A civil rights suit filed against Wal-Mart by undocumented workers was amended Monday to include a charge that the store locked its janitors inside stores during their shifts.

The amendment to the lawsuit comes as a federal grand jury in Pennsylvania weighs evidence to determine whether Wal-Mart will face criminal charges in the use of illegal immigrants to clean its stores.

....INS agents raided Wal-Mart stores across the country on Oct. 23 in a sweep that resulted in the arrest of hundreds of janitors on immigration charges. Among those arrested were the 17 named plaintiffs in the civil suit, including 11 Mexican immigrants who were the original plaintiffs, plus six Eastern Europeans added to the list Monday. The lawsuit seeks class-action status for perhaps thousands of immigrants.

The lawsuit is being brought under the federal Racketeer Influenced Corrupt Organizations Act, charging that Wal-Mart systematically violated workers' rights and tried to shield itself from liability by using independent contractors to employ the immigrants.

Our prior coverage of the Wal-Mart arrests and lawsuit is here, here and here.

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LA Times columnist Steve Lopez writes in a poignant column:

Maria Suarez called me from a jail in San Pedro and said Tuesday she could see harbor boats through the window. After roughly two-thirds of her life in captivity, freedom was close enough to raise her hopes and break her heart at the same time.

Suarez, now 43, legally entered the United States from Mexico at the age of 16, only to be raped and beaten as the teenage sex slave of a man 55 years her elder. She was convicted of killing the monster, despite her claims of innocence, and finally won her parole last month after battling for years.

Now she sits in another prison, awaiting a deportation hearing scheduled for today. Suarez is a permanent legal resident, but not a U.S. citizen, and immigration law says that, with an aggravated felony on her record, she is to be deported.

"Justice," Suarez said, "is so hard to understand."

Cheers for Gov. Olene Walker of Utah, who opted out of the federal government's crime database today after being advised by the ACLU that the database is a threat to privacy.

Gov. Olene Walker promised to set up an oversight group after the ACLU on Wednesday said the program poses a more powerful threat to privacy than its organizers acknowledge. Utah's decision leaves six states still in the program.

Canada has officially called for a full public inquiry in the Maher Arar case.

Justice Dennis O'Connor, who led Ontario's Walkerton tainted water inquiry, will head the Arar inquiry, McLellan announced. It is not clear when hearings will begin or who will be called to testify.

Arar was detained by American agents at an airport in New York in the fall of 2002 on suspicion he had links to al Qaeda. He was deported to Syria and imprisoned for 10 months in Damascus, where he says he was tortured. He was released without explanation this fall. He has consistently denied any links to terrorism and has pressured Ottawa for months to call an inquiry into the affair.

Mr. Arar had this response to the news:

Arar welcomed the announcement as "a great day for Canadian justice.

"It is . . . very important to ensure this inquiry can, indeed, clear my name and answer all of our questions so that we can begin to rebuild our lives," said Arar, who has been on public assistance since the incident and expects the inquiry to address compensation for him and his family.

As always, Damned Foreigner has more. Our coverage of the case can be accessed here.

Why did the U.S. deport Mahar Arar to Syria? Accoring to a new report, it was because he told the FBI he knew two other men under investigation:

The only stated reason the United States deported Maher Arar to Syria is that he admitted he knew two Ontario men who were also under RCMP investigation and later jailed as terrorism suspects in Syria.

According to U.S. documents obtained by The Globe and Mail, an Immigration and Naturalization Service's regional director concluded that Mr. Arar was a member of al-Qaeda because the 33-year-old Ottawa computer engineer admitted to the FBI after his arrest in 2002 that he was acquainted with two men suspected of being terrorists at the time. "I have determined that Arar is a member of the designated foreign terrorist organization known as al-Qaeda," INS Eastern region director J. Scott Blackman wrote in his October, 2002, decision.

Mr. Arar sued the U.S. Government Thursday as planned, alleging it knew he would be tortured if returned to Syria.

For more, see our posts yesterday, here and here.

Los Angeles is the latest city--and the largest one--to reject the Patriot Act:

"This is a huge victory for civil liberties," said Ramona Ripston, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California. "Los Angeles is the largest city to pass a resolution in support of civil liberties and critical of the USA-PATRIOT Act. Angelenos should be proud that their City Council stands on the side of those who believe we can be both safe and free. Today’s resolution sends a clear message to those who assume that Americans will tolerate the erosion of our basic Constitutional rights."

The council voted 9 to 2 to adopt the resolution which seeks to “affirm the rights of all people… living within the City.” The resolution was spearheaded by Councilmember Jan Perry (D-District 9) and Assistant President Pro Tempore Eric Garcetti (D- District 13). The Civil Liberties Defense Coalition, a group of more than 50 local and national organizations, including the ACLU, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee and the National Council of LaRaza, had endorsed the resolution.

We think that L.A. choosing the day after Bush called for extending the Patriot Act to oppose it is a good omen. So far, more than 235 US communities representing over 30 million people have resolved to seek Patriot Act reform.

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Did you know about Matrix, the federally funded crime database that is already in seven states that has a "potent repository of personal information?" It looks a lot like the scrapped Pentagon datamining program.

But newly emerging facts about the program, including documents obtained by the American Civil Liberties Union, indicate it could also be made to sift through vast stores of Americans' personal data some 20 billion records and proactively finger crime and terrorism suspects.

Combining state records with databases owned by Seisint Inc., Matrix details among other things the property, boats and Internet domains people own, their address history, utility connections, bankruptcies, liens and business filings, according to an August report by the Georgia state Office of Homeland Security.

Canadian Maher Arar will file his lawsuit today against Attorney General John Ashcroft. Arar was seized at JFK while changing planes and ordered deported to Syria, where he was imprisoned for a year, during which he says he was tortured.

The suit will be filed in federal court in the Eastern District of New York, where JFK airport is located. The American Centre for Constitutional Rights has said it will oversee the lawsuit.

The Justice Department has previously said it received assurances from Syria that Mr. Arar would not be tortured.

In what the Canadian press is calling tactics resembling a police state, the RCMP, armed with a search warrant, spent 8 hours searching a reporter's home, trying to find the source of leaked information in the Maher Arar case that appeared in one of the reporter's articles on the case:

Police were seeking the source of an alleged information leak stemming from a Nov. 8 story O'Neill wrote on Arar, an Ottawa telecommunications engineer who became entangled in the war against terrorism. Arar, a Canadian citizen who hails from Syria, was deported to the country of his birth by U.S. authorities after being stopped in New York in 2002.

O'Neill's article cited "a security source" and a leaked document offering minute details of what Arar allegedly told Syrian military intelligence officials during his incarceration. Following his release last fall, Arar said he was tortured for months by Syrian authorities who pressed him about any links to the Al Qaeda terrorist network.

O'Neill reported that Arar told the Syrians he attended an Al Qaeda training camp in Afghanistan in 1993. Arar later insisted he only made a bogus confession under torture, and denied any involvement in terrorism. He has also called for a full public inquiry into what role Canadian police and intelligence officials might have played in his deportation. The federal government has so far rejected those calls.

This is for real. We hope the Boston folks fight hard:

Some Bostonians are up in arms over a Homeland Security Department plan to hold foreigners under arrest in a new office building in historic Charlestown, the neighborhood that saw the first major fighting of the American Revolution. The federal government has signed a 10-year lease with developers in the section of Boston that is the site of the Bunker Hill Monument and the home of the USS Constitution and was the starting point for Paul Revere's ride.

"I think not only is there an irony, but there's a tragedy," said Abhijit Das, a 31-year-old lawyer who lives in a condominium near the building. He and his neighbors have raised $22,000 and hired lawyers and media advisers to fight the project. They say developers promised the building would be filled with stores and office space - not holding rooms for people awaiting deportation.

At least there's some strong opposition:

Opponents, including some city officials, have asked why the government decided to use office building that was not designed for high security. Federal officials said it was the only building to put in a bid. Mayor Thomas M. Menino said the Homeland Security facility does not belong in this neighborhood. The Boston Redevelopment Authority said it would violate zoning laws.

Don't miss watching Honor the Memory of Martin Luther King, Jr. - Get Active from BushFlash and United for Peace:

The flash movie produced for this year's MLK Holiday by BushFlash.com features excerpts from Dr. King's 1967 Vietnam War speech, and ends with an appeal to take part in the March 20 Global Day of Protest on the one-year anniversary of the Iraq War

United for Peace and Justice urges you to honor the legacy of Dr. King by taking part in educational events, cultural activities and protests during the MLK Holiday weekend. This can be a critically important time for the antiwar movement to link the struggle against empire abroad with the fight for racial and economic justice at home, to strengthen ties with other movements, and in many cases to build new relationships. Here's some suggestions.

Some quotes from Dr. King:

Peace is not merely a distant goal that we seek, but a means by which we arrive at that goal.

That old law about "an eye for an eye" leaves everybody blind. The time is always right to do the right thing.

Another must-read: Declaration of Independence from the War in Vietnam . It was delivered by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr , April 1967, at Manhattan's Riverside Church.

Here is an extensive list of links as a primer on Dr. King.

The Jan. 26 issue of US News & World Report features John Ashcroft on the cover and contains this 8 page article on him. It's not entirely a puff piece, although plenty of his friends and underlings assert that he has been unfairly demonized. At least it mentions some of the policies Ashcroft has been criticized for:

They [federal judges and civil liberties groups] cite policies like jailing terrorism suspects as "material witnesses" so that they can be interrogated by investigators and prosecutors, even though they have not been charged with any crime. Or the preventive detention of illegal aliens and the 600-odd secret trials of those detainees. Or Ashcroft's legal defense of the administration's detention of thousands of "enemy combatants" at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba--with no prospect of trial for most. Ashcroft also modified existing rules to allow the government to detain illegal aliens even after courts ruled that they should be released--measures that four federal judges have ruled unconstitutional.

Public perceptions aside, there are growing questions about whether Ashcroft's prevention paradigm works. In his new book Enemy Aliens, Georgetown University law Prof. David Cole examines the preventive detentions of roughly 5,000 foreign nationals--Muslim men--after the terrorist attacks. Only three were ultimately charged with terrorism-related crimes. Just one was convicted. At the time, Ashcroft called the detainees "suspected terrorists" and announced the deportation of more than 500 Muslim men as a signal victory in the "war on terror." In fact, the 500 were deported only after the FBI found no terrorist ties. "They were misses," Cole says, "not hits."

There's lots more, go read the whole thing. One of our favorite quotes:

More and more, there's grousing among prosecutors, who say they duck when Ashcroft blows into town to announce a big case because they fear that his polarizing presence could taint the jury pool.

[link via How Appealing]