American Civil Liberties Union

Originally posted on The Huffington Post.

With controversy still swirling around the film Zero Dark Thirty and its misleading suggestion that torture put the CIA on the trail of Osama bin Laden, it's time to take the tools of filmmaking into our own hands to refocus the discussion on why torture is always wrong.

Many in the intelligence community - including former CIA and FBI agents with firsthand experience with interrogations - have spoken out about the film's inaccuracies, the fact that real intelligence is better produced through humane and lawful interrogations, and the fact that torture almost always leads to false information. But that's a message that is likely lost among most viewers, especially because the film opens with the words, "Based on Firsthand Accounts of Actual Events."

Of the thousands of now public documents related to the Bush administration's experiment with torture, a particularly remarkable one is a Justice Department memo from 30 May 2005 analyzing whether the CIA's "enhanced interrogation techniques" violate the Convention Against Torture.

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.

Today, the ACLU laid out concrete steps the Obama administration should take to live up to the human rights promises it made to the U.N. just over one year ago. The release of our new briefing paper coincides with the administration's announcement today of a newly created interagency process for implementing those commitments. The new process is a step in the right direction, and will establish working groups in areas such as criminal justice, immigration, and national security.