FAYETTEVILLE : ACLU to ask Obama to close Cuba lockup
Posted on Friday, November 14, 2008
FAYETTEVILLE — While a new presidential administration brings opportunities for rights advocates, expectations should be tempered, the immediate past president of the American Civil Liberties Union said Thursday.
The ACLU and other human rights organizations have asked President-elect Barack Obama to sign executive orders shutting down the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and eliminating the practice of torture.
“Along with other human rights organizations, we have called on this president, on the very first day of the new administration, to do something,” said Nadine Strossen, addressing about 185 people at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville School of Law.
Last month, she stepped down as ACLU president, a position she’d held since 1991.
“So we’re saying, please, on day one, with one stroke of the pen, you can do so much to restore the United States’ moral leadership in human rights and also advance our progress in the war on terror,” said Strossen, the group’s first female president. Every time the United States engages in torture, abuse, “kangaroo courts” and sweeping, “dragnet” surveillance and searches, this moral leadership is further eroded, Strossen said. Even though her talk was titled “A Conversation with Nadine Strossen about Civil Liberties in the Post-Bush Era,” she said it’s important to remember historical events that have affected freedoms both before and after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.
“The ACLU is staunchly nonpartisan,” she said. “We never endorse or oppose any candidate, any official, or any party or any group. “ Our view has been, since we were founded in 1920, that no matter who you are, no matter what you believe, in politics or religion or anything else, you have certain fundamental freedoms.”
The group formed so it could hold government accountable to live up to “these promises that exist on paper, but not in reality,” she said.
The ACLU has even helped religious groups and guns-rights advocates, though their viewpoints are deemed by some as at odds with the ACLU’s goals.
“You would be amazed at the extent to which we come to the aid of ministers who are not allowed to speak on a public sidewalk,” she said in response to an audience member’s question.
In response to another question, she said when she headed ACLU, she tended to deal with people’s actions and not on whether they were laying the groundwork to establish a police state or martial law.
“It is harder to know someone’s intent,” Strossen said, and she often would challenge actions even while giving the benefit of the doubt on motive. Even those who champion civil liberties have a tendency to overreact to events. She suspects the internment of Japanese-Americans in 1942 was based on real fear, but the lack of evidence led to rights violations nonetheless.
“If you look over the course of even the recent past, but certainly going back to when the ACLU was founded … we are infinitely closer to the goals of liberty and justice for all than we were at the beginning of the 20 th century.
“ That said, we’re coming out of a period now where there have been enormous setbacks to individual rights, most sweepingly under the guise of the socalled ‘war on terror,’ which has been used unfortunately as justification for suppressing the free speech and the privacy and the due process and the fundamental equality rights of everybody in this country, including people who aren’t even suspected of any wrongdoing at all, let alone of terrorism.”
There was little resistance to the Bush administrations’ response to 9 / 11, Strossen said.
“The [USAPATRIOT ] Act and … many other laws that repress civil liberties were passed by sweeping bipartisan margins,” she said. “Members of the Congress on both sides of the aisle were complicit in passing laws with minimal debate, with insufficient hearings.”
Strossen said she is unsure what the ACLU’s intentions are concerning Arkansas voters’ passage earlier this month of a ban on unmarried, cohabiting adults adopting or fostering children, but she said, “It certainly is on the ACLU’s radar.”
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