After the September 11, 2001 attacks, the United States government responded by commencing immediate rescue operations at the World Trade Center site, grounding civilian aircraft, and beginning a long-term response that included official investigations, legislative changes, military action, and restoration projects.
The USA PATRIOT Act was a landmark Act of the United States Congress, signed into law by President George W. Bush. The formal name of the statute is the Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act of 2001, and the commonly used short name is a contrived acronym that is embedded in the name set forth in the statute.
The Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003 was draft legislation written by United States Department of Justice during the George W. Bush administration, under the tenure of United States Attorney General John Ashcroft. The Center for Public Integrity obtained a copy of the draft marked "confidential" on February 7, 2003, and posted it on its Web site along with commentary. It was sometimes called Patriot II, after the USA PATRIOT Act, which was enacted in 2001. It was never introduced to the United States Congress.
Philip David Zelikow is an American diplomat and international relations scholar.
Waterboarding is a form of torture in which water is poured over a cloth covering the face and breathing passages of an immobilized captive, causing the person to experience the sensation of drowning. In the most common method of waterboarding, the captive's face is covered with cloth or some other thin material and immobilized on their back at an incline of 10 to 20 degrees. Torturers pour water onto the face over the breathing passages, causing an almost immediate gag reflex and creating a drowning sensation for the captive. Normally, water is poured intermittently to prevent death; however, if the water is poured uninterruptedly it will lead to death by asphyxia. Waterboarding can cause extreme pain, damage to lungs, brain damage from oxygen deprivation, other physical injuries including broken bones due to struggling against restraints, and lasting psychological damage. Adverse physical effects can last for months, and psychological effects for years. The term "water board torture" appeared in press reports as early as 1976.
Michael Ratner was an American attorney. For much of his career, he was president of the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR), a non-profit human rights litigation organization based in New York City, and president of the European Center for Constitutional and Human Rights (ECCHR) based in Berlin.
Anthony D. Romero is an American lawyer who serves as the executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He assumed the position in 2001 as the first Latino and openly gay man to do so.
Carl Lotus Becker was an American historian who studied the American Revolution and the Age of Enlightenment in America and Europe.
American Civil Liberties Union v. Department of Defense, No. 1:04-cv-04151, 389 F. Supp. 2d 547, is a case in United States Federal Court, wherein the American Civil Liberties Union sued the Department of Defense and the Central Intelligence Agency under the Freedom of Information Act for the release of still-secret materials —specifically those related to abuse at Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad, Iraq, during the U.S. military Occupation of Iraq. The case was brought in 2004. According to already public reports, the abuse began in mid-2003 and was ended in late 2003. Public news reports of the abuse first appeared in April 2004.
NSA warrantless surveillance — also commonly referred to as "warrantless-wiretapping" or "-wiretaps" — was the surveillance of persons within the United States, including U.S. citizens, during the collection of notionally foreign intelligence by the National Security Agency (NSA) as part of the Terrorist Surveillance Program. In late 2001, the NSA was authorized to monitor, without obtaining a FISA warrant, phone calls, Internet activities, text messages and other forms of communication involving any party believed by the NSA to be outside the U.S., even if the other end of the communication lays within the U.S.
The Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board (PCLOB) is an independent agency within the executive branch of the United States government, established by Congress in 2004 to advise the President and other senior executive branch officials to ensure that concerns with respect to privacy and civil liberties in the United States are appropriately considered in the development and implementation of all laws, regulations, and executive branch policies related to terrorism.
Michael Bernard Mukasey is an American lawyer and jurist who served as the 81st Attorney General of the United States from 2007 to 2009 and as a U.S. district judge of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York from 1987 to 2006.
Secondary Security Screening Selection or Secondary Security Screening Selectee, known by its initials SSSS, is an airport security measure in the United States which selects passengers for additional inspection. People from certain countries are subject to it by default. The passengers may be known as Selectee, Automatic Selectee or the Selectee list. The size and contents of the list fluctuates and is a secret, although the Transportation Security Administration has stated there are tens of thousands of names on it.
The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot is a 2007 non-fiction book by Naomi Wolf, published by Chelsea Green Publishing of White River Junction, Vermont. Wolf argues that events of the early 2000s paralleled steps taken in the early years of the twentieth century's worst dictatorships and called Americans to take action to restore their constitutional values before they suffer the same fate. Wolf describes the ten steps she sees as the process of transition from open societies into closed regimes.
The history of the USA PATRIOT Act involved many parties who opposed and supported the Patriot Act, which was proposed, enacted and signed into law 45 days after the September 11 terrorist attacks in 2001. The legislation, though approved by large majorities in the U.S. Senate and House of Representative, was controversial, and parts of the law were invalidated or modified by successful legal challenges over constitutional infringements to civil liberties. The Act had several sunset provisions, most reauthorized by the USA PATRIOT Improvement and Reauthorization Act of 2005 and the USA PATRIOT Act Additional Reauthorizing Amendments Act. Both reauthorizations incorporated amendments to the original USA PATRIOT Act, and other federal laws.
The Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2008 would have authorized funding levels for the 13 government intelligence agencies and increased oversight for the U.S. intelligence community. The bill would have also applied the standards in the U.S. Army Field Manual to the entire government, effectively barring the CIA and other agencies from using tactics like waterboarding in their interrogations. The bill was sponsored by Rep. Silvestre Reyes.
Torturing Democracy is a 2008 documentary film produced by Washington Media Associates. The film details the use of torture by the Bush administration in the "War on Terror."
Jameel Jaffer is a Canadian human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. The Institute engages in "strategic litigation, research, and public education." Among the Knight Institute's first lawsuits was a successful constitutional challenge to President Trump's practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account.
Unconstitutional: The War on Our Civil Liberties is an American 2004 political documentary about the legal problems with the PATRIOT Act. It posits that the law, hastily passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, is used to justify a variety of abuses of civil rights that are guaranteed by the US Constitution.
Zero Dark Thirty is a 2012 American political action thriller film directed and produced by Kathryn Bigelow, and written and produced by Mark Boal. The film dramatizes the nearly decade-long international manhunt for Osama bin Laden, leader of the terrorist network Al-Qaeda, after the September 11 attacks. This search leads to the discovery of his compound in Pakistan and the U.S. military raid where bin Laden was killed on May 2, 2011.
