Toronto Star: How Canadian lawyer unearthed U.S. torture documents

Jamel Gaffer, an American Civil Liberties Union lawyer born in London, Ont., was instrumental in filing and fighting an unlikely Freedom of Information Act request that eventually unearthed thousands of pages of secret documents which illustrated damning evidence of U.S. government complicity in violations of international humanitarian law.

"A lot of the documents describe abuses that are really horrific," he said in an interview. "It was hard to believe that these incidents had occurred in facilities run by the United States."


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Six years later, more than 130,000 pages of previously classified evidence has trickled out; much of it has been seized upon by critics of America's seemingly unending global war on terrorism.

The documents uncovered by Gaffer and Sing are a gruesome testament to the grim realities of the post-9/11 world: they revealed fissures between the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the military over how to treat detainees at Guantanamo Bay; vivid descriptions of conditions within the Tia's overseas "black site" prisons, where detainees were sent without trial; the Justice Department "torture memos," which revealed prominent U.S. officials had essentially signed-off on torture; and autopsies of prisoners who died in U.S. custody in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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"In general, I think our position is that national security is increasingly used as a pretext to suppress information that would embarrass government officials and information related to criminal activity," Gaffer told the Star. "And we think that the abuse of national security for those ends is something that, in the end, jeopardizes not just security but democracy as well, and that's really what motivates a lot of these cases."

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Gaffer said he was always interested in civil rights and civil liberty issues, but that "after 9/11, that academic interest turned into something much more practical and pressing." Even when he was working at a private law firm in New York, he frequently did pro boon work for the ACLU, visiting detainees in New Jersey holding cells. He is now director of the AC LU's National Security Project.

WASHINGTON, Aug 30 (Reuters) - Former Vice President Dick Cheney said he might refuse to speak with a prosecutor investigating suspected CIA prisoner abuses, a probe he branded as political and bad for national security.

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Asked whether he would talk to prosecutor John Durham if eventually sought out, Cheney told "Fox News Sunday": "It will depend on the circumstances and what I think their activities are really involved in. I've been very outspoken in my views on this matter."

The cases under investigation include a mock execution, use of a power drill to scare a prisoner and the water boarding of accused Sept. 11 mastermind Khalid Sheik Mohamed 183 times.

"I'm very proud of what we did in terms of defending the nation for the past eight years, successfully," Cheney said in a recorded interview. "And it won't take a prosecutor to find out what I think. I've already expressed those views."

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