How Not to Make Terrorism Policy

The Atlantic

The years of revelations about White House pressure on the Justice Department to concoct far-fetched legal rationales for physically tormenting terrorism suspects, for wiretapping without warrants, and for implementing other Bush policies has obscured a still more fundamental flaw in the Bush policy-making process.

That flaw was the almost exclusive focus on what could be done to captives as a matter of law—as interpreted by aggressive advocates of virtually unlimited presidential war powers—rather than on what should be done as a matter of morality and policy, taking account of careful cost-benefit analysis and past experience.

The result was that while approving in 2002 and 2003 the use of "extreme physical pressure on captives" during interrogations, the CIA and the White House not only disregarded the lessons of history but also engaged in "little substantive policy analysis or interagency consideration."

So said Philip Zelikow, a lawyer who was a senior adviser to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice from February 2005 until December, in a probing lecture for the Houston Journal of International Law on April 26.

Instead of grappling with the large body of evidence about what has worked best in the past, including the experience of such terror-torn U.S. allies as Israel and the United Kingdom, the administration, Zelikow asserted, pushed interrogators simply to "do everything you can [to break captives], so long as it is not punishable as a crime under American law."

These interrogation policies have been and still are being softened, in a partly secret process. But it is unclear whether President Bush and other top officials have learned that wise policy-making involves more than pushing interrogators to use every harsh method permitted by the Justice Department’s view of the law.

Opening Argument – Terrorism Suspects and the Law

National Journal

What should our government do when it captures a noncitizen suspected of being an Islamist terrorist?

Under the Bush administration’s approach, partly ratified by Congress, such people can be imprisoned indefinitely, perhaps for life, without ever seeing a judge or jury, based on slapdash military hearings with no defense lawyers, no real opportunity to confront the evidence against them — which can be obtained through coercive interrogation — and all-too-cursory judicial review. Some detainees have also been subjected to years of interrogation, including techniques so brutal as to meet many definitions of torture — and, in a few cases, to cause death.

By contrast, under the approach demanded by some human-rights groups, even a captive who is undoubtedly a mass-murdering terrorist must be freed unless the government can prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in an ordinary criminal trial. If the proof would publicly expose secrets so sensitive as to endanger the lives of intelligence sources, that would be the government’s problem. Nor could terrorist masterminds be subjected to even mild discomfort by interrogators seeking to extract life-saving information.

The gulf between these two approaches illustrates the polarization of our political and legal debate on the handling of terrorism suspects. No satisfactory resolution seems likely until at least 2009. Then, perhaps, we may have a new president willing to heed the advice of the more moderate-spirited experts (some named below) who have been thinking through the challenges posed by the hundreds of suspects now held by the military and others who may be captured in the future.

Terrorism Suspects and the Law

The Atlantic

What should our government do when it captures a noncitizen suspected of being an Islamist terrorist?

Under the Bush administration’s approach, partly ratified by Congress, such people can be imprisoned indefinitely, perhaps for life, without ever seeing a judge or jury, based on slapdash military hearings with no defense lawyers, no real opportunity to confront the evidence against them—which can be obtained through coercive interrogation—and all-too-cursory judicial review. Some detainees have also been subjected to years of interrogation, including techniques so brutal as to meet many definitions of torture—and, in a few cases, to cause death.

By contrast, under the approach demanded by some human-rights groups, even a captive who is undoubtedly a mass-murdering terrorist must be freed unless the government can prove his guilt beyond a reasonable doubt in an ordinary criminal trial. If the proof would publicly expose secrets so sensitive as to endanger the lives of intelligence sources, that would be the government’s problem. Nor could terrorist masterminds be subjected to even mild discomfort by interrogators seeking to extract life-saving information.

The gulf between these two approaches illustrates the polarization of our political and legal debate on the handling of terrorism suspects. No satisfactory resolution seems likely until at least 2009. Then, perhaps, we may have a new president willing to heed the advice of the more moderate-spirited experts (some named below) who have been thinking through the challenges posed by the hundreds of suspects now held by the military and others who may be captured in the future.

Opening Argument – The Case for a National Security Court

National Journal

A front-page, February 20 federal appeals court decision moved another big "enemy combatant" case down the road toward an eventual Supreme Court decision, probably in June 2008. But the outcome, like the current situation, will be unsatisfactory no matter how the justices rule.

This problem is one that only Congress can solve: how to handle appeals by foreigners who are detained indefinitely as enemy combatants by U.S. forces abroad but who claim to be innocent civilians. Despite two new laws over the past 14 months, Congress has not yet devised a process that is either effective in catching and incarcerating bad guys or fair in the exacting eyes of world opinion.

The justices cannot solve this problem without unseemly gymnastics, because current law presents them with two bad alternatives. The first would be to uphold the sharp restrictions on federal judicial review of appeals by militarily detained terrorism suspects that Congress imposed in the October 2006 Military Commissions Act. That’s what a sharply divided three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit did on February 20, in Boumediene v. Bush.

But as my December 16 column details, the MCA, even if constitutional, is neither fair to detainees nor credible to world opinion. It is thereby self-defeating, because it makes it harder to get other nations to help us get our hands on bad guys in the first place.

For these reasons the justices may well reverse the D.C. Circuit and strike down the relevant MCA provisions. Such a decision could, if written broadly, give every suspected terrorist captured anywhere in the world a historically unprecedented federal constitutional right to file a habeas corpus petition in federal district court demanding legal representation, release, a ban on interrogation, and/or nicer conditions of confinement. Such an outcome might (or, in these times, might not) satisfy world opinion.

Opening Argument – This Time, Let’s Get It Right

National Journal

One of the first orders of business for the new Democratic Congress should be legislating better safeguards against mistaken incarcerations of terrorism suspects and attaching the language to a veto-proof defense spending bill.

This would not only avoid needless imprisonment of harmless innocents. It would also help win the war against Islamist terrorism by reassuring allies and potential allies abroad that we are the good guys — and that America is still a safe place to visit.

In the five years since 9/11, the Bush administration has grabbed and imprisoned suspected "enemy combatants" without due process in Peoria and Chicago as well as in Afghanistan and elsewhere. But we still don’t have a decent system for sorting out dangerous jihadists from harmless bystanders.

It’s time we got this right. And although the need for Congress to protect against the possibility of unwarranted electronic eavesdropping gets far more attention, the need for it to end the current reality of long-term imprisonment of innocent people is far, far more important.

The Bush administration, mistaking its own incompetence for infallibility, has shown such indifference to the risk of erroneous detentions as to draw a succession of Supreme Court rebukes while making "Guantanamo" an anti-American rallying cry around the world. Meanwhile, President Bush continues to claim sweeping power to seize foreign students, tourists, and other visitors anywhere in the U.S. and lock them up for years — even for life — without ever producing real evidence of involvement in terrorism.

Congress has made two well-intentioned efforts to straighten out this executive-detention mess. But by severely curbing judicial review of executive detentions, the December 2005 Detainee Treatment Act and this October’s Military Commissions Act have actually made things much worse.

The Gitmo Fallout

Newsweek

David Bowker vividly remembers the first time he heard the phrase. A lawyer in the State Department, Bow-ker was part of a Bush administration "working group" assembled in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Its task: figuring out what rights captured foreign fighters and terror suspects were entitled to while in U.S. custody. White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptab

David Bowker vividly remembers the first time he heard the phrase. A lawyer in the State Department, Bow-ker was part of a Bush administration "working group" assembled in the panicked aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Its task: figuring out what rights captured foreign fighters and terror suspects were entitled to while in U.S. custody. White House hard-liners, led by Vice President Dick Cheney and his uncompromising lawyer, David Addington, made it clear that there was only one acceptable answer. One day, Bowker recalls, a colleague explained the goal: to "find the legal equivalent of outer space"–a "lawless" universe.

As Bowker understood it, the idea was to create a system where detainees would have no legal rights and U.S courts would have no power to intervene.

Opening Argument – Emergency Powers Should Be Temporary

National Journal

The battle over President Bush’s warrantless eavesdropping program has faded as a political issue. But it serves to illustrate a legal principle that should be — but has not been — a point of consensus in the broader debate about presidential war powers.

The principle is that while the president should have power during an extraordinary emergency to temporarily disregard outdated laws that may impede his ability to protect American lives, that power should lapse once he has had time to seek appropriate congressional changes in the laws.

I call this the emergency-powers principle. Its logic has been overlooked by many Bush critics as well as supporters in assuming their respective positions: that the eavesdropping program either was illegal from the outset (as critics claim), or has always been legal and will always be immune to congressional regulation (as defenders claim).

The better view is that Bush was right to start the eavesdropping program (assuming that the still-secret details show the need for it) during the post-9/11 emergency — but was wrong to keep its existence secret and to resist congressional regulation.

Although various laws give the president extraordinary powers during emergencies, no general emergency-powers principle is spelled out in the Constitution or in any judicial decision that I can find. But the principle is implicit in the Framers’ division of powers between Congress and the president.

It is also compelled by common sense. In the days and weeks after the 9/11 attacks, the administration had reason to fear that more attacks might be imminent. It also had cause for concern that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act — badly outdated by new communications technologies and by the vastly enhanced terrorist threat — might make it unduly difficult to find the plotters.

Opening Argument – Decommission the Commissions

National Journal

On March 28, the Supreme Court will hear arguments on whether the "military commissions" created by President Bush in November 2001 to prosecute suspected Qaeda terrorists are a time-honored presidential prerogative or (as I have re- luctantly come to believe) another unwise, unconstitutional Bush power-grab.

The legal issues are complex and difficult, and the outcome is hard to predict. What’s already clear beyond dispute, however, is that this supposedly speedy, streamlined system — which took nearly three years to start its first trial — has in practice been a fiasco and an international embarrassment.

Small-fry defendants. Weak evidence. Commission members apparently hand-picked for their likelihood to please their bosses.

Egregious errors by translators. And constantly changing rules, including the last-minute effort to dress up the commissions for their date with the Supreme Court by banning the previously approved use of statements obtained under torture.

The defendant whose case is now before the Court, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, hardly seems to be one of "the most dangerous, best-trained, vicious killers on the face of the earth," as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has described the Guantanamo detainees. Hamdan admits that he was Osama bin Laden’s chauffeur for several years before his capture in late 2001. But he is charged with only a single count of conspiring to murder civilians, based on allegations so nebulous that a real court might well throw the case out. The government has not even claimed that Hamdan helped plot any terrorist attacks or committed any specific criminal act. Its best evidence seems to be that he drove Qaeda members and weapons around Afghanistan.

Opening Argument – Leak Prosecutions: The Gathering Storm

National Journal

The news media’s ability to use leaks to keep the White House honest is threatened as never before by the unanticipated consequences of the investigation into the White House’s own leaks of classified information to discredit a critic.

Some government officials are itching to exploit that investigation as a precedent for using the threat of long jail terms and massive fines to force reporters to finger their confidential sources. The precedent was set, ironically, by the special counsel investigating leaks by White House officials, including (we now know) Karl Rove and I. Lewis (Scooter) Libby.

Few leakers and no reporters in American history have been prosecuted for disclosing classified information. But that may change.

Under the Justice Department’s interpretation of a 1917 espionage law, both those who leak government secrets and those who publish them are felons. It may be no defense to argue that the leaks did little damage to national security, or that they exposed official misconduct or deception.

Subpoenas of journalists have not been so common in more than 30 years. Former Pentagon official Lawrence Franklin was sentenced to 12 years in prison last month for orally sharing classified information to help two then-staffers of a pro-Israel group lobby for a harder line on Iran. Those two men face trial in April for receiving classified information and sharing it with reporters and Israeli officials. They are the first private citizens ever prosecuted for such activities. Reporters could be next. Meanwhile, Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Pat Roberts said on February 17 that he may push for new legislation making it easier to prosecute leakers.

Unless wise heads in the Justice Department, the judiciary, Congress, and the media themselves steer a steady course through this gathering storm, the executive branch will acquire more power than ever to hide its actions from public and congressional scrutiny.

Opening Argument – Coercive Interrogation: Can Anyone Straighten Out This Mess?

National Journal

There is more than enough blame to go around for the disastrous damage done to our international standing and national security by the uproar over the use of coercive interrogation methods — all of them "torture," in the parlance of many critics — to squeeze potentially life-saving information out of suspected terrorists.