Jameel Jaffer

Jameel Jaffer is a Canadian human rights and civil liberties attorney and the inaugural director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University, which was created to defend the freedoms of speech and the press in the digital age. The Institute engages in "strategic litigation, research, and public education." Among the Knight Institute's first lawsuits was a successful constitutional challenge to President Trump's practice of blocking critics from his Twitter account.

Jaffer was previously a Deputy Legal Director at the American Civil Liberties Union. In that role, he was particularly notable for the role he played in litigating Freedom of Information Act requests that led to the release of documents concerning the torture of prisoners held at the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and in CIA black sites. Among the documents released were interrogation directives signed by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld; emails written by FBI agents who witnessed the torture of prisoners; autopsy reports relating to prisoners who were killed in U.S. custody; and legal memos in which the Office of Legal Counsel stated that so-called "enhanced interrogation techniques" involving mental and physical torment and coercion that were widely regarded as torture might be legally permissible under an expansive interpretation of presidential authority. The ''New York Times'' billed the lawsuit "one of the most successful in the history of public disclosure." Provided by Wikipedia