For nearly 10 years, Ali Soufan helped fight the United States’ secret war on terror, gathering intelligence and interrogating prisoners as an FBI Special Agent. Soufan claims that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s insistence that waterboarding was effective is flat-out wrong.

For nearly 10 years, Ali Soufan helped fight the United States’ secret war on terror, gathering intelligence and interrogating prisoners as an FBI Special Agent. Soufan claims that former Vice President Dick Cheney’s insistence that waterboarding was effective is flat-out wrong.

Soufan’s new book, The Black Banners: The Inside Story of 9/11 and the War Against Al-Qaeda reveals the faulty logic of Cheney and members of the Bush administration who still feel that it was justifiable for the United States to torture.

Ali Soufan talks with ACLU Deputy Legal Director, Jameel Jaffer in our latest episode of ACLU Studio.

Alternative content

Subscribe to our podcast feed in iTunes, or subscribe via RSS.

Learn more about torture: Sign up for breaking news alerts, follow us on Twitter, and like us on Facebook.

(A version of this blog post was originally posted on Huffington Post.)

For Ina Cochran, it all began more than four years ago, when she gave birth to a baby girl at Kentucky's Ephraim McDowell Regional Medical Center. The next day, the hospital tested Ms. Cochran and her baby for illicit drugs. As a result of these tests, Kentucky charged Ms. Cochran with felony child abuse. Essentially, the state decided Ms. Cochran was a criminal because she became and decided to remain pregnant despite struggling with a substance abuse problem.

Four years later, Ms. Cochran is still waiting for the Kentucky courts to decide, once and for all, whether the state wrongfully charged her as a matter of law. As a public health matter, the record is clear: turning pregnant women who suffer from drug addiction into criminals isn't good for women or babies. The Kentucky Supreme Court heard oral argument in the case, Cochran v. Commonwealth, in December; we expect a decision in the coming months. Let's hope the court does the right thing not only for Ms. Cochran and her daughter, but for women throughout the state.

Ms. Cochran never should have been charged in the first place. In 1993, in a similar case, Commonwealth v. Welch (the ACLU represented Ms. Welch in that case), the Kentucky Supreme Court ruled that Kentucky's criminal laws could not be used to punish women who become and choose to remain pregnant despite a substance abuse problem.

Welch is still good law, and as we argue in our friend-of-the-court brief filed last year in support of Ms. Cochran, not only does Welch still hold, but, more fundamentally, using criminal laws to punish pregnant women who are struggling with addiction makes for bad law and even worse public policy.

If a pregnant woman can be charged with a crime for potentially harming her fetus, then literally everything she does or does not do — including choosing to continue her pregnancy to term despite an underlying health condition — could land her in jail. What if a pregnant woman has a glass of wine with dinner now and then, or lives with a smoker; what if she drives over the speed limit, fails to get regular pre-natal care, or works in a coal mine, as many women in Kentucky do? Allowing the government to exercise such unlimited control over women's bodies, and every aspect of their lives, would essentially reduce pregnant women to second-class citizens, denying them the basic constitutional rights enjoyed by the rest of us.

Moreover, from a public health perspective, these prosecutions are simply counterproductive. Fifty-nine organizations and experts, including the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists and the Kentucky Psychiatric Medical Association, joined friend-of-the-court briefs in this case, explaining that punitive approaches to improving fetal health just don't work. Seems obvious, right? By forcing doctors to turn in their own patients, these prosecutions only drive women away from the health care and treatment they need.

Unfortunately, Ms. Cochran's story is not an unusual one. The ACLU has been involved in similar cases across the country for decades. Indeed, for the past three years the ACLU has been following a growing problem in Alabama where more than 20 women have been charged for continuing their pregnancies despite a substance abuse problem. Fortunately, however, most state supreme courts that have looked into this issue have held that no legislature ever wrote the criminal laws with the intention to reach the relationship between a pregnant woman and her fetus, and that if they did it would in all likelihood be unconstitutional.

If, as a society, we are truly interested in supporting healthy moms and babies, we would not be undermining basic constitutional principles in order to throw the pregnant women and mothers who need health care most into jail. Our efforts should be focused on ensuring that pregnant women with underlying health conditions can get the care they need. Hopefully, the Kentucky Supreme Court — as well as prosecutors across the country — will finally agree.

In this video, reporter Hunter Stewart of STV Productions interviewed Alexa about the Cochran case:

You can also listen to a podcast interview of Alexa talking about Cochran v. Commonwealth in this Below the Waist podcast:

Alternative content

Today the ACLU released a new interview with Aleo Seh, a single father who was subjected to five months of mandatory detention before winning his immigration case. Aleo is a longtime green card holder who came to this country as a refugee from the Liberian Civil War when he was 15 years old. In Liberia, Aleo was kidnapped, tortured, and forced to become a child soldier by rebel militias and survived by escaping to a refugee camp in Guinea.

Alternative content

Since his escape, he has has built a life in the United States for himself and his four young U.S. citizen daughters, two of whom he has full custody as a single parent. Nonetheless, the government sought to deport Aleo based on a minor misdemeanor offense for making a false police report and a minor drug paraphernalia offense for both of which he received no jail time. Even though Aleo posed no danger or flight risk, and even though he had a strong claim for permanent relief from removal, the government refused even to consider his release from detention while he fought his case on the grounds that his misdemeanor convictions subjected him to mandatory detention.

Thus, Aleo was forced to choose between abandoning his right to remain in the United States and returning to Liberia or enduring an indeterminate period of imprisonment. Ultimately, through the work of the Pennsylvania Immigration Resource Center, Aleo won permanent relief from removal based on his strong ties to his family and community. The government chose not to appeal and Aleo was able to return to his family. His five months of detention, however, caused tremendous hardship to him and his small children. It also resulted in him losing his job as a machine operator.

Aleo’s interview appears on the ACLU’s new website, No End in Sight, featuring the stories of the many other individuals who have been subjected to arbitrary and prolonged immigration detention, at unimaginable cost to themselves, their families, and their communities. The Obama administration has professed its commitment to “smart enforcement” as it looks toward comprehensive immigration reform, with a priority on violent offenders and people who pose threats to national security. If the government is serious about that commitment, it needs to take a hard look at who it locks up and puts into removal proceedings. Aleo, and the many immigrants like him, simply aren’t priorities for enforcement.