A public lecture to mark the 16th anniversary of the opening of Guantanamo Prison.

After 9/11, the United States created a network of secret prisons where it held terrorism suspects for years without charge or access to a court, and subjected them to torture and other mistreatment, in violation of the Constitution and international law.  While the US has renounced several of these practices, Guantanamo, the symbol of US lawlessness remains. The US has also failed to implement any mechanism to ensure accountability for the worst abuses.  The Trump administration, meanwhile, has raised concerns about US backsliding on providing basic due process guarantees to all persons in US custody.  This talk will examine what the US treatment of terrorism suspects reveals about the notion of American exceptionalism.

Jonathan Hafetz is a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union Center for Democracy, and a law professor at Seton Hall University School of Law, where he teaches courses on constitutional law, national security law, and international law.  Professor Hafetz works on issues involving detention, torture, surveillance, racial and religious discrimination, and the intersection of immigration and national security law.  He is the author of the multiple award-winning 2010 book Habeas Corpus after 9/11, the editor of Obama’s Guantanamo: Stories from an Enduring Prison (2016), and the co-editor of The Guantanamo Lawyers: Inside a Prison Outside the Law (2009).  He is at work on another book, Between Justice and Legality: Charting the Future of International Criminal Law, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press.  He has litigated major Guantanamo cases at all levels of the federal court system, and authored or co-authored over 30 amicus curiae briefs for the Supreme Court and US federal appeals courts. Professor Hafetz Hafetz served as a law clerk for the Hon. Sandra L. Lynch of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit and the Hon. Jed S. Rakoff of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. He is a graduate of Amherst College, Oxford University, and Yale Law School.