Glenn Greenwald

Monday, Sep 15, 2008 09:40 PDT

Salon Radio: ACLU's Caroline Frederickson

Why aren't constitutional issues receiving any campaign attention and what can be done about it? Plus: updates on the FISA lawsuits. Audio
By Glenn Greenwald

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My guest today is Caroline Frederickson, the ACLU's National Legislative Director. We discuss the virtually complete invisibility of civil liberties and constitutional issues in the presidential campaign, as well as the ACLU's new campaign to change that (which you can join here). Frederickson also provides the latest updates on the ACLU's lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of the recently enacted FISA Amendments Act of 2008.

The discussion is roughly 25 minutes. It can be heard by clicking PLAY on the record below, and a transcript will be posted very shortly.

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 disproved 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 view 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, policy in these areas.

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I was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. I am the author of two New York Times Bestselling books: "How Would a Patriot Act?" (May, 2006), a critique of the Bush administration's use of executive power, and "A Tragic Legacy" (June, 2007), which examines the Bush legacy. My most recent book, "Great American Hypocrites", examines the manipulative electoral tactics used by the GOP and propagated by the establishment press, and was released in April, 2008, by Random House/Crown.

Twitter: @glenngreenwald
E-mail: GGreenwald@salon.com

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