Today’s Torture and America symposium featured:
- Firedoglake’s Christy Hardin Smith, “Stand For Liberty And The Rule Of Law”
- Crooks & Liars’ Nicole Belle, “What Comes Around Goes Around Again”
- Omega Minor author Paul Verhaeghen, “We Are Not Immune to History. History Is Not Immune to Us.”
- ACLU’s Chris Anders, “The Watchdog Bites at the Torture Administration”
Tomorrow, look for guest bloggers Jeralyn Merritt of Talkleft and Marcy Wheeler of Emptywheel. Also contributing will be Jameel Jaffer, Director of the ACLU’s National Security Project. Jameel, along with ACLU Staff Attorney Amrit Singh, literally “wrote the book” on torture. In Adminstration of Torture, Jameel and Amrit use hundreds of documents released through the ACLU’s Freedom of Information Act request to show how the highest levels of the Bush administration and other top government officials authorized, approved, or turned a blind eye to the torture and harsh interrogation techniques that are being discussed in our torture symposium on the Blog of Rights, on the Hill, and at the DOJ.
Tomorrow, you’ll also find a dispatch from Jamil Dakwar, Director of the ACLU’s Human Rights Program, who’s in Guantánamo Bay right now for the military commissions pre-trial hearing of Ibrahim Ahmed Mahmoud al-Qosi and the arraignment of Afghan national Mohammed Kamin. You won’t find his full, first-person dispatch anywhere else but here, so keep an eye out for it.
