Originally published on the CGS blog on August 15, 2007.
Check out this interview in the Santa Fe Reporter with Jameel Jaffer. Jaffer is a litigator for the American Civil Liberties Union and director of the ACLU’s National Security Program. He gives some informed commentary on the issue of habeas corpus and the secretive nature of many of the Bush administration’s policies. This passage sums up to a degree the veil consuming certain current policy choices, and the implications of this as we try and make sense of this historically:
“Right now, I think that it’s a pretty dire time for civil liberties. It’s difficult to compare historically, in part because at this particular juncture we don’t know that much about the Bush administration’s policies. What we do know is extremely troubling, but so many things are still secret. We don’t know, for example, the full scope of the National Security Agency’s warrantless wiretapping program. We don’t know how many prisoners are held in CIA detention centers around the world. We don’t know how many people have been kidnapped by the CIA and flown to other foreign countries that are known and expected to use torture. To sit down and compare how bad things are now to 1945 or 1955 or something, you’d just have to know more. I don’t think any previous president has openly advocated that the CIA should use torture. In fact, I think it’s unprecedented for the head of state in any Western democracy to come out and say, “I believe that our intelligence services and military need to be allowed to torture prisoners.”
Read the full interview here.
