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)

02/04/2013
Targeted Killings

The Justice Department’s White Paper on Targeted Killing

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 10:04pm

Michael Isikoff at NBC News has obtained a Justice Department white paper that purports to explain when it would be lawful for the government...

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03/12/2013
U.S. Torture

American Torture and the 'Heroic Imagination'

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU & Larry Siems, The Torture Report at 11:55am

This was originally posted on The Huffington Post.

Click here to read an original op-ed from the TED speaker who inspired this post and watch the TEDTalk below.

Trained in the Geneva Conventions and the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the military interrogators and guards who tortured and dehumanized prisoners in U.S. custody after 9/11 were hardly without ethical bearings. But as Alberto Mora, former chief counsel of the Navy, predicted when he discovered Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had authorized previously banned interrogation techniques,

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06/10/2013
Patriot Act

Checks, Balances, and the National Security Agency

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU & Ben Wizner, Director, ACLU Speech, Privacy & Technology Project at 10:14am

Over the course of three days, the usually invisible National Security Agency has become ostentatiously visible and many Americans...

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03/29/2013
Targeted Killings

What the Government Should Disclose About Its Targeted Killing Program

By Jameel Jaffer, Deputy Legal Director, ACLU at 11:36am

This post originally appeared on Politico.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit recently ruled that the Central Intelligence Agency may no longer refuse to acknowledge something that everyone knows to be true: the agency has "an interest" in the use of drones to carry out targeted killings. The CIA is unaccustomed to courts rejecting its secrecy claims, but in asking the courts to pretend that the agency might have no connection whatsoever to the targeted killing program, the agency dramatically overreached. Unsurprisingly, the appeals court was unwilling to give its "imprimatur to a fiction of deniability that no reasonable person would regard as plausible."

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