American Civil Liberties Union

On Thursday, John Brennan, the White House deputy national security advisor for homeland security and counterterrorism, will come before the Senate to interview for one of the most powerful jobs in the world: director of the Central Intelligence Agency. Brennan's nomination is by no means a fait accompli.

Brennan, who served in the top echelons of the CIA during the key early years of the Bush administration, still has many questions he hasn't answered regarding the agency's role in torture, indefinite detention and kidnapping during his time there. And he has at least as many questions to answer about his role running the killing program in the Obama White House.

Last week, the world celebrated International Human Rights Day, marking the 64th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

After a fruitless five-year battle in U.S. federal courts to hold accountable those who unlawfully detained and tortured her son José Padilla, Estela Lebron today sought to have their claims heard by the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR). You can read today’s filing here.

Padilla is the only American citizen to have been seized on U.S. soil, detained as an enemy combatant, kept in incommunicado military detention, and tortured. Until U.S. courts stop using national security arguments to bar Bush-era torture survivors from seeking remedies for abuses, victims, like Padilla and Lebronwill have to resort to international bodies for any chance at redress.

I’m in Guantánamo today, expecting to argue the ACLU’s constitutional challenge to the censorship of torture in the military commissions this afternoon or tomorrow. 

The Guantánamo military commissions were created in part to hide the government’s illegal torture program while permitting the use of information obtained through torture. Because of improvements in 2009 in the law governing the commissions, it’s harder (though not impossible) for coerced evidence to be used in the proceedings. But the government still wants to hide from the public what it did to prisoners in CIA and military custody.