Civil liberties group holds liberals and conservatives to account

Not infrequently I receive correspondence – usually characterized by questionable grammar and spelling – that boldly asserts President Barack Obama is a communist, or a socialist, or a fascist.

It’s not terribly difficult to refute those suggestions, although I seldom bother. This is America, after all, and people are entitled to all sorts of strange beliefs.

But I was reminded on Friday of a good question to pose in opposition: If Obama is so nakedly leftist, how is it that the American Civil Liberties Union is so often at odds with him? And isn’t it odd that many of the areas of disagreement are items left over from the administration of President George W. Bush, which Obama has continued without interruption?

Those were some of the questions raised by a presentation given at Boyd Law School by Susan Herman, president of the ACLU and author of the book, “Taking Liberties: The War on Terror and the Erosion of American Democracy.”

Herman made it clear that while Obama was an ally on some issues, deep divisions remain on others.

For example, although Obama called for closing the detention facility on the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, in the 2008 campaign, and while he signed an executive order to that end, “Camp Justice” remains open. Although many detainees have been released, hundreds more await a trial. (And Congress has blocked holding those trials in the United States.)

For another, torture. Although Obama has signed an executive order that limits interrogations to the standards outlined in the Army field manual, the administration has balked at investigating instances of torture that took place in the past.

“You can’t turn the page until you’ve written the truth on the page,” Herman said in her talk with law school students and professors. “The American people have to come to grips with what was done in our name.”

The ACLU also parts ways with the president on the issue of government surveillance, spying that may be carried out against perfectly innocent people, which court rulings have made extremely difficult to attack.

Ironically, Herman said, the program (which began under former President Bush) has inverted the usual condition of democracy: The government is allowed to know everything about its citizens, but those citizens are not allowed to know key details about the activity of their government.

And then there’s targeted killings by drone strikes, which have risen dramatically under Obama and have included at least two U.S. citizens, Anwar al-Awlaki, who died even after attempts were made to erase his name from a government-sponsored “kill list,” as well as his son, Abdulrahman.

“Americans have constitutional rights that other people don’t have,” Herman said of the al-Awlaki killings.

The ACLU maintains on its website a list of 10 things Obama could be doing to increase civil liberties, including closing Guantanamo Bay, banning surveillance of American citizens, stopping targeted killings, as well as items aimed at domestic and race relations, such as ending racial profiling and disparate sentences for powder and crack cocaine users. It’s a fairly extensive list, and one the administration hasn’t exactly been working hard on.

That’s not to say there hasn’t been progress: The president has wound down the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan; has truncated the use of torture (always an unreliable technique for obtaining information) and begun to end discrimination against gays by ending the military’s Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy and ending the legal defense of the Defense of Marriage Act.

But, as Herman reminded law students Friday, the words of one ACLU founder, Roger Baldwin, still ring true: No civil liberties battle ever remains won. And that’s true even with a Democrat/communist/socialist/fascist in the White House.

Steve Sebelius is a Review-Journal political columnist and author of the blog SlashPolitics.com. Follow him on Twitter (@SteveSebelius) or reach him at (702) 387-5276 or ssebelius@reviewjournal.com.