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Jameel Jaffer: Hello, and thanks for coming. I'm Jameel Jaffer. I'm the Director for the
ACLU's National Security Project. The documents you're going to hear tonight are all official
government documents, or almost all of them are official government documents. Some of
them were made public through the Freedom of Information Act. Some of them were leaked
to the media, but almost all of them are official government documents, and I think that it's
remarkable how much information has already been released. We've got the interrogation
directives in which Secretary Rumsfeld authorized methods that were once characterized as war
crimes. We have the memo, the presidential directive in which President Bush denied prisoners
the protections of the Geneva Conventions. We've got the legal memos in which the Justice
Department lawyers essentially gutted the Torture Statute and so it's remarkable how
much has been released, but I think it's even more remarkable how little has been done about
the facts that we now know to be true. After the abuses of the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, Congress
convened the Church Committee to look into the roots of the problem, to recommend reforms,
to create a public record. There hasn't been that kind of response this time around. There's
a criminal investigation. The Justice Department initiated a criminal investigation, but the
investigation looks at interrogators who went beyond the limits. It doesn't look at the
senior officials and the lawyers who set the limits in the first place.
Some of you may have seen that a couple weeks ago, the Justice Department's Ethics Office
released a scathing review of the lawyers who wrote those memos. At the same time, it
released a document that essentially overrules the Ethics Office's report and concludes that
the lawyers were guilty of nothing more than poor judgment. I think that you can decide
for yourselves whether poor judgment is a fair characterization of what they did and
that, in a way, is the point of this evening. The point is to allow you to hear the documents
for yourselves and make your own decisions. Look at all the documents that were once secret
and make your own decisions. I wanted to say just one thing about secrecy.
All of this information that was once secret ... the Bush administration fought very hard
to keep this information secret, all of this information about gross human rights abuses
that were perpetrated in the name of national security, and there were many Americans who
fought against that secrecy and many Americans who fought against the policies that were
being kept secret, but I think it's important to acknowledge that we didn't always ask all
the questions that we should have asked. In many instances, we didn't ask and the government
didn't tell, and the consequences that we were kept in the dark by virtue of our own
action or inaction and in a way, secrecy became not a tool that the government used against
the people, but instead a tool that the people used to keep themselves from the information
and maybe to keep themselves from the moral burden of the information.
But we now know all of these facts. We now know what's in these documents and I think
we have a responsibility not just to grapple with the documents, but to grapple with the
moral responsibility for those documents, and that means doing something about what's
in the documents. I wanted to just thank our co-sponsors for this event, PEN American Center
and Georgetown's Human Rights Clinic and Clinic on National Security on the Law. We've worked
with them on other events, with PEN American Center, on other events in the past. They've
been a great partner for us, and it's a real honor to be able to do this event at Georgetown
tonight. Thanks for coming, and we'll turn to the readings.