A federal lawsuit filed today in Washington, D.C., challenges the Executive Branchs prolonged detention of an American citizen in Iraq without court review. The suit, entitled Munaf v. Harvey, was filed by the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, with co-counsel Burke Pyle LLC and the MacArthur Justice Center at Northwestern University School of Law.

The Brennan Center for Justice and the law firm of Jenner & Block LLP filed a brief yesterday on behalf of former federal judges in Qassim v. Bush. The brief argues that our federal courts have the power to end the four-year-plus detention of two men in the Guantanamo Bay Naval Base who the Government concedes are innocent, but who remain imprisoned. Such an arbitrary exercise of executive authority, contend the former judges, cannot go unchecked by the courts.

Petitioner Shawqi Omar and his wife and son as next friends hereby submit supplemental briefing requested by the Court in support of the request for a Temporary Restraining Order preventing the United States government from transferring Mr. Omar, a United States citizen, to Iraqi authorities.

A wide coalition of leading law professors today urged Congress to reject efforts to strip the federal courts of the ability to hear habeas corpus cases from the detainees at Guantanamo Bay. The letter, signed by more than 350 law professors, came in response to the passage late last week of an amendment to the Defense Appropriations Act by Senator Lindsey Graham. The Graham Amendment apparently seeks to cut off the cases filed by detainees at Guantanamo Bay.