When Ben Wizner joined the American Civil Liberties Union as a staff attorney in 2001, he never thought his main dockets would include representing the victims of domestic surveillance and torture. But since Sept. 11, the Brooklyn resident has been traveling to Guantanamo Bay, representing torture victims and obtaining documents proving the government labeled activist groups as "terrorists." In Tampa as part of a forum addressing the balance between civil liberties and security, Wizner sat down with Creative Loafing to talk about the state of civil liberties post-Sept. 11.
Creative Loafing: From torture to the NSA spying program, I hear the argument that these programs are only being used on terrorists, so U.S. citizens have nothing to worry about. How do you respond to those claims?
Ben Wizner: First of all, we should be very suspicious of their definition of terrorists. I've done a lot of work under the Freedom of Information Act about the information that has been gathered by the FBI and parts of the Pentagon on peaceful protesters under the label of terrorism and counter-terrorism. You've had Food Not Bombs [an organization that feeds vegetarian food to the homeless]; you've had the Thomas Merton Center, which is a left-wing religious group in Pittsburgh; and you've had all kinds of groups like this put in terrorism files, so what does terrorism mean?
But I also turn that around a little bit, because you hear that argument not just from the government but from people who say, 'I'm not a criminal. I'm doing nothing wrong. Therefore, I have nothing to hide. Therefore, I don't care if the government is listening to all conversations.'
But privacy is not about concealing crime. Privacy is a basic human right, and it's part of our dignity as individuals. People do have things to hide — we all do — and there are very mundane examples of that: When you go to the bathroom you close the door; when you talk on your cell phone you look around; when you kiss your girlfriend in a park you don't do it right in front of other people. There are critical elements of our lives that we know are private. I really think people have lost sight of what privacy is.
CL: In your research for the ACLU, have you found other little-known ways the government is tracking citizens?
BW: I had read somewhere that data from the EZ Pass is stored, so that when you drive through tolls people are able to use it to track you. It is being used in divorce cases. People don't even think about that, you know, that their movements are being tracked in so many ways.
CL: Is there anything you do special to avoid surveillance, seeing as you know all of these programs and their possible abuse?
BW: I pay cash at tolls. [Laughs.] I don't know why. It's habit. I certainly buy things with my credit card even though I know that's a way [to track people]. When you get your credit card frozen because you're traveling away from home and the company is suspicious it might have been stolen, you realize that there is a whole network of tracking information out there.
CL: What were some of the most striking aspects of your visits to Guantanamo, on a personal level?
BW: The overwhelming sense that you have when you're in Guantanamo is that you're being lied to all the time. That it is really a propaganda media war room than it is anything else. It's not about justice; it's about projecting an image of justice and changing a narrative of us having swept up a bunch of innocent people there.
CL: What's the most harrowing story you've heard from those held captive there?
BW: The most harrowing stories I've heard have not been from Guantanamo. They have been from CIA secret prisons, and they've been quite harrowing. And many of them are told in our most recent legal complaint.
We filed a lawsuit on behalf of five torture victims against a subsidiary of the Boeing Company, which had been involved in their transport and rendition and knew what was going on and profiting off the program. And some of the accounts that you hear from these people in secret prisons — either in Eastern Europe or Afghanistan or Morocco — are just breathtaking and they're evil.
People being cut with scalpels on intimate parts of their body. People being subjected to total darkness for weeks at a time. Loud music, 24 hours a day being blared into their cells. Being woken up every 30 minutes if they manage to fall asleep. People writing in their own blood on the walls of their cells 'I am innocent,' thinking they were going to die there.
This was not done in the heat of the moment following a terrorist attack, with someone snatched off to prevent the next one. This was systematic. This was top down. These were techniques developed from high-level people within the CIA with input from psychologists that were designed to break people. And they did.
I can't imagine that you could get anything of value from such a person. One of our clients was subjected to so much torture he hadn't seen sunlight for over two years. He confessed to being part of a dirty bomb plot with Jose Padilla — someone who he had never heard of and never met. He wasn't even on the same continent at the same time. There are more stories like that.
CL: What do you think the average citizen can do to stop these abuses?
BW: I think that in the short term we have to make clear to people running for office that we don't just care about pocketbook issues, we don't just care about the war in Iraq but issues that go to the core of who we are as Americans. Like habeas corpus — the idea that if you're being held you can go before a judge to determine if there is ample cause to hold you.
Surveillance, torture — all of these have to be part of political campaigns. They have to be part of the discussion.
Ending these policies is not simply a matter of getting rid of the current Administration. It's making sure the next administration sees these [issues] as high priorities.
This article appears in Sep 12-18, 2007.
