American Civil Liberties Union

As I noted in a previous post, the two Bush administration surveillance memos we obtained last Friday are very heavily redacted. They’re interesting nonetheless.

The first memo, written by Office of Legal Counsel lawyer John Yoo in November 2001, contends that the president has authority as Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces to disregard the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), a statute that “purports” (Yoo’s word) to regulate government surveillance. It also contends that Congress doesn’t have the power to regulate the president’s authority to gather intelligence for national security purposes. And it contends that intelligence gathering in support of military operations “does not trigger constitutional rights against illegal searches and seizures.” These are radical and insupportable claims, but they’re consistent with the claims that Yoo made in other OLC memos.

Weeks after 9/11, Alan Dershowitz notoriously proposed that judges be empowered to issue warrants authorizing interrogators to use torture against suspected terrorists. His theory was that government interrogators would torture prisoners whether or not we authorized them to, and that, given this "fact," it would be better to regulate torture than to leave it unregulated. He argued that allowing interrogators to apply for "torture warrants" before using methods that would otherwise be illegal would make the practice of torture more "visible" to the public, allow interrogators to use torture without fear of criminal prosecution, and limit the use of torture to state-sanctioned methods. ("A sterilized needle underneath the nail might be one such approved method," Professor Dershowitz suggested, helpfully.)

(Originally posted on Open Salon.)

Benjamin Franklin famously warned that "they who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety, deserve neither liberty nor safety." But over the last decade, Americans — and others all over the world — have been willing to trade many of their freedoms for the promise of security. John Kampfner's new book, Freedom For Sale: Why the World is Trading Democracy for Security, examines the roots of this trend, and considers what citizens can do to counter it. In the exchange below, Kampfner talks to Jameel Jaffer, the director of the ACLU National Security Project. With the author's permission, some of the questions have been edited for clarity.

(Originally posted on Huffington Post.)

Since 2004, the ACLU and its partners — the Center for Constitutional Rights, Physicians for Human Rights, Veterans for Common Sense, and Veterans for Peace — have been litigating under the Freedom of Information Act for documents concerning the abuse of prisoners held by the Department of Defense and CIA. The litigation has produced thousands of pages of government documents, including the Justice Department torture memos that were released in April, the FBI emails that discussed the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo, and dozens of autopsy reports relating to the deaths of prisoners in the custody of the Defense Department.