Gitmo Prisoners to NY for Trial
Today, Attorney General Eric Holder announced that he plans to move five prisoners from Guantanamo to New York for a civilian trial. Holder says the prisoners masterminded the 9/11 attacks and will now face the death penalty.
Some journalists and commentators are calling this move a wholesale repudiation of the Bush policy. Actually, no. Holder also announced that five other Gitmo prisoners will soon be put on trial before a military commission. Thus, the Bush framework essentially remains in place. The Executive will decide on a case-by-case basis who will be held prisoner (overseas, Gitmo, here in the USA), and who will be tried in civilian court, and who will be tried before a military commission.
By way of background, these prisoner controversies (habeas corpus, waterboarding, trial by commissions) fall into three basic categories: (1) detention/imprisonment; (2) treatment (including interrogation practices); and (3) trial issues. Today’s announcement concerns trials.
If there is to be a trial for persons accused of terrorism, it ought to be in civilian court. Courts martial are for persons actually in the U.S. military (the Fort Hood shooter). Military “commissions” are a hybrid that is nowhere mentioned in the Constitution. It is mistake for Obama to retain the commission system because it is (a) dubious to begin with, and (b) can be whimsical with respect to the people that end up there. Even the former Gitmo prosecutor has voiced his objections to the system!
Bin Laden and his cohorts murdered some 3,000 people on 9/11. It is lamentable that they did not all go down fighting at Tora Bora. But we do have to have policies in place for captures. Boiled down, the U.S. should follow the Geneva Convention for prisoners and, for trials, the procedures set out in the Constitution.
For additional Cato work on this subject, go here and here.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Law and Civil Liberties
Greenwald on the Arrar Ruling
Glenn Greenwald has a good post about Arrar v. Ashcroft, an appeals court ruling that came down the other day. Here’s an excerpt:
Maher Arar is both a Canadian and Syrian citizen of Syrian descent. A telecommunications engineer and graduate of Montreal’s McGill University, he has lived in Canada since he’s 17 years old. In 2002, he was returning home to Canada from vacation when, on a stopover at JFK Airport, he was (a) detained by U.S. officials, (b) accused of being a Terrorist, (c) held for two weeks incommunicado and without access to counsel while he was abusively interrogated, and then (d) was “rendered” – despite his pleas that he would be tortured — to Syria, to be interrogated and tortured. He remained in Syria for the next 10 months under the most brutal and inhumane conditions imaginable, where he was repeatedly tortured. Everyone acknowledges that Arar was never involved with Terrorism and was guilty of nothing. I’ve appended to the end of this post the graphic description from a dissenting judge of what was done to Arar while in American custody and then in Syria.
Read the whole thing. Also, the ACLU has put together a short film about the experiences of some prisoners released from Guantanamo.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; General; Law and Civil Liberties
Preventive Detention: What Would Thomas Jefferson Do?
By all accounts, the White House is going to unveil its proposal for indefinite detention within the next four to eight weeks, and it has begun dispatching proponents of that scheme to lay the rhetorical groundwork. In The Washington Post today, one of the proposal’s architects — Law Professor Robert Chesney, a member of Obama’s Detention Policy Task Force — showcased the trite and manipulative tactics that will be used by advocates of indefinite detention to win support for their radical program [anyone doubting that detention without trials is radical should recall that Obama's own White House counsel Greg Craig told Jane Mayer back in February that it's "hard to imagine Barack Obama as the first President of the United States to introduce a preventive-detention law"; New York Times reporter William Glaberson wrote that "Obama's detention policy "would be a departure from the way this country sees itself"; Sen. Russ Feingold warned that it "violates basic American values," "is likely unconstitutional," and "is a hallmark of abusive systems that we have historically criticized around the world"; The New York Times' Bob Herbert said that "Americans should recoil as one against the idea of preventive detention"; and the Obama policy's most vigorous Congressional proponents are Tom Coburn and Lindsey Graham].
According to Chesney, though, the real extremists are those “on the left” who oppose preventive detention; those who believe that radical liberties such as criminal charges, trials and due process are necessary before the state can put someone in a cage for life; those who agree with Thomas Jefferson that trial by jury is “the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution.” Chesney insists that such people (these “leftists”) are (as always) the mirror images of the extremists on the Right, who “carelessly depict civil-liberties advocates as weak-kneed fools who are putting American lives at risk.” These two equally partisan, radical, extremist sides (i.e., those who believe in due process and trials and those who oppose them) are — sadly — “shrink[ing] the political space within which reasonable, sustainable policies [i.e., Chesney's preventive detention scheme] might be crafted with bipartisan support.”
…This is how political debates are typically carried out in Washington by the Serious Centrists and Responsible Adults. Chesney writes an entire Op-Ed defending the soon-to-be-unveiled preventive detention policy without describing a single aspect of it. To Serious people, the substance of the policy is irrelevant. What matters is that anyone who opposes it is a radical, partisan, shrill extremist. Conversely, as long as the Obama administration stays somewhere in the middle of the two sides — between Tom Coburn and Russ Feingold — then it proves they are being sensible, moderate and responsible, regardless of how extreme and dangerous their proposal actually is, and regardless of how close to Coburn and as far from Feingold as they end up.
No system of justice is perfect. But it’s no improvement to decide that in certain cases we can just do better without one.
All that such a policy does is to move the act of judging back one level — and to locate it at the point where someone, somewhere decides that this particular case doesn’t get judged in the usual way. And so the accused gets “detention” rather than “trial, followed possibly by prison.” But we are still putting a person, and perhaps a dangerous person, in a cage, are we not? The acts of judging and of punishing are still there, and we have hidden them only from ourselves.
It is no improvement to shift the fundamental problem of justice to a different location — out of open courtrooms, out of review, out of established legal tradition — and into a shadowy realm where potentially anything goes. We’re deluding ourselves if we think that it is a step forward or a refinement in the criminal law to have its work done somewhere else, by someone else. The work goes on, and with it all of the associated dangers. Western legal philosophy has spent centuries forcing these dangers out into the open, so that we may confront them directly.
But oddly, Professor Chesney is actually right in one respect:
The problem is twofold. First, the national dialogue has been dominated by a pair of dueling narratives that together reduce the space available for nuanced, practical solutions that may require compromise from both camps. On the one hand, critics of the government’s policies promiscuously invoke the post-Sept. 11 version of the Imperial Presidency narrative, reflexively depicting security-oriented policies in terms of executive branch power aggrandizement (with de rigueur references to former vice president Dick Cheney; his chief of staff, David Addington; or Justice Department attorney John Yoo, if not all three). On the other hand, supporters of the government’s policies just as carelessly depict civil-liberties advocates as weak-kneed fools who are putting American lives at risk.
Second, individual issues in the debate over detention policy are often framed in stark and incompatible terms. Take, for example, the Guantanamo detainees, who are portrayed in some quarters as innocent bystanders to the last man and in other quarters as the “worst of the worst.” While both extremes are misleading, their influence is pervasive.
True enough. A reasonable middle position? Give the detainees trials in which they can individually prove their guilt or innocence. Surely they aren’t all guilty, and I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anyone claim that they are all innocent, either. The truth really is somewhere in between, and it just so happens that we already have a mechanism for sorting out muddled cases like these.
Civil Liberties and President Barack W. Bush?
It’s fair to say that civil liberties and limited government were not high on President George W. Bush’s priorities list. Indeed, they probably weren’t even on the list. Candidate Barack Obama promised “change” when he took office, and change we have gotten. The name of the president is different.
Alas, the policies are much the same. While it is true that President Obama has not made the same claims of unreviewable monarchical power for the chief executive–an important distinction–he has continued to sacrifice civil liberties for dubious security gains.
Civil libertarians recently accused President Obama of acting like former President George W. Bush, citing reports about Mr. Obama’s plans to detain terrorism suspects without trials on domestic soil after he closes the Guantánamo prison.
It was only the latest instance in which critics have argued that Mr. Obama has failed to live up to his campaign pledge “to restore our Constitution and the rule of law” and raised a pointed question: Has he, on issues related to fighting terrorism, turned out to be little different from his predecessor?
The answer depends on what it means to act like Mr. Bush.
As they move toward completing a review of their options for dealing with the detainees, Obama administration officials insist that there is a fundamental difference between Mr. Bush’s approach and theirs. While Mr. Bush claimed to wield sweeping powers as commander in chief that allowed him to bypass legal constraints when fighting terrorism, they say, Mr. Obama respects checks and balances by relying on — and obeying — Congressional statutes.
“While the administration is considering a series of options, a range of options, none relies on legal theories that we have the inherent authority to detain people,” Robert Gibbs, the White House press secretary, said this week in response to questions about the preventive detention report. “And this will not be pursued in that manner.”
But Mr. Obama’s critics say that whether statutory authorization exists for his counterterrorism policies is just a legalistic point. The core problem with Mr. Bush’s approach, they argue, was that it trammeled individual rights. And they say Mr. Obama’s policies have not changed that.
“President Obama may mouth very different rhetoric,” said Anthony D. Romero, executive director of the American Civil Liberties Union. “He may have a more complicated process with members of Congress. But in the end, there is no substantive break from the policies of the Bush administration.”
The primary beneficiaries of constitutional liberties are not terrorist suspects, but the rest of us. The necessary trade-offs are not always easy, but the president and legislators must never forget that it is a free society they are supposed to be defending.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Fixing Detention
The Obama administration performed another Friday afternoon Guantanamo news dump last week, indicating that it will probably maintain administrative military detention of combatants under a forthcoming executive order.
This is unnecessary executive unilateralism. As Benjamin Wittes and Jack Goldsmith point out in today’s Washington Post, this is a debate that ought to be held in Congress.
This would not be a tough push for Obama. The Obama administration already amended its claim of authority in a filing with the District Court for the District of Columbia, the judicial body sorting through the detainees remaining at Gitmo. Convincing Congress to ratify this decision should not be hard; the differences between the Bush administration’s “enemy combatant” criteria and what the Obama administration defines as “substantially supporting” Al Qaeda and the Taliban are minute. As I wrote in a previous post on detention definitions and decisions, the actions proscribed under these two standards and the activities constituting the “direct participation in hostilities” standard used in the case of Salim Hamdan are nearly identical.
The only positive news about the pending announcement is that the creation of a national security court specializing in detention decisions is probably not in the cards. As I have said before, national security court proposals play the propaganda game the way terrorists want to and often revive the prospect of domestic preventive detention of terror suspects, to include American citizens who would otherwise be charged with a substantive crime for domestic acts. The Cato Institute filed an amicus brief opposing this practice in the Padilla case.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Week in Review: Sotomayor, North Korean Nukes and The Fairness Doctrine
Obama Picks Sotomayor for Supreme Court
President Obama chose federal Judge Sonia Sotomayor on Tuesday as his nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, the first Hispanic Latina to serve on the bench.
On Cato’s blog, constitutional law scholar Roger Pilon wrote, “President Obama chose the most radical of all the frequently mentioned candidates before him.”
Cato Supreme Court Review editor and senior fellow Ilya Shapiro weighed in, saying, “In picking Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama has confirmed that identity politics matter to him more than merit. While Judge Sotomayor exemplifies the American Dream, she would not have even been on the short list if she were not Hispanic.”
Shapiro expands his claim that Sotomayor was not chosen based on merit at CNN.com:
In over 10 years on the Second Circuit, she has not issued any important decisions or made a name for herself as a legal scholar or particularly respected jurist. In picking a case to highlight during his introduction of the nominee, President Obama had to go back to her days as a trial judge and a technical ruling that ended the 1994-95 baseball strike.
Pilon led a live-chat on The Politico’s Web site, answering questions from readers about Sotomayor’s record and history.
And at The Wall Street Journal, Cato senior fellow John Hasnas asks whether “compassion and empathy” are really characteristics we want in a judge:
Paraphrasing Bastiat, if the difference between the bad judge and the good judge is that the bad judge focuses on the visible effects of his or her decisions while the good judge takes into account both the effects that can be seen and those that are unseen, then the compassionate, empathetic judge is very likely to be a bad judge. For this reason, let us hope that Judge Sotomayor proves to be a disappointment to her sponsor.
North Korea Tests Nukes
The Washington Post reports, “North Korea reportedly fired two more short-range missiles into waters off its east coast Tuesday, undeterred by the strong international condemnation that followed its detonation of a nuclear device and test-firing of three missiles a day earlier.”
Writing in the National Interest online, Cato scholar Doug Bandow discusses how the United States should react:
Washington has few options. The U.S. military could flatten every building in the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea (DPRK), but even a short war would be a humanitarian catastrophe and likely would wreck Seoul, South Korea’s industrial and political heart. America’s top objective should be to avoid, not trigger, a conflict. Today’s North Korean regime seems bound to disappear eventually. Better to wait it out, if possible.
On Cato’s blog, Bandow expands on his analysis on the best way to handle North Korea:
The U.S. should not reward “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il with a plethora of statements beseeching the regime to cooperate and threatening dire consequences for its bad behavior. Rather, the Obama administration should explain, perhaps through China, that the U.S. is interested in forging a more positive relationship with [the] North, but that no improvement will be possible so long as North Korea acts provocatively. Washington should encourage South Korea and Japan to take a similar stance.
Moreover, the U.S. should step back and suggest that China, Seoul, and Tokyo take the lead in dealing with Pyongyang. North Korea’s activities more threaten its neighbors than America. Even Beijing, the North’s long-time ally, long ago lost patience with Kim’s belligerent behavior and might be willing to support tougher sanctions.
Cato Media Quick Hits
Here are a few highlights of Cato media appearances now up on Cato’s YouTube channel:
- Ted Galen Carpenter discuss the North Korean missile tests on WOR radio.
- On Fox News, Chris Edwards disputes the idea of a federal sales tax.
- Gene Healy comments on the future of Guantanamo detainees on BBC.
- On CNBC, Dan Mitchell explains why California is like the “France of America.”
- In Friday’s Cato Daily Podcast, John Samples discusses how at least three presidents used the Fairness Doctrine to squelch dissenting speech.
Filed under: Cato Publications; Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics; Law and Civil Liberties
Cheney vs. Obama: Tale of the Tape
In case you missed it, President Obama and former Vice President Dick Cheney spoke separately today on terrorism and national security. Like two boxers at a pre-fight press conference, they each touted their strength over their opponent. They espoused deep differences in their views on national counterterrorism strategy.
The Thrilla in Manilla it ain’t. As Gene Healy has pointed out, they agree on a lot more than they admit to. Harvard Law professor and former Bush Office of Legal Counsel head Jack Goldsmith makes the same point at the New Republic. Glenn Greenwald made a similar observation.
However, the areas where they differ are important: torture, closing Guantanamo, criminal prosecution, and messaging. In these key areas, Obama edges out Cheney.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Politicians in Thrall to Terrorism
Doug Bandow aptly finds the debate about Guantanamo detainees surreal. For my part, I see it as an exhibition of politicians put “on tilt” — and unwittingly executing the terrorism strategy.
The leadership of both parties appears not to understand that terrorism is designed to elicit self-injurious overreaction. Fear-mongering is a cog in the overreaction machine.
If they did understand this, they would see it as both a civic duty and politically rewarding leadership to exhibit bravery. Messages of indomitability and calm are the appropriate strategic response to terrorism.
Instead, what we have is a bidding war about who can be the most fearful of Guantanamo detainees — a group that is well under control itself and whose transportation and housing in U.S. prisons is entirely manageable.
Both parties are playing to a “base” of caterwauling Islamophobes while the bulk of the American public looks on bewildered and disappointed. Meanwhile, people around the world see that terrorism is a great way to express opposition to U.S. power and U.S. policies. Oops.
Who’s Scared of the Guantanamo Inmates?
Many debates in Washington seem surreal. One often wonders why anyone considers the issue even to be a matter of controversy.
So it is with the question of closing the prison in Guantanamo Bay. Whatever one thinks about the facility, why are panicked politicians screaming “not in my state/district!”? After all, the president didn’t suggest randomly releasing al-Qaeda operatives in towns across America. He wants to put Guantanamo’s inmates into American prisons.
Notes an incredulous Glenn Greenwald:
we never tire of the specter of the Big, Bad, Villainous, Omnipotent Muslim Terrorist. They’re back, and now they’re going to wreak havoc on the Homeland — devastate our communities — even as they’re imprisoned in super-max prison facilities. How utterly irrational is that fear? For one thing, it’s empirically disproven. Anyone with the most minimal amount of rationality would look at the fact that we have already convicted numerous alleged high-level Al Qaeda Terrorists in our civilian court system (something we’re now being told can’t be done) – including the cast of villains known as the Blind Shiekh a.k.a. Mastermind of the First World Trade Center Attack, the Shoe Bomber, the Dirty Bomber, the American Taliban, the 20th Hijacker, and many more — and are imprisoning them right now in American prisons located in various communities.
Guantanamo may be a handy dumping ground for detainees, but it has become a symbol of everything wrong with U.S. anti-terrorism policy. Closing the facility would help the administration start afresh in dealing with suspected terrorists.
The fact that Republicans are using the issue to win partisan points is to be expected. But the instant, unconditional Democratic surrender surprises even a confirmed cynic like me.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
The Jurisprudence of Detention: Definitions and Cases
Almost a year has passed since the Supreme Court’s decision to extend habeas rights to Guantanamo in Boumediene. Detention policy is currently under review by interagency task forces; it is worth looking at what the developing body of detention rulings say about the future of detention.
Taking prisoners is an unavoidable part of military action. Telling our troops that they can engage identified enemies with lethal force but cannot detain them puts them in an impossible position.
But who can we hold? The Taliban foot soldier is an easy case, but as we move away from the battlefield things get a little fuzzy. A chronological review of the decisions regarding detainee status gives some insight.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Torture? No.
Charles Krauthammer’s recent column tells us that the wisdom of torture is undeniable. According to Krauthammer, there are two situations where torture is justified: the ticking time bomb scenario and when we capture high-ranking terrorists and conclude that giving them the third degree may save lives. Furthermore, it would be “imprudent” for anyone who would not use torture to be named the commander of Central Command (CENTCOM), the military organization in charge of American forces in the Middle East.
The generals who have been in charge of CENTCOM and other national security officials disagree.
Here is a video of General Petraeus, current commander of Central Command, saying that American forces cannot resort to torturing prisoners:
The open letter Petraeus mentions in the video is available here. He admonishes our troops to treat prisoners humanely. “Adherence to our values distinguishes us from our enemies.”
Former CENTCOM commanders Anthony Zinni and Joseph Hoar don’t endorse torture either, evidenced by their open letter (along with dozens of other former general officers) to Congress asking that the CIA abide by the Army interrogation manual.
Hoar and former Commandant of the Marine Corps Charles Krulak wrote separately to denounce torture:
As has happened with every other nation that has tried to engage in a little bit of torture — only for the toughest cases, only when nothing else works — the abuse spread like wildfire, and every captured prisoner became the key to defusing a potential ticking time bomb.
So, once we sign off on the ticking time bomb scenario, the rationalization spreads to whenever we think it may save lives. Sound familiar?
These former commanders are not alone. Colonel Morris Davis, former chief prosecutor at Guantanamo Bay, also had some words on the subject. “We can never retake the moral high ground when we claim the right to do unto others that which we would vehemently condemn if done to us.”
Malcolm Nance, former head of the Navy’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape course (where sailors are trained in resisting interrogation techniques, including waterboarding), seems to know a thing or two about the topic. “I have personally led, witnessed and supervised waterboarding of hundreds of people.” He roundly denounces the use of waterboarding as wrong, ineffective, and counterproductive. Just for the record, water actually enters the lungs of a waterboarding victim. This is not simulated drowning, but controlled drowning. Read the whole thing.
Krauthammer’s column gives the impression that all national security experts support making torture our national policy. Wrong.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Obama’s First 100 Days: Mixed Record on Foreign Policy
Cato foreign policy experts weigh in on President Obama’s record in his first 100 days:
Christopher Preble, Director Foreign Policy Studies:
President Obama deserves credit for making a few modest changes in U.S. foreign and defense policy, and he has signaled a desire to make more fundamental shifts in the future. Some of these may prove helpful, while others are likely to encounter problems. In the end, however, so long as the president is unwilling to revisit some of the core assumptions that have guided U.S grand strategy for nearly two decades — chief among these the conceit that the United States is the world’s indispensable nation, and that we must take the lead in resolving all the world’s problems — then he will be unable to effect the broad changes that are truly needed.
Ted Galen Carpenter, Vice President Defense & Foreign Policy Studies; Christopher Preble:
On the plus side, Obama moved quickly to fulfill his most important foreign policy promise: ending the war in Iraq. That said, the policy that his administration will implement is consistent with the agreement that the outgoing Bush administration negotiated with the Iraqis. Given that the war has undermined U.S. security interests, and our continuing presence there is costly and counterproductive, Obama should have proposed to remove U.S. troops on a faster timetable.
Malou Innocent, Foreign Policy Analyst:
The jury is still out on the other major, ongoing military operation, the war in Afghanistan. That mission is directly related to events in neighboring Pakistan, which is serving — and has served — as a safe haven for Taliban supporters for years. President Obama deserves credit for approaching the problem with both countries together, and also in a regional context, which includes Iran, as well as India. Still unknown is the scope and scale of the U.S. commitment. President Obama has approved a nearly 50 percent increase in the number of U.S. military personnel in Afghanistan. Some have suggested that still more troops are needed, and that these additional troop numbers might prevail for 10-15 years. That would be a mistake. The United States should be looking for ways to increase the capacity of both Afghanistan and Pakistan to confront the extremism in their countries, and should not allow either to grow dependent upon U.S. military and financial support.
Christopher Preble and Ted Galen Carpenter:
On Iran, President Obama made the right decision by agreeing to join the P5 + 1 negotiations, but that is only a first step. The two sides are far apart and President Obama has not signaled his intentions if negotiations fail to produce a definitive breakthrough. Sanctions have had a very uneven track record, and are unlikely to succeed in convincing the Iranians to permanently forego uranium enrichment. If the Iranians are intent upon acquiring nuclear weapons, military action would merely delay Iran ’s program, and would serve in the meantime to rally support for an otherwise unpopular clerical regime, and a manifestly incompetent president.
Doug Bandow, Senior Fellow; Christopher Preble:
A related problem is North Korea’s ongoing nuclear program, an area where the president and his team seem to be grasping for answers. President Obama was mistaken if he believed that that the UN Security Council would render a meaningful response to Pyongyang’s provocative missile launch. It was naive, at best, for him to believe that even a strong rebuke from the UNSC would have altered Kim Jong Il’s behavior. The president must directly engage China, the only country with any significant influence over Kim. The North’s reckless and unpredictable behavior does not serve Beijing’s interests.
Benjamin Friedman, Research Fellow; Christopher Preble:
Obama and Defense Secretary Robert Gates are correct to apply greater scrutiny to bloated Pentagon spending, and to terminating unnecessary weapon systems, but the budget will actually grow slightly, at a time when we should be looking for ways to trim spending. If President Obama decided to avoid Iraq-style occupations, we could cut our ground forces in half. If we stopped planning for near-term war with China or Russia, the Air Force and Navy could be much smaller. Unless we commit to a grand strategy of restraint, and encourage other countries to provide for their own defense, it will be impossible to make the large-scale cuts in military spending that are needed.
Jim Harper, Director of Information Policy Studies; Benjamin Friedman; Christopher Preble:
Two other quick points. President Obama has moved away from some of the overheated rhetoric surrounding counterterrorism and homeland security, including dropping the phrase ‘War on Terror”. This was the right approach. The language surrounding the fight against terrorism is as important — if not more important — than the actual fight itself. Equally useful is his pledge to close the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay and his renunciation of the use of torture and other illegal means in the first against al Qaeda. These steps send an important message to audiences outside of the United States who cooperation is essential.
Ian Vasquez, Director, Center for Global Liberty & Prosperity; Juan Carlos Hidalgo, Project Coordinator for Latin America.
President Obama has signaled a slight change on US-Cuba policy by softening some travel and financial restrictions. It is not as far as we would have liked, but it is a step in the right direction — toward greater engagement, as opposed to more isolation, which was the approach adopted by the Bush administration.
For more research, check out Cato’s foreign policy and national security page.
“Soft” Interrogation Yields the Best Results
My colleague Chris Preble sketches out some of the moral pitfalls that come with authorizing torture in his post. Beyond that, history shows that utilitarian claims that torture has enhanced our safety are also mistaken.
While torture can in some instances provide valid intelligence, it can also produce false information motivated only by a desire to end suffering. Successful interrogators from World War II to the modern day have used rapport and psychology, not brutality, to get inside the heads of their enemies.
The Air Force interrogator who helped bag Abu Musab al Zarqawi, writing under the pseudonym Matthew Alexander, says that the difference between an interrogator and a used car salesman is that the interrogator has to abide by the Geneva Conventions. No torture there, and a good read to boot.
This theme is echoed in Kyndra Rotunda’s book Honor Bound:
I knew one CITF agent and one FBI agent who were Muslims, and both knew how to coax the truth from detainees’ lips. One word captures their effective, secret ingredient to successful interrogations – patience. They each spent hours visiting with the detainee, sharing tea, bringing gifts of dried fruits, and talking endlessly about family, Allah, and the Quran.
This should come as no surprise, since it is a repackaging of the techniques of World War II interrogator Hanns Scharff, “Master Interrogator of the Luftwaffe.” Scharff treated downed Allied pilots humanely, gaining their trust and sympathy while gleaning significant information about Allied air power and advance warning of the D-Day landing. The Allies wanted to prosecute him after the war for interrogating their pilots so effectively, but dropped the charges when they couldn’t substantiate him so much as raising his voice. He came to the United States after the war and did mosaic art work at Walt Disney World.
So color me unsurprised when a former FBI supervisory agent says that we gained actionable intelligence by traditional interrogation techniques, and that torture backfired on us.
The release of memoranda authorizing torture will help prevent the U.S. from ever traveling this dark path again. The U.S. has consistently taken the moral high ground in armed conflicts, contrasting our behavior with the savagery our enemies engaged in for decades. The historical record shows that mercy, not might, is the key to successful interrogation.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Law and Civil Liberties
Bob McDonnell Wants to Scare You and Take Your Money
Though I’m not a Virginia resident or voter, nor a donor to politicians, Virginia gubernatorial candidate Bob McDonnell (whose party affiliation I’m not aware of) has added me to his email list. His name is similar to a past roommate, and that affinity has caused me to open more of his emails than I ordinarily would.
Today’s is worth writing about: It’s a political candidate transparently trying to scare voters and use their fear for fundraising.
Dear Jim,
Terror suspects could be headed to Virginia…
With the closing of the detention center at Guantanamo Bay the federal government must find new locations in which to house and try the roughly 240 terrorist suspects currently held 90 miles from our shores. Recent news reports indicate that the Department of Justice is considering transferring a number of the detainees to the Commonwealth of Virginia. One specific location: Alexandria. And other Virginia locations could be possibilities as well.
There are security details to be worked out when prisoners are transferred out of Guantanamo Bay, but the prisoners themselves are not dangerous as such. They’re prisoners, and they will always be under heavy guard. Terrorists are not radioactive, and they do not have lasers built into their eyes.
The problems with housing prisoners in the past have been over-the-top security precautions that make a great show but don’t necessarily meet actual security problems associated with housing terror suspects.
Bills have been introduced to bar detainees from being transferred to various states.
A precious few Americans have exhibited cool in this fear-of-detainees brouhaha. Alexandria Sheriff Dana A. Lawhorne is quoted in this Washington Post article, at least saying “he would do what he can: ‘You can’t run the other way when your country calls.’”
But McDonnell, the politician seeking a prominent leadership position in the state, would “lead” by pretending that captured terrorists are too big a security risk for Virginia. It’s shameful fear-mongering meant to capitalize on the ignorance and weakness of Virginians who don’t understand terrorism. The only links in the text of the email are to the fundraising page on McDonnell’s Web site.
McDonnell exhibits leadership malpractice with this kind of campaigning.
Filed under: Foreign Policy and National Security; Government and Politics
The Guantanamo Bubble Pops
Within a day of Barack Obama’s inauguration, he has asked the military commissions judges to halt all trials in Guantanamo. All indications point toward detainees being tried in federal courts. This is a good decision for a couple of reasons.
First, the military commissions play into the propaganda game that terrorists thrive on. It confirms their message that normal courts can’t address the threat that they pose. In fact, the opposite is true. When you convict a terrorist and lock him up with murderers and rapists, you take away his freedom fighter mystique.
Second, the trial of Omar Khadr was about to start. Khadr fought alongside a band of Al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists and allegedly killed Special Forces medic Christopher Speer with a hand grenade. Khadr deserves to be locked up, and letting his military commission trial start would create a Double Jeopardy issue if we interrupt the proceedings somewhere down the road and move him to federal court.
President Obama is also circulating a draft order for the closing of detainee operations at Guantanamo. The memo sets a 12 month deadline for deciding whether to try, release, or continue holding each detainee. Good move.
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