The ACLU was in court yesterday trying to hold officials accountable for the torture of U.S. citizen Jose Padilla. In 2002 he was taken from a New York jail by the military, declared an "enemy combatant," and secretly transported to a Navy brig in Charleston, South Carolina.
He was imprisoned without charge for nearly four years, subjected to extreme abuse, and unable to communicate with his lawyers or family for two years. The illegal treatment included forcing Padilla into stress positions for hours on end, punching him, depriving him of sleep and threatening him with further torture and death.
In 2007, The Washington Post made an exception to its policy against anonymous op-eds and ran a piece by Nicholas Merrill, who at the time was legally barred from identifying himself as having been served with a National Security Letter under the Patriot Act.
This week marks 10 years since the Patriot Act was signed into law by President George W. Bush. The ACLU is hosting a blog series that will address some of the sweeping changes to surveillance laws over the past decade. To learn more about the Patriot Act, visit www.aclu.org/patriot.
Congress is currently considering new cybersecurity measures, including some proposed by the Obama administration. But the plans threaten to make the same mistakes as the Patriot Act, which has its 10th anniversary this Wednesday.
The debate over the U.S. government's targeted killing of Anwar Al-Awlaki continued this week. ACLU Deputy Legal Director Jameel Jaffer took on former Bush lawyer (and torture memo writer) John Yoo on Southern California Public Radio’s AirTalk (listen here), and also explored the issue on CBC's The Current (listen here).
Yesterday in federal district court in Manhattan, we appeared for the latest round in our long fight for the release of information about the abuse of detainees in U.S. custody in facilities throughout Iraq and Afghanistan. This time, we were arguing against the government's suppression of over 2,000 photographs depicting the abuse of detainees. In the face of the government's claim that it could withhold the photographs from the public without any judicial review, we argued that the core principles of transparency and accountability embodied in the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) required the court to review the government’s decision. Unfortunately, the judge ruled against us.
Since the killing of Osama bin Laden, there has been much debate over whether the torture of detainees in U.S. custody helped American intelligence find the terror leader. It would be hard to find a better authority on where the truth lies than CIA Director Leon Panetta. Now the Washington Post's Greg Sargent has released part of a letter from Panetta to torture opponent Sen. John McCain — and the contents leave little doubt that torture played no role in locating the courier who eventually led to bin Laden. Panetta wrote:
