American Civil Liberties Union

June: best known for school ending, kids’ going to camp, longer days, and increasing temperatures. Also known for being Torture Awareness Month. And, tomorrow, June 26, is International Day in Support of Victims of Torture (as declared by the U.N. in 1997). 

We at the ACLU promote torture awareness all year long, but tomorrow, we’re joining the National Religious Campaign Against Torture, Amnesty International, Witness Against Torture, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and many other groups in a Tweet-in Day Against Torture. We’ll be tweeting @No_More_Torture and using the hashtags #June26, #NoTorture, #StopTorture, #Torture, #Guantanamo, and #NDAA, and we hope you will tweet tomorrow as well.

The DC Circuit Court of Appeals just issued its opinion in the ACLU’s First Amendment lawsuit on behalf of Col. Morris Davis, the former chief prosecutor at Guantánamo. He was fired from his job at the Congressional Research Service (part of the Library of Congress) in 2009 because of op-ed pieces he wrote in The Washington Post and The Wall Street Journal criticizing the Obama administration’s decision to try some Gitmo detainees in federal courts and others in the military commissions system.

This weekend, Bill Moyers’ public television show is devoting a full hour to Reckoning With Torture, the innovative film project by director Doug Liman, the ACLU, and PEN American Center. The movie will tell the story of America’s torture program using the government’s own documents. Here’s a preview of the upcoming Moyers & Company episode: http://billmoyers.com/segment/preview-reckoning-with-torture/

In an email sent to potential supporters a few days before releasing his book on CIA torture, Jose Rodriguez, the former head of the CIA’s Counterterrorism Center and its former Deputy Director of Operations, complained that his book, Hard Measures, would “be attacked from many quarters—mostly by people who will never read it.” 

Having just finished reading Mr. Rodriguez’s book, I am confident that its readers will be critics, too. Hard Measures is a shameless defense of torture, and it is a dishonest one. At its core, the book has two central contradictions.