lawsnotmen.org The Robert Jackson Steering Committee

By Charlotte Dennett
 
 No one ever said the struggle for greater accountability and democracy would be easy, as evidenced by some of the highlights of 2011.
 
In February, The ACLU got hit with two bad decisions on torture. 

On February 14, a federal judge dismissed the ACLU’s  FOIA lawsuit requesting the removal of redactions in the internal investigative report by the Office of Professional Responsibility concerning Bush’s torture lawyers. Said the ACLU, ““the judge found that that Department of Justice can keep those redacted portions secrets, and can even withhold information contained in the OPR report even if it describes illegal activity.” For the full decision, see PDF. 
 
On February 13th, a federal judge dismissed the ACLU’s case against Donald Rumsfeld for the detention and torture of Jose Padilla. As the ACLU blog reports, “Padilla was arrested in March 2002, held without charge for two years in a South Carolina military brig without access to a lawyer, and was tortured… The Bush administration sought to justify his detention and subjecting him to harsh interrogation methods in part by claiming Padilla was plotting with al-Qaeda to detonate a radiological “dirty bomb” in a U.S. city, but no evidence of such a plot has been presented in court.” Noted ACLU’s Ben Wizner, who argued the case, “The court today held that Donald Rumsfeld is above the law and Jose Padilla is beneath it. . But if the law does not protect Jose Padilla, it protects none of us, and the executive branch can simply label citizens enemies of the state and strip them of all rights.”
 
But then came some good news.
 
In August, two federal judges in two different districts allowed lawsuits by American citizens to go forward against Donald Rumsfeld for torture and illegal detention.
 
 Both are groundbreaking cases which put a significant dent in claims of legal immunity by high level federal officials.
 
In September, the Department of Justice informed the Robert Jackson Committee that its own FOIA appeal for removing redactions of draft versions of the OPR report has been turned over to the CIA for a response. (The Jackson committee asked for removal of redactions in all versions of the report, not just the final version which the ACLU requested).
 
In the Fall issue of the Vermont Bar Journal, Jackson Steering committee member Charlotte Dennett chronicled the struggle for accountability in a piece entitled “Closing the Impunity Gap: How Lawyers and Judges Are Holding Higher-Ups Accountable.”
 
 The article, which begins by acknowledging the demands by the Arab Spring and Occupy movements for accountability and equal treatment under the law, ended on a hopeful note. 
 
On New Year's Eve, Barack Obama signed the National Defense Authorization Act in support of putting American citizens in military (or other) detention without charge or trial, as chronicled by Jackson committee chair David Swanson.