It's the end of 2007 and the Democrats have been in charge of Congress for a year. But on the civil liberties front, you'd hardly know it.

Guantanamo still holds hundreds of prisoners without charge. Americans' electronic communications are still being spied on without warrants. We still have an attorney general who is confused on the 100-year history that equates waterboarding with torture. And the Military Commissions Act — one of the worst legislative abominations since the Alien and Sedition Acts — still remains on the books.

So why am I feeling hopeful?

Maybe it's that there is only a little more than a year left on the tenure of the worst-ever president-vice president combo in American history. Or maybe it's because the electorate appears less susceptible to fear-mongering and more responsibly attuned to prosaic bread-and-butter issues. Or maybe I've been so beaten down by the Bush administration's mass destruction of everything I value in my country — individual liberty, shared prosperity, honesty, integrity and competence in government — that there is nowhere to go but up.

The year 2007 was not that much different from the six that preceded it. But at least with Congress under Democratic control, investigations were launched when the executive branch grabbed or abused power. In the scandal involving the U.S. attorney firings and the destruction of the CIA interrogation videotapes, lawmakers didn't just take it, asking for another, as they had when Republicans were in charge. Remember signing statements? Congress barely flinched.

Still, the Democrats have not done enough to earn them a "Freeby" — an end-of-the-year award I give to those who furthered the cause of civil liberties in a significant or courageous way. Their hands were tied from making legislative changes by a recalcitrant president and the profligate use of the filibuster by Senate Republicans, but congressional Democrats didn't use their public platform to make the case to the American people for the restoration of civil liberties. They could have, but they didn't.

So, instead, the fifth annual Freeby for civil liberties heroism goes to Lt. Col. Stephen Abraham, an Army lawyer who worked as a hearing officer in Guantanamo. Abraham's affidavit on the gaping flaws in the hearings granted detainees to establish their "enemy combatant" status probably convinced the U.S. Supreme Court to hear a momentous case involving the rights of Guantanamo prisoners to habeas corpus.

In a highly unusual move at the end of its last term in June, the high court reversed itself, deciding that it would hear an appeal brought by Guantanamo detainees asserting a right to challenge their indefinite detention. The decision came only seven days after Abraham's affidavit was submitted to the court.

In it, Abraham described how the hearings often accused detainees of being enemy combatants using generalized claims rather than specific allegations, how they gave detainees little real opportunity to rebut the allegations, and how hearing officers were pressured into ruling against the detainees, with do-overs if the government didn't like the result.

Abraham, a man decorated for his counterespionage and counterterrorism work, was the first military insider to come forward and speak out against the hearings. He is a much-deserved Freeby winner.

Runner-up recognition — and I hesitate here — goes to James Comey and John Ashcroft. It turns out that these former top officials in the Justice Department heroically stood in the way of the Bush administration's complete trashing of the Constitution's warrant requirement.

Former Attorney General Ashcroft is not a man who distinguished himself as a champion of constitutional rights. As a U.S. senator, Ashcroft introduced no less than seven amendments to the founding document — including one to make the Constitution easier to amend — and as attorney general, he routinely allowed his conservative religion to trump his duty to uphold individual rights.

But as we learned from former Deputy Attorney General Comey's riveting testimony before Congress in May, Ashcroft, while convalescing in a hospital bed, refused to be pressured by then-White House counsel Alberto Gonzales into authorizing a broad NSA warrantless domestic wiretapping program. Even in his weakened state, Ashcroft refused to go along, affirming Comey's rejection of the program as illegal.

This wall of resistance to parts of the NSA program, and the indication that there would be high-level resignations if President Bush continued it without Justice Department approval, caused Bush to blink.

Ashcroft was a disaster as attorney general. But this was a great act of fealty to the rule of law.

As to 2008, it should hurry up and be over so our country can start healing. Only when Bush is back clearing brush in Crawford, and Dick Cheney, with his Halliburton millions, is away from the levers of power, is a better America remotely possible.

Robyn Blumner writes for Tribune Media Services. Reach her at blumner@sptimes.com.

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