Alumni Profile - Ben Wizner (88)

Ben Wizner ’88 has spent more time at Guantanamo Bay than the average Brooklyn resident. As staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) for the past 7 years, Ben has focused almost exclusively on national security and human rights cases. A few weeks after Ben took the job at the ACLU, the attacks of September 11th occurred. There were new challenges to confront like discrimination against Arabs, Muslims and South Asians; surveillance of non-violent peace groups; and the torture of prisoners in U.S. custody.

Ben works to protect the principles of individual freedom and respect for others outlined in the Bill of Rights, the same principles that he says were positively promoted on his BYFI summer. After graduating from Harvard in 1994, Ben spent three years working for the Urban Justice Center, a homeless advocacy organization in NYC. He attended NYU Law School and graduated in 2000. After a year of clerking for a Federal judge, Ben joined the ACLU.

A case he technically ‘lost’ is the one he is most proud of bringing. Ben represented Khaled El-Masri, an innocent German citizen who was kidnapped and tortured by the CIA in a case of mistaken identity. The lawsuit against George Tenet and other officials was dismissed, not because the court rejected El-Masri’s claims, but because the CIA successfully argued that any litigation would expose “state secrets” and jeopardize national security. “The El-Masri case helped turn the tide of public opinion against extraordinary rendition and torture,” explained Ben. “Although the lawsuit was dismissed, the CIA’s illegal practices have been curtailed.”

Ben has been to Guantanamo six times to observe military commission proceedings. This summer, Ben was an observer at the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan, the first ‘enemy combatant’ to go to trial since the ‘war on terror’ and the first war crimes tribunal convened in the U.S. since Tokyo and Nuremberg. “It was a remarkable rebuke to the Bush administration that a jury of military officers returned a short sentence after prosecutors asked for life imprisonment” said Wizner.

Ben points out that, “we live in an age of fanaticism – reflected not only in the distorted ideology of terrorists, but in the extreme and unprecedented claims of executive authority that followed the 9/11 attacks.” He follows by saying, “BYFI is committed to tolerance, which is the antithesis of the dehumanization that sets the stage for inhumane treatment.”

Check out a podcast with Ben after the Hamdan sentence was delivered. Ben blogs for the ACLU at blog of rights. The New Yorker has a short peice about Ben’s work with Khaled El-Masri.