Jameel Jaffer

Who is Jameel Jaffer?

Jameel Jaffer is a human rights and civil liberties attorney who is deputy legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union. He is particularly notable for the role he played in litigating Freedom of Information Act requests that led to the U.S. government's release of over one hundred thousand pages of documents related to the torture of prisoners held by the U.S. at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Among the documents released through that litigation were interrogation directives signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, emails written by FBI agents who witnessed the torture of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, legal memos in which the Office of Legal Counsel stated that U.S. law did not prohibit the President from authorizing torture, and autopsy reports relating to prisoners who were killed in U.S. custody.