoenaing journalists and demanding they expose their sources. “You either answer the question or you’re going to be held in contempt and go to jail, which is what I thought all reporters aspire to do anyway. I thought that was the crown jewel of the reporter’s resume, to actually go to jail protecting a source.”

Another Republican suggested the media’s watchdog role is unnecessary because whistleblower laws allow citizens to report wrongdoing to the government. In other words, we don’t need to know anything about our government’s national security actions, because we can trust the government to police itself.

Some even suggested the Obama administration has leaked information for political gain. The chair of the subcommittee, Rep. Lamar Smith (R-TX), said the administration could be “weakening our national security and endangering American lives.” Like the “Fast and Furious” investigation, this could end up being another Republican witch hunt for information that could embarrass the Obama administration.

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Detainees in U.S. military custody at Guantanamo Bay were regularly interrogated under the influence of antipsychotics and other “mind altering drugs,” according to a declassified Department of Defense (DOD) report obtained by Truthout. The report alleges that prisoners were not only forcibly given mind altering drugs, but were also drugged immediately preceding interrogations.

The DoD probe began several months after a Washington Post report in 2008, in which several Guantanamo inmates claimed that they were forcibly drugged in order to facilitate confessions. Truthout obtained the full report — entitled “Investigation of Allegations of the Use of Mind-Altering Drugs to Facilitate Interrogations of Detainees” — under a Freedom of Information Act request.

Despite the DoD’s failure to substantiate claims that detainees with already deteriorating mental health had been drugged specifically in order to facilitate interrogation, the report confirms that detainees were under the influence of psychoactive medications during investigations.

Truthout explained the significance of the findings in the context of the Washington Post report:

Over the past decade, dozens of current and former detainees and their civilian and military attorneys have alleged in news reports and in court documents that prisoners held by the US government in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan were forcibly injected with unknown medications and pills during or immediately prior to marathon interrogation sessions in an attempt to compel them to confess to terrorist-related crimes of which they were accused.

The inspector general’s investigation was unable to substantiate any of the allegations by current and former detainees that, as a matter of government policy, they were given mind-altering drugs “to facilitate interrogation.”

But the watchdog’s report provides startling new details about the treatment of detainees by US military personnel. For example, the report concludes, “certain detainees, diagnosed as having serious mental health conditions being treated with psychoactive medications on a continuing basis, were interrogated.”

Brandon Neely, a former Guantanamo prison guard, says that “medics never informed the detainees what the medication was…The medics walked around with little white cups that had pills in it a couple of times a day,” and if the prisoners refused to voluntarily take the drugs, they were forcibly administered.

The only drug explicitly named in the report is Haldol, an anti-psychotic sedative used in psychiatric hospitals. According to Wired, Haldol has many side effects, which “include depression, muscle contractions and suicidal behavior. A patient on Haldol can develop long-term movement disorders and life-threatening neurological disorders…Haldol’s main effect, though, is that it makes you really groggy.” The report also confirms that “at least one detainee – convicted ‘dirty bomb’ plotter Jose Padilla – was the subject of a ‘deliberate ruse’ in which his interrogator led him to believe he was given an injection of ‘truth serum.’

The DOD report raises many concerns, including uncertainty regarding both the ethical standards of the treatment of prisoners and the validity of the prisoners’ interrogations. Leonard Rubenstein, a medical ethicist at Johns Hopkins Center for Public health and Human Rights, said that the doctors’ failure to tell their patients what drugs they were being given neglects basic principals of medical ethics, “especially those requiring a doctor to explain his or her recommendation and seek consent for it as an affirmation of the dignity and autonomy of the patient.”

The report also indicates that the testimonies of prisoners during interrogations were assumed to be accurate, despite the debilitating affects of the drugs. Combined with the use of manipulative practices like the truth-serum ruse, the prisoners’ ability to give accurate testimony is gravely called into question.

– Nina Liss-Schultz

The Justice Department filed a lawsuit on Monday against the Harborside Health Center, a medical marijuana dispensary in California, threatening the closure of its Oakland and San Jose facilities. The DOJ has continued to crack down on state-based medical marijuana facilities — particularly in California — despite the fact that support for medical marijuana is at an all-time high.

Harborside Health Center is the largest dispensary in the world. Harborside has more than 100,000 customers, employs more than 100 staff members, and sells $20 million worth of marijuana every year — and paid the state more than $3 million in taxes last year. Harborside’s co-founder told the Los Angeles Times that the DOJ’s crackdown is “incredibly destructive” to the community of Californians who will be forced to turn to the streets to seek marijuana, which is legal for medical purposes under California state law.

Although federal law prohibits medical marijuana, it is currently legal in 17 states and the District of Columbia, with seven additional states poised to legalize medical marijuana by the end of this year. Kris Hermes, the spokesperson for the advocacy group Americans for Safe Access, points out that the DOJ is undermining the marijuana laws in these states by continuing to target facilities like Harborside’s:

HERMES: This is the most obvious and significant step by the federal government in attacking completely law-abiding dispensaries. It becomes more untenable for them to say they are just going after certain facilities and not just undermining the state’s marijuana laws.

Democratic Leader Nacy Pelosi (D-CA), who has criticized the federal crackdown against state-based medical marijuana shops, indicated yesterday that House Democrats may take up federal medical marijuana legislation after the upcoming election. Pelosi said that it is “really important” to make changes to the current federal law against medical marijuana to “prevent the federal government from acting to harm the safe access to medicinal marijuana provided under state law.”

Harborside Health Center plans to fight the DOJ to stay open. In a press release on its website, it maintains that its Oakland property is a “model” medical marijuana facility in compliance with California law and promises to contest the DOJ’s actions in court.

WASHINGTON – Earlier this year, Rep. Gwen Moore (D-WI) spoke emotionally about her experience of being raped as a young woman, to highlight the need for an extensive version of the Violence Against Women Act. Moore, a sponsor of this years’ VAWA, is still hopeful that Democrats and Republicans can overcome their differences and pass a final version of the bill this legislative session.

Since the House and Senate passed different versions of VAWA, members have dragged their feet on reconciling the differences and voting for final passage. Just yesterday, Sen. Pat Leahy called on Congress to pick up the pace.

“Victims should not be forced to wait any longer,” he said.

But Moore is hoping that Congress will act — and soon. “I feel real good about that,” she told ThinkProgress on Wednesday. “How many defections did we have,” she asked, referencing the 23 Republicans who voted against the Republican version of the bill in the House:

There’s a crack on their side that’s significant to the party unity thing. And then their creation of their fake women’s caucus, the young women’s guns or something or another as a response to it. I think that you know this really elucidated, surprisingly, to an extent that the birth control thing wasn’t able to, that there really is some antipathy toward the plight of women. You know, this whole, ‘we’re going to have a neutral Violence Against Women Act’ that’s genderless.’ Come on now, everyone knows who’s getting their butts beat in the house.

The two bills are not irreconcilably different, but the Senate’s version is far more inclusive — it covers undocumented women, Native Americans, and the LGBT community. Should Congress pass the House’s version of the bill, those victims would be left uncovered.

Top Democrats have called the Republicans’ resistance to VAWA a clear political move, and a “directive of John Boehner.” The White House has also threatened to veto a version that does not cover all victims.

Our Guest Blogger is Billy Corriher, Associate Director of Research for Legal Progress.

The state of Louisiana will soon have its first African-American Chief Justice, unless her fellow Justices succeed in keeping Justice Bernette Johnson from taking her post. Johnson has sued her colleagues in federal court to force them to appoint her to the chief justice spot. The NAACP on Wednesday passed a resolution supporting Johnson’s claim, and her supporters have asked the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) to intervene.

Johnson joined the court in 1994, as part of a settlement with DOJ over civil rights violations. DOJ charged that the state’s election system did not give minority voters full representation in judicial elections. To settle the charges, the state added Johnson to the high court as an eighth justice, but since because the state constitution sets the number of justices at seven, she technically remained a member of the state’s appellate court. Johnson was officially elected to the high court in 2000.

In Louisiana, the Justice with the longest tenure on the court automatically becomes chief justice. Johnson served in this role once before, when Chief Justice Catherine Kimball was incapacitated, and none of her colleagues objected. But, as Johnson prepared to permanently take the reins next year following Kimball’s retirement, the other justices suddenly cried foul. They claim that the period in which Johnson was technically an appellate judge does not count, which would mean she is not the longest-serving justice.

In an attempt to resolve the dispute, Kimball outlined a process by which the court would vote on the matter, recusing Johnson and two other justices. Kimball appointed appellate judges to represent the districts covered by the two other justices, but no one to represent Johnson’s district, ensuring that the state’s majority-African-American district would not be part of the decision. The chief justice allegedly left the district out intentionally, saying it had “too big a stake” in the process to be included.

In their letter to DOJ, Thompson’s supporters argue the court’s actions violate the Voting Rights Act. The NAACP’s resolution says the court’s reluctance to seat Thompson represents “an effort to block opportunities which were made available to racial and ethnic minorities by the [1994 settlement].” The state had denied African American citizens representation on the high court until the mid-90’s, and now, the other justices are trying to use a technicality to keep the first African-American chief justice off the bench.

A U.S. citizen is suing the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security after the fingerprint-sharing program Secure Communities incorrectly identified him as an undocumented immigrant. When Chicago resident James Makowski pleaded guilty in December 2010 to a felony charge and sentenced to four months at a drug treatment facility, the controversial program flagged Makowski as an undocumented immigrant, and he spent two months in a maximum-security prison before immigration officials stopped his erroneous deportation order.

Makowski’s lawsuit — the first legal challenge to Secure Communities — “argues that the FBI and Department of Homeland Security violated the Privacy Act of 1974” because the government agencies share fingerprints from people who are suspected of immigration violations:

“The FBI and DHS are consistently and systematically violating the Privacy Act,” said Fleming, a lawyer for the National Immigrant Justice Center, a nonprofit advocacy group in Chicago. “The FBI should not be sharing this data if they have indications that this individual is a U.S. citizen.” [...]

Secure Communities was started by President George W. Bush in 2008, and the FBI has sent more than 16 million fingerprints to the immigration database since then. More than 900,000 were flagged as potential immigration violators, records show.

The other 15 million sets of fingerprints likely belonged to U.S. citizens, the lawsuit alleges, and their transmission violates the Privacy Act.

As the Los Angeles Times reports, only 26 of Illinois’ 102 police jurisdictions participate in Secure Communities, and some departments were concerned that sharing fingerprints with immigration officials would make witnesses less likely to cooperate with police. Some officials are limiting the scope of Secure Communities in their areas. The D.C. city council unanimously approved a bill to reduce the ability to enforce Secure Communities by limiting when D.C. law enforcement must hold individuals at the request of immigration officials, and Chicago’s Mayor Rahm Emanuel (D) announced yesterday that he will propose a similar ordinance.

On Tuesday, Colorado Secretary of State Scott Gessler increased his efforts to purge Colorado’s voter rolls. Gessler sent a letter, backed by Colorado Attorney General John Suthers and elections officials in 11 other states, requesting that Department of Homeland Security help verify the citizenship of 5,000 registered voters, and threatening to sue if they do not.

Instead of learning from Florida’s wildly inaccurate voter purge attempt, which managed to target two World War II veterans and incite lawsuits by the Justice Department and civil rights groups, Colorado appears to be determined to pursue a voter purge policy that could disenfranchise eligible voters.

The letter lists nine secretaries of states and two lieutenant governors (who serve as the top elections officials in their states) who Gessler says “share this approach and expect to request” similar agreements with DHS. They are from Ohio and Iowa — both, like Colorado, battleground states in this fall’s presidential race — as well as Utah, Arizona, New Mexico, Michigan, Kansas, Georgia, Arkansas, Washington, and Alaska. Like Gessler and Suthers, all of them are Republicans.

Opponents of Gessler’s efforts say they amount to voter intimidation and could keep eligible voters — particularly Latinos, who are expected to play a big role in deciding the election in states such as Colorado — from going to the polls. Those voters lean heavily Democratic.

Critics also say trying to compare federal and state databases could lead to errors in matching names and citizenship information — resulting in some voters improperly losing their Constitutional right to cast a ballot — and that the problem is not nearly big or serious enough to make that risk worthwhile.

Indeed, even though voter fraud is less likely to occur than getting hit by lightning, Gessler insists that voter rolls need to be scrubbed of non-citizens. The best evidence of voter fraud that Gessler can point to is non-citizens voluntarily pointing out that they erroneously registered to vote.

Gessler acknowledges he doesn’t have a stack of confirmed cases of voter fraud, but he points to 430 cases where non-citizens self-identified their presence on the voting rolls and asked to be removed.

Letters provided by Gessler’s office and reviewed by 9NEWS show non-citizens apologizing, often in broken English, for mistakenly ending up on the voting rolls when they registered for a driver’s license as a resident alien.

Analysis of efforts aimed at dealing with the non-existent problem of voter fraud, including voter purges, ID requirements, and new registration restrictions, shows that they disenfranchise eligible voters and that they disproportionately affect young, minority, elderly, and low-income voters, as well as on voters with disabilities. Because these voters are more likely to vote democratically, the efforts result in shifting the electorate to the right.

–Alex Brown