Quotes by Jameel Jaffer

...if you take a step back and you look more broadly at what the administration is doing on national security, in particular, what you see far too often is the administration endorsing policies that most of us recognize were extreme under the last administration. And, in fact, in some cases, you see this administration going even further than the last administration did...

some of the places we point to in the report include the endorsement of indefinite detention for some of the people who are now held at Guantánamo, the failure to hold accountable the people who endorsed torture. The last administration built a framework for torture, but this administration... is building a framework for impunity. Allowing those senior officials who endorsed torture to get away with it leaves torture on the table as a permissible policy option, if not for this president, then for the next president...

the decision to endorse torture was a decision that was made at the highest levels of the Bush administration... So the problem we have now is that there is... the Obama administration has initiated a criminal investigation, but the criminal investigation is very narrow. It examines only a handful of incidents in which contractors or CIA interrogators went beyond the authority that was invested in them. And nobody, as far as we know, is looking into the responsibility and the criminal liability of the people who endorsed torture and authorized it. And that seems indefensible to us...

There are still a half a dozen lawsuits out there, including some that the ACLU has brought, that are an effort to create a complete public record of what took place under the last administration. Rather than cooperate with that effort, the administration, the Obama administration, is invoking national security to withhold, for example, allegations from prisoners who were held in CIA black sites about the treatment that they suffered in those black sites. And at this point, there is no legitimate national security justification for withholding that kind of material. So that’s one context.

And the other context is in the context of civil suits brought by survivors of the torture program. What you see is the administration invoking the same state secrets privilege that the last administration invoked to get those cases kicked out of court. So, on every front, you see the Obama administration, rather than providing the kind of accountability that it committed to provide, instead obstructing accountability.

Report available here