Today, Alliance for Justice is organizing human rights and social justice supporters from across the country to make phone calls to the Department of Justice and ask for the immediate release of the Justice Department’s report on the role of lawyers in providing legal cover for torture. Join this Day of Action by calling Attorney General Holder today.

Momentum for accountability continues to build. Alliance for Justice’s short film, Tortured Law, has been released online and viewed over 5,450 times on YouTube. The film has also been screened on campuses and at community events across the country.

The legal architecture for torture was originally outlined and sanctioned in 2002 by a series of memos drafted by lawyers in the Department of Justice's Office of Legal Counsel. Were these lawyers simply giving the President their best legal advice? Or was their work part of a larger criminal conspiracy to distort the law and authorize torture?

Alliance for Justice's latest documentary film, Tortured Law is now available online. This short film examines the role lawyers played in authorizing torture under the Bush Administration.

On Friday, seven former CIA Directors sent a letter to President Obama asking him to put a halt to the investigation of detainee torture and abuses in the CIA’s interrogation program. President Obama rightly told CBS “I continue to believe that nobody's above the law. And I want to make sure that, as president of the United States, I'm not asserting in some way that my decisions overrule the decisions of prosecutors who are there to uphold the law.” While President Obama is correct that he should not be ordering the Justice Department around, we wish the Justice Department believed that nobody is above the law and would expand their investigation to include those who ordered, designed, and justified torture rather than only investigating interrogators.

I want to start this, my first post here on Everyday Citizen, by saying thank you to Founder and Editor-In-Chief Pamela Jean for inviting me to contribute to this community.

As founder and president of Alliance for Justice (AFJ), I’ve spent the past 20 years pushing back against efforts by conservatives to stifle progressive nonprofits and stack the federal judiciary with extremists.

Now, we’re on a different playing field – change has come to the White House and Congress. But they must still hear from all of us.

The president and the Congress are obviously confronting a number of critical issues, the economy and health care among them; they also had a Supreme Court confirmation to handle. But, we cannot let judicial nominees fall to the wayside. AFJ has prepared a fact sheet examining the pace of President Obama’s judicial nominations in comparison to President George W. Bush’s at the same time in his presidency. Currently, the disparity between the two is 68% to 38% on court of appeals nominees and 37% to 13% on district court nominees.