In a history-making lawsuit, the ACLU challenged the CIA on behalf of Khaled El-Masri, an entirely innocent victim of rendition who was released without ever being charged.

Mohamedou Ould Slahi (sometimes spelled “Salahi”) is a Mauritanian national who was illegally detained by the U.S. for more than 14 years. On October 17, 2016, Mr. Slahi was released and transferred back to Mauritania, where he was reunited with his family. Mr. Slahi was arrested in Mauritania in November 2001 on suspicion of ties to al-Qaeda. He was then illegally rendered by the U.S. government to Jordan, where he was detained, interrogated and abused for eight months. He was subsequently rendered to U.S. custody in Bagram, Afghanistan and finally to Guantánamo, where he was held from August 2002 until his release.

The ACLU filed a lawsuit in November 2009 on behalf of Amir Meshal against four FBI agents for their direct, personal role in his unlawful detention, torture, and rendition from Kenya to Somalia and Ethiopia over a period of more than four months.

The Fourth Amendment prohibits the arrest of criminal suspects without probable cause to believe they have committed a crime. Yet after 9/11, former Attorney General John Ashcroft and the U.S. Department of Justice implemented a policy of misusing the federal “material witness” statute to detain Muslim men for investigative purposes without probable cause to believe that they’d committed any crime. Pursuant to this policy, our client, Abdullah al-Kidd, a Kansas-born U.S. citizen and former football player at the University of Idaho, was arrested on a material witness warrant in 2003 and imprisoned without charges for 16 days, ostensibly because the government wanted his testimony in someone else’s criminal case. He was never called to testify and never criminally charged.