American Civil Liberties Union

The insightful Suzanne Spaulding has a great Op-Ed in the Guardian on Thursday. Spaulding is the former Assistant General Counsel at the CIA and has spent the last 20 years handling national security issues for Congress and the Executive Branch. She argues that in order to effectively fight terrorism, the U.S. will have to abandon the politics of fear that characterized a September 12, 2001 mentality.

“If the detainee dies, you’re doing it wrong.”

Yesterday’s testimony by former DOD lawyer William Haynes and documents released by the Armed Services Committee highlighted how top Department of Defense and CIA officials selected and honed interrogation methods at Guantánamo by studying the torture techniques — sometimes called SERE techniques, for “Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape”) — that were used against U.S. soldiers during the Cold War.

In the midst of the transition hubbub, I want the world to remember that George W. is still very much in office - holding a pen and the power to obliterate civil liberties through the use of twilight provisions.

I realize why Americans are all too eager to awake from the strange nightmare that has been the Bush administration – it has seemed interminable. How far away does 2004 seem right now? Or 2003 for that matter? When I started working at the ACLU, John Ashcroft was still the Attorney General. Had someone told me then that Ashcroft would be redeemed as a defender of (certain) liberties in a melodramatic near-deathbed showdown with nefarious minions of Cheney, I would have laughed. The man who insisted the "Spirit of Justice" wear a robe? Surely you jest.

There is a lot of last-minute scrambling at Guantánamo in the waning days of the Bush administration. Some of it involves 17 prisoners of Uighur descent. The Uighurs are an ethnic Muslim minority who face persecution at home in the Xianjiang province of China. Although the Department of Defense concedes that these 17 men were never enemies of the United States, it continued to imprison them, holding them in cells 22 hours a day without any natural light, while the U.S. looked for somewhere to send them.