ACLU's Jaffer Responds to Margulies

Peter is mistaken.  We filed that suit because we thought the photos would help the public understand what had happened in the detention centers.  We also thought it would set an intolerable precedent to allow the government to withhold evidence of official misconduct on the grounds that the evidence would be incendiary if released.  (Our opposition to the government’s certiorari petition is here.)  The 2009 legislation, like the executive’s stonewalling of our FOIA request, was meant to deny the public information about government misconduct.  Why would a civil liberties organization have celebrated it? The argument that the ACLU gave the Obama administration “little or no credit” for the release of the torture memos is also mistaken.  Here is what we wrote in our first major review of the administration’s national security policies: "The administration’s release of Justice Department memoranda that purported to             authorize the Bush administration’s torture regime, as well as a CIA report describing how even those lax limits were exceeded, evinced a commitment to transparency of truly historic significance, and the administration deserves high praise for making those critical documents available for public scrutiny." Since the Obama administration released the torture memos in 2009, its commitment to transparency about counterterrorism policy has waned, and accordingly we have been more critical.  But this is called consistency, not “moving the goalposts,” and it is one of the ACLU’s virtues.