Unchecked and Unbalanced

Presidential Power in a Time of Terror

April 30, 2007, 12:30pm – 2:00pm

About This Event

Thirty years after the Church Committee unearthed COINTELPRO and other instances of illicit executive behavior at home and overseas, the Bush administration has elevated flaws of Cold War intelligence abuse into first principles of government.

The Bush administration has created a "secret presidency" run with classified presidential decisions and secret laws. A hyperactive Office of Legal Counsel in the Department of Justice has aggressively expanded executive power. It has deployed a vision of unmitigated presidential authority inconsistent with the Constitution and the roots of the nation.

Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror puts today's executive abuses in historical perspective and offers a road map for future accountability. Drawing on Fritz Schwarz's experience with the Church Committee and Aziz Huq's work with the Brennan Center's Project on Liberty and National Security, it argues that restoring the checks and balances of American government will promote American liberty and security. Former Vice President Walter Mondale calls Unchecked and Unbalanced "a masterly account of the roots of contemporary executive overreaching. Schwarz and Huq clarify the stakes in the Bush administration's radical and unprecedented vision of executive power."

Please join the co-authors for an engaging discussion on the history of executive overreaching and the potential for the recently divided executive and congressional branches to restore real oversight and accountability to our government.

Featured Panelists:
Frederick A.O. Schwarz, Co-author, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror
Aziz Huq, Co-author, Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror

Moderated by:
Morton H. Halperin, Senior Fellow and Director of Security and Peace Initiative, Center for American Progress

Location

Center for American Progress
1333 H St. NW, 10th Floor
Washington, DC 20005

Biographies

Frederick A.O. Schwarz is the co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New Press, 2007). In a distinguished legal career spanning four decades, Fritz Schwarz has shown a unique ability to combine the highest level of private practice with a series of critically important public service assignments. In every case, Schwarz has handled these responsibilities with his trademark grace and insight. He has a broad litigation record from Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where he had been a partner since 1969. Schwarz left the firm twice, once to serve as chief counsel to the Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activity (1975-1976), and again to serve as Corporation Counsel under New York City Mayor Edward I. Koch (1982-1986). In 1989, he chaired the commission that revised New York City’s charter. In addition to currently serving as senior counsel at the Brennan Center for Justice, he chairs the New York City Campaign Finance Board, the Board of the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Board of the Vera Institute of Justice.

Schwarz received an A.B. magna cum laude from Harvard University in 1957 and a J.D. magna cum laude from Harvard Law School in 1960, where he was an editor of the Law Review. After a year’s clerkship with Judge J. Lumbard of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, he worked one year for the Nigerian government as Assistant Commissioner for Law Revision under a Ford Foundation grant.

Aziz Huq is the co-author of Unchecked and Unbalanced: Presidential Power in a Time of Terror (New Press, 2007). He directs the liberty and national security project at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, where he conducts litigation and does works on civil liberties in the counterterrorism context. He is also an adjunct professor at NYU School of Law.

Before joining the Brennan Center, he clerked for Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the Supreme Court of the United States, and for Judge Robert D. Sack of the Second Circuit Court of Appeals. His scholarship has appeared in the Columbia Law Review, the Yearbook of Islamic and Middle Eastern Law, the World Policy Journal and Constellations. He has essays forthcoming in the Encyclopedia of Islam in America (Palgrave) and One of the Boys: Women and Torture (Seal Press). He writes for Legal Times, American Prospect, Findlaw, the New York Law Journal, and Himal Southasian; and he has appeared as a commentator on Democracy Now!, NPR’s Talk of the Nation, and many public radio stations. 

Huq is a 2006 Carnegie Scholars Fellow and teaches as an adjunct professor at New York University School of Law in the spring. He also consults as a senior analyst with the International Crisis Group on issues of constitutional and judicial reform in South Asia.

Huq graduated summa cum laude from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1996. In 2001, he graduated summa cum laude from Columbia Law School, where he was awarded the John Ordonneux Prize, given to the student with the highest grade point average in a graduating class. While at the Law School, he was Essay and Review Editor of the Columbia Law Review. Since 1998, Huq was worked on human rights issues overseas, including in Guatemala and Cambodia. In 2002, he joined International Crisis Group on a Post-Graduate Human Rights Fellowship from Columbia Law School, and has since worked as an analyst in Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Nepal studying the development of legal institutions and new constitutions.

Morton H. Halperin is a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress and Director of the Security and Peace Initiative, a joint initiative of American Progress and The Century Foundation. He is also the Executive Director of the Open Society Policy Center and the Director, U.S. Advocacy for the Open Society Institute. Halperin served in the federal government in the Clinton, Nixon and Johnson administrations, most recently from December 1998 to January 2001 as Director of the Policy Planning Staff at the Department of State. In the Clinton administration, he was also Special Assistant to the President and Senior Director for Democracy at the National Security Council, a consultant to the Secretary of Defense and the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, and was nominated by the president for the position of Assistant Secretary of Defense for Democracy and Peacekeeping. In 1969, he was a Senior Staff member of the National Security Council responsible for National Security Planning. From July 1966 to January 1969, he worked in the Department of Defense where he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, responsible for political-military planning and arms control.

Halperin has also been associated with a number of think tanks. He was a Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations from January 2001 to June 2003 and from March 1996 to December 1998. Halperin has been a Senior Vice President of The Century Foundation/Twentieth Century Fund, a Senior Associate of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a Senior Fellow in Foreign Policy Studies of the Brookings Institution. In addition to his involvement in foreign policy issues, Halperin worked for many years for the American Civil Liberties Union. He served as Director of the Center for National Security Studies there from 1975 to 1992, focusing on issues affecting both civil liberties and national security. From 1984 to 1992, he was also the Director of the Washington Office of the ACLU, with responsibility for the ACLU's national legislative program as well as the activities of the ACLU Foundation based in the Washington Office.

Halperin has authored, coauthored and edited more than a dozen books including Strategy and Arms Control (1961), Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy (1974), The Lawless State (1976), Nuclear Fallacy (1987), and Self-Determination in the New World Order (1992). He has also contributed articles to a number of newspapers, magazines, and journals, including the New York Times, Washington Post, The New Republic, Harper's, Foreign Affairs, and Foreign Policy, on subjects including national security and civil liberties, bureaucratic politics, Japan, China, military strategy, and arms control.