Salon Radio: ACLU's Caroline Frederickson
The discussion is roughly 25 minutes. It can be heard by clicking PLAY on the recorder below, and a transcript is here.
It is common for people to assert, without citation to any polling data, that Americans don't care about civil liberties protections or that they sanction abridgments of core constitutional liberties if those abridgments can be remotely justified by appeals to greater security. In fact, ample actual polling data has long disproven that common belief, and as Jim White documents today, a poll released this week by the National Constitution Center provides compelling new data that these political values could resonate among large portions of the electorate if a political leader chose to take a strong stand in their defense.
It's certainly true, as Andrew Sullivan disturbingly documents today, that the American public now views matters such as torture the same way that the public in places such as Iran, Egypt and Russia views those issue -- as we have seen many times, that cluster of nations has become America's peer group in so many ways -- but that is due at least as much to the failure of any leadership on these issues as anything else. The ACLU's campaign is designed to inject these vital issues back into our national debates -- the key prerequisite to improving public opinion and, then, changing policy in these areas.
Currently in Glenn Greenwald's Blog
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- Monday, Jul 6, 2009 15:07 EDT
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- Saturday, Jul 4, 2009 12:05 EDT
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- Thursday, Jul 2, 2009 18:03 EDT
- The still-growing NPR "torture" controversy
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- Thursday, Jul 2, 2009 13:03 EDT
