Blog of Rights
Jameel
Jaffer

Jaffer directed the National Security Project from 2007 – 2010 and is currently the Director of the ACLU's Center for Democracy. He has testified before Congress about issues relating to government surveillance and, since 2004, has served as a human rights monitor for the military commissions at Guantánamo. His book, Administration of Torture (co-authored with Open Society Justice Institute attorney Amrit Singh), was published by Columbia University Press in 2007. Prior to joining the ACLU, he clerked for Amalya L. Kearse, U.S. Court of Appeals for the 2nd Circuit, and Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada. He is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University, and Harvard Law School. (Photo: Redwell Imaging)

03/25/2011
Warrantless Wiretapping

The Surveillance Memos, and a Suggestion for Jack Goldsmith

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 1:55pm

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.

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04/20/2009

Obama Was Right to Release Torture Memos

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 12:16pm

(Originally posted on Index on Censorship’s Free Speech Blog. Index on Censorship is a British organization and magazine that promotes freedom of expression.)

Last week the Obama administration released four legal memos that supplied the basis for the Bush administration’s torture program. The memos, which were disclosed in response to a lawsuit that the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) filed five years ago, include detailed descriptions of the interrogation methods that CIA interrogators were authorized to inflict on prisoners in their custody. Described methods included ‘the facial slap’, ‘the water board’, and perhaps most grotesque, ‘cramped confinement box with insect’.

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10/13/2006

Keep Out: The New Yorker on Ideological Exclusion

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 3:21pm
This week's New Yorker includes a Comment by George Packer about the State Department's refusal to grant a visa to Swiss-Egyptian scholar Tariq Ramadan. Ramadan is a prominent scholar of Islam -- he is currently a Fellow at Oxford University and his last book, "Western Muslims and the Future
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07/21/2009

John Yoo's Dragnet

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 5:22pm
(Cross-posted to CBSNews.com and Daily Kos.) In a recent Wall Street Journal piece, former Justice Depa
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01/14/2007

Opaque Guantánamo

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 6:12pm
In a June 2003 statement President Bush observed, that governments that use torture often seek to “shield their abuses from the eyes of the world by staging elaborate deceptions and denying access to international human rights monitors.”  He was not speaking of his own government, but he might as well have b
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01/14/2007

Report Reveals Wider Reach of Financial Spying

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 5:51pm
In today’s New York Times, Eric Lichtblau and Mark Mazzetti report that the CIA and Pentagon have been using "national security letters" to obtain sensitive financial information about Americans and others living in the United States.  The report raises serious questions about the extent to which the Pentagon and CIA have become
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11/03/2004

Guantánamo: A Legal Black Hole

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 1:00am
The pre-trial hearings in the Hicks case came to an end today, so this may be my last dispatch from Guantánamo. Next week, the commission will hear motions in the case of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a 34-year old Yemeni who is accused of having served as a bodyguard and driver to Osama bin Laden. Trial in the Hicks case is scheduled to begin in March.
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11/02/2004

While U.S. Elections Loom, It's Another Day at the Kangaroo Court

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 1:00am
Right now, Guantánamo Naval Base seems very far away from the election going on in the United States. There are restrictions on what members of the military can say in uniform, so there aren't a lot of public conversations about politics. I haven't seen any political posters or bumper stickers. And there are no voting booths here, because thos
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10/04/2004

Day One in Sunny Guantánamo

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 12:00am
This is the first of six dispatches I'll write from Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, which I'm visiting as a representative of the ACLU. If you've read the dispatches sent by Anthony Romero a few weeks ago, you already know that the ACLU's main purpose here is to monitor the military commissions th
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