Guantanamo, Habeas Corpus, Torture and Military Contractors: The Roadmap to Accountability in the First 100 Days
From illegal detention policies to outsourcing torture and mercenaries, the Bush administration has worked systematically over the last seven years to violate U.S. and international law. Legal advocates and journalists have uncovered the facts and identified those responsible. So what will accountability look like? What must the courts and the next administration do in its first 100 days to make things right?
Jameel Jaffer is the director of the American Civil Liberties Union’s National Security Project. The project litigates civil liberties and human rights cases relating to detention, torture, surveillance, censorship, and secrecy. Before joining the staff of the ACLU in 2002, Jaffer served as law clerk to Hon. Amalya L. Kearse, United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, and then to Rt. Hon. Beverley McLachlin, Chief Justice of Canada. He is a graduate of Williams College, Cambridge University and Harvard Law School.
Senior editor at Slate. She writes “Supreme Court Dispatches” and has covered the Microsoft trial and other legal issues for Slate. She is also a contributing editor for Newsweek and a guest columnist for The New York Times. Before joining Slate as a free-lancer in 1999, she worked for a family law firm in Reno, Nevada, and clerked for Procter Hug, chief justice of the ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1996. Her work has appeared in The New Republic, Elle, The Ottawa Citizen, and The Washington Post. She is co-author of Me v. Everybody: Absurd Contracts for an Absurd World, a legal humor book. Ms. Lithwick was awarded the Online News Association’s award for online commentary in 2001. She received a B.A degree in English from Yale University in 1990 and a J.D degree from Stanford Law School in 1996.
Jeremy Scahill is a journalist. He primarily covers celebrity gossip, Lindsay Lohan, Mel Gibson, SnOOki et al. Occasionally he writes about mercenaries, the lovely US military adventures across the globe and the politicians that love and fund them. Oh, and he likes turtles and wrote some book about Blackwater (that awesome company President Obama keeps hiring to keep America safe). Favorite beer: Bud Light Lime.
