The mission-accomplished banner still cannot be raised in the strife for civil liberties in the U.S., said Susan Herman, president of the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), at a lecture yesterday titled “Civil Liberties in the Age of Obama.”

Throughout the last eight years, Herman said, the government has committed multiple violations of civil liberties under the ongoing “War on Terror.” The continuous operations of the Guantánamo Prison, the rendition program and brutal interrogation tactics are, according to Herman, realities that compromise “… our principles, alienate [us] from the rest of the world and discredit our image.” The rendition program, which is the government’s transfer of one person to another country in order to be tortured, has remained out of the eye of Courts because of its inclusion under the executive privilege principle. Fight for your right: President of the ACLU Susan Herman speaks about civil liberties and the Obama administration in the Plant Sciences building yesterday.

It is because of this that Herman, on behalf of the entire ACLU, has presented three main petitions to the Obama administration: the closing of Guantánamo and the cessation of torture tactics and secrecy. “People should be entitled to know what government is doing,” Herman said.

In order to stop these contradictions to our most basic political values, Herman said she believes everyone, and the government in particular, should act following the simple principle of the ‘Golden Rule.’ “There’s something wrong with not treating people equally,” she said. Herman said she hopes that the Obama administration will soon acknowledge the importance of “accountability” and begin fulfilling its promises of abolishing brutal mechanisms for the sake of national security.

However, she emphasized the discouraging fact that Obama is still not committed to the elimination of “preventive detention.”

According to Herman, the morality of the situation the nation is undergoing as result of the war on terrorism is untenable. This, she said, is what “happens when you abandon your principles.”

Herman said, however, that the ACLU’s firm stance in defending human rights, including those of foreigner suspects of terrorist activities, has made her organization highly unpopular. “We are unpopular because of what we are doing right,” Herman said. “We defend people who say unpopular things; those are the ones that need our legal assistance.”

By defending the civil liberties of these civilians, Herman said, “You are not defending terrorism, you are not defending violence, you are [just] defending the ideal of due process.”

Herman emphasized that the laws implemented as result of the War on Terrorism do not only affect foreigners, but that they also have a very direct impact upon all Americans. This, she said, is the theme of the book she is currently working on which will be titled “Ordinary Americans and the War on Terror.”

Herman finalized her lecture by mentioning the long participation of ACLU in Supreme Court cases. According to Herman, the ACLU, whose involvement can be traced back to the historic Scopes Trial of 1925, is the “most frequent litigant in the Supreme Court, except government itself.”

The lecture, part of the Colloquium Series presented by the Cornell University Institute for Public Affairs, was followed a by a question-and-answer session.