Cross-posted at Balkinization

In response to my post a few days ago lamenting the post-bin Laden urge to rehash debates about torture’s efficacy, Ben Wittes writes to disagree.

“Pearlstein is right, of course, that we will never know with any certainty whether any specific piece of information that the CIA program developed would have been developed had the program used no coercion–or had the program not existed at all and had the interrogators in question been military folks. One can never establish a but-for relationship between coercive practices and any valuable intelligence that we learned following its use. But I do not think the effort to understand the value added of the CIA program is useless. In fact, I think it’s critical. If one believes that the program contributed nothing–or little–of value that could not have been obtained in a manner that did not trouble our collective conscience, one will and should feel very differently about it than one will and should if one believes it provided critical intelligence that saved American lives and led to the capture and killing of key Al Qaeda figures. While it may be impossible to get certainty on the answers to these questions, it should not be impossible to get some more solid understanding of the matter than we currently have as a society. A lot of people are quick to opine on this matter in one direction or another, but it has received virtually no impartial study.”

Various things to say. First, I quite agree that impartial study of intelligence methods and their effects is of great value. That (among other reasons) is why I have long supported the establishment of an independent commission that would look back over intelligence practices of the past decade and evaluate not only questions of history, but also questions of strategic impact, small and large. It is also why I thought it worth looking closely at the findings those impartial studies that do exist – like the 2006 report on Educing Information by the Intelligence Science Board – which I’ve often cited for its conclusion, among others, that “knowledge of behavioral indicators that might assist in the detection of deception is very limited and provides little reliable information that could assist intelligence collectors” with current populations of interest. In other words, 4 years in to our dramatic program of coercive intelligence collection, no one knew in any real way how to secure the revelation of accurate information from an individual. My point in this week’s post was not that such investigations, when rigorously and ethically done, lack value. Just the opposite, it was to note that post hoc assertions based on incomplete information about a particular anecdotal case are no substitute for rational study. Put differently, for every “maybe some guy in Gitmo said something useful” story, there’s a “some guy in Gitmo said something false that lead us to war in Iraq” story. Dueling anecdotes do nothing to advance – and plenty to mislead – the inquiry about efficacy.

Second, and more broadly, let’s imagine for a minute that the closest to “truth” about efficacy we will ever be able to get is that sometimes people say useful things under torture and sometimes they don’t. In other words, let’s imagine that study will not be able to conclusively foreclose the possibility that on some occasion, someone will say something true if you torture them. (With more study, maybe one could discern what kinds of torture are more likely to produce true answers than false ones, even true answers not otherwise obtainable, but I’d be fascinated to hear the scenario for doing this in any ethical way.) The far harder question still remains: What policy conclusion follows from this result? How does one weigh this information in a cost-benefit analysis that includes tactical gain vs. strategic loss, effects on our own forces, variations among individual responses, designs of training and education, alternative options (including a finding that sometimes, someone will say something true if you give them a Big Mac), or all of the important arguments from philosophy, morality, law, medicine and religion that say efficacy is entirely beside the point, and we can decide as humans that there are some kinds of things we simply won’t do? Science can be enormously valuable. But I think it’s a mistake to imagine in thsi case that it will get us out of – or even much clarify – the otherwise far deeper question. In all events, for those who have not yet settled this matter in their own minds, this week strikes me as a particularly inopportune time to try.

Cross-posted at Balkinization

For all the interesting things that might be said about the still-emerging circumstances of bin Laden’s death, it’s disheartening to see conversation already turning to old, old debates about interrogation. Peter King (R-N.Y.) was naturally quick to suggest that reports that information leading to bin Laden’s capture came from detainees held at Guantanamo Bay should lead Obama to rethink his opposition to torture. Emptywheel, naturally, says it’s clear waterboarding had nothing to do with it. FWIW, Rumsfeld appears far closer to Emptywheel’s view than King’s.

Why is this a fruitless (not to mention so, so old) conversation? Any number of reasons. For one, the odds are negligible that we will ever truly know who produced the critical piece of information when and for what reason. If perchance we do learn the actual “facts” about what happened – facts as distinct from competing anecdotal accounts selectively leaked by “official sources” with agendas of their own – they will prove nothing in any meaningful way. If a detainee effectively volunteered key information, advocates of waterboarding, prolonged isolation, etc. will insist torture could have produced it sooner. I’ll look forward to their controlled study. If a detainee gave up the information under torture, critics will insist that it is impossible to know whether he also would have conveyed the same information under other conditions. Just right.

Either way, let’s be clear that the arguments in this realm have never been about ‘interrogation’ as an intelligence collection method per se. No one seriously thinks we should refrain from using our broad range of lawfully available means to seek information from terrorist suspects who are otherwise lawfully in our custody. The debate is about torture and cruelty. And all the arguments that existed about the legality, morality, and efficacy of torture that we had when we had the debate in 2002, and 2004, and 2006, and 2008 and all the years in between – remain the same today as they were yesterday. So let’s note that the U.S. law prohibiting cruel techniques has been strengthened since 9/11. Let’s recall that there was nothing at all in the President’s speech last night to suggest that this no-doubt defining experience of his presidency has led him to reconsider his standing executive order reinforcing existing prohibitions. And let’s not nudge the blogosphere to see that yesterday’s events “reignite” that old, rightly concluded, debate.

Having just read through the new order quickly, a few thoughts. First, as had been long rumored, the order essentially sets up a periodic review system for the Guantanamo detainees. The review system is discretionary in nature, but appears designed to supplement the already existing and fairly robust review available to Gitmo detainees through the federal courts since 2008 (thanks to the Supreme Court). In this respect, the order should be seen as a positive development. Especially given that not all of those seeking habeas review win their cases, I certainly don’t see how it can hurt to have an additional layer of periodic review to ensure that the circumstances that made detention appropriate in the first place (the existence of a particular armed conflict, for example) continue to hold.

Indeed, such a system of review seems directly contemplated by the Geneva Conventions (at least as they apply to more traditional situations of occupation and international armed conflict) when it comes those a state thinks necessary to detain for “imperative reasons of security,” as the Fourth Convention puts it. (This is not to suggest I think that convention or its Art. 78 directly applies here in any way; I note it only to show that systems of periodic review are generally favored by the Conventions in circumstances of armed conflict. Again, on very quick scan, the order reads to me as though it is trying to extend this IHL-by-analogy idea in explaining, for what it says are discretionary purposes (not to change or impact how the district courts have already resolved this question) that in the President’s view “[c]ontinued law of war detention is warranted for a detainee subject to the periodic review in section 3 of this order if it is necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States.” More on the utility of this standard for these limited purposes below.) For an administration interested in attending at all to the international law of armed conflict, and in the face of a Congress that has proven itself repeatedly loopy when it comes to all things Gitmo (most recently with the deeply ill-conceived use-of-funds ban on detainee transfers even for criminal prosecution), this seems like a fine step.

As for the quality/nature of the review process itself, much will have to wait for guidelines the order requires the Secretary of Defense to issue, but the parameters set forth in the order seem sensible as far as they go (and again, on very quick survey). There’s notice and an opportunity to be heard, and, I take it, to be assisted by both a government-appointed representative and an outside/private counsel. And the order appears to establish a separate process to keep tabs on what progress the government is making on transferring detainees who are found (by this process or otherwise) eligible for transfer. One red flag – as I read it, after the initial review, although files are reviewed annually, the detainee doesn’t get this kind of full review again for another 3 years. Why wait so long? The answer no doubt relates to a fuller understanding than what is reflected in this document of why/under what circumstances the President thinks these detainees will ever be entitled to release. More on that below, too, but for now I’d say the answer (to why/what circumstances) remains unclear.

Second, and probably more important, the new executive order is limited to the handling of the ongoing detentions at Guantanamo. (Per the text, “The periodic review described in section 3 of this order applies only to those detainees held at Guantánamo on the date of this order…. It does not create any additional or separate source of detention authority, and it does not affect the scope of detention authority under existing law.”) In this respect, I read it to reject efforts by some to make more permanent the detention regime Guantanamo currently models. This is a good thing. And it seems consistent with the Administration’s moves on detention policy elsewhere. Worldwide, the Obama Administration appears to have been working actively to get out of the “wartime” detention business, and wisely so. Having held tens of thousands of detainees since the attacks of 2001, the U.S. is now out of the detention business in Iraq, well on its way to getting out of the detention business in Afghanistan, and (according to the administration) entirely out of the secret-CIA-facility-detention business for good. The uniquely backwards Guantanamo regime – and a substantial reason why there is ongoing detention at Guantanamo at all – emerged patchwork and as a lesser-of-multiple-other-evils response to the foolishness of the Bush Administration on detention policy, a policy that needlessly ignored international law (among other legal strictures) over a period of years.

These days, the working theory behind Gitmo – now blessed in somewhat different form by two administrations, endorsed by the D.C. federal appeals court, tolerated by Congress, and by its terms untouched by this order – is that the statutory Authorization for Use of Military Force passed in 2001 includes authority for the President to detain certain individuals (a category defined with modest and fuzzy reference to international law) for the duration of an armed conflict (within the meaning of international law) between the United States and Al Qaeda. Not an implausible basis of authority in principle. But in reality, the AUMF is vague, and international law informs the statutory meaning in incomplete ways at best. To the extent that international law does offer guidance – for example, on the question of whether the chronic, global threat of hostilities (and occasional actual hostilities) between a terrorist organization and much of the rest of the world counts should really count as an “armed conflict” within the contemplation of the Geneva Conventions – I’ve argued that its guidance should lead us to avoid such broad definitions. Armed conflict in international law terms was meant to describe an exceptional state of affairs; a defined, and definable, moment in time during which ordinary law does not apply. In an age in which the threat and reality of transnational terrorism has been and seems foreseeably likely to remain a condition of human existence indefinitely, the U.S. v. Al Qaeda armed conflict on which the Gitmo regime depends, while arguably better than the “war on terrorism” the last administration asserted, is indistinguishable from the world’s ordinary state of being. It is the exception that swallows the rule. For these reasons, among others, I’m glad to see the executive order read in ways that seem to limit the necessary damage that ameliorating the situation at Guantanamo does.

All that said, the order seems to leave open some critical questions. The prospect of periodic review of detention implies that there are circumstances that do not exist now but that might arise in the future in which a prisoner currently deemed detainable becomes eligible for release. What are these circumstances and how, exactly, may a detainee go about demonstrating they exist? In some respects, the order does specify what particular eventualities it has in mind. The transfer review process, for instance, is designed to monitor the cases of those who are currently “conditionally detained,” i.e. detained pending a finding improved security circumstances Yemen (unclear assessed according to what metric and by whom); or detained pending only the identification of a suitable rehabilitation program or other third-country transfer option. For those individuals, the circumstances that would necessitate their release seem at least marginally clear. But beyond the detainees who find themselves in one of those categories, what does it mean that continued detention is available where “necessary to protect against a significant threat to the security of the United States?” Must there be a finding of an end to the armed conflict US v. Al Qaeda? May more individualized findings also be dispositive? May a detainee once deemed a security threat show by his words, conduct, or psychiatric profile that he no longer poses such a threat? I pose the questions not only because any detailed periodic review regime must be prepared with answers to them, but also because in practice I’ve often found that friends and colleagues who favor “preventive” detention with periodic review in principle become flummoxed and mute when asked to describe how/when such periodic review leads to release. Because it seems difficult to imagine that an individual President will ever enjoy a political environment in which releasing Gitmo detainees is easy or uncontroversial, it seems particularly important for any periodic review system that exists to be thoughtful, specific and to the extent possible binding about the process by which it might ever lead to release. Without such identified circumstances, it becomes not so much a useful additional layer of review, but a process that adds more to the appearance than the reality of legal legitimacy.

This order goes farther in answering such questions than any U.S. law, legal brief, or set of guidelines I’ve yet seen in the public realm – and that is a strength. But I don’t believe it can be understood as definitively answering the remaining questions about what we are doing at Guantanamo Bay.

The President’s much-anticipated executive order on Guantanamo was released today. I hope to read and comment on it shortly (not to mention figure out how to post a PDF). In the meantime, the press statement is here. It reads in its entirety as follows:

Statement by President Barack Obama:

“From the beginning of my Administration, the United States has worked to bring terrorists to justice consistent with our commitment to protect the American people and uphold our values. Today, I am announcing several steps that broaden our ability to bring terrorists to justice, provide oversight for our actions, and ensure the humane treatment of detainees. I strongly believe that the American system of justice is a key part of our arsenal in the war against al Qaeda and its affiliates, and we will continue to draw on all aspects of our justice system – including Article III Courts – to ensure that our security and our values are strengthened. Going forward, all branches of government have a responsibility to come together to forge a strong and durable approach to defend our nation and the values that define who we are as a nation.”

In case any one finds themselves in/around Philadelphia on March 5, this event may be of interest:

Supreme Court litigators Carter G. Phillips and Kannon Shanmugam will argue a case based on hypothetical federal legislation that exempts police from issuing Miranda warnings to individuals suspected of terrorism. A jury of nine distinguished judges will decide if such legislation can withstand constitutional scrutiny. This event is presented by the National Constitution Center as part of the 2011 Peter Jennings Project for Journalists and the Constitution. The moot court will take place on Saturday, March 5, 2011, beginning at 1:00 p.m., in the Ceremonial Courtroom at The United States District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania at 601 Market Street. Admission is FREE, but seating is limited. Reservations are required and can be made by calling 215.409.6700 or online at www.constitutioncenter.org.

The panel of judges includes: Michael Chertoff, Senior of Counsel, Covington & Burling LLP, former Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit, and former Secretary of Homeland Security (2005-2009); Michael A. Fitts, Dean and Bernard G. Segal Professor of Law, University of Pennsylvania Law School; Brett Kavanaugh, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit; Judith S. Kaye, Of Counsel, Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher & Flom LLP and former Chief Judge, New York State Court of Appeals; Timothy Lewis, Of Counsel at Schnader, Harrison, Segal & Lewis and former Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Theodore McKee, Chief Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Marjorie O. Rendell, Judge, United States Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit; Albert M. Rosenblatt, Of Counsel at McCabe & Mack LLP and former Associate Judge, State of New York Court of Appeals; Dolores K. Sloviter, Judge, United States Court Appeals for Third Circuit.

Cross-posted at Balkinization

It felt like a lively discussion Friday at the panel hosted by American University scholar Dan Marcus on “Guantanamo Detainees – What Next?” (Many thanks to Ken for plugging it earlier in the week. I take it the session will at some point be available among webcasts on the law school website.) Jack Goldsmith gave a keynote address to a very full house, and then Bobby Chesney (UTexas), Steve Vladeck (American) and I had a chance to respond and interact. It felt a little like old home week with folks like Gene Fidell, Marty Lederman, Geremy Kamens (Hamdi’s defense counsel) and Ken Troccoli (Moussaoui’s defense counsel) in the audience. Good to see everyone, and thanks to all for an engaging conversation.

For those of you who’ve been following this for a while, I’m not sure we broke any major new ground, but a few points may be worth mentioning. Jack Goldsmith is no longer arguing in favor of a statutory fix to the Guantanamo problem in the form of a clearer AUMF-type authorization. As he rightly notes, the D.C. courts have now in key respects answered questions of what habeas hearings look like procedurally, and even who may be detained. I hardly agree with the courts’ answers in all these respects, but I wholeheartedly agree that congressional involvement at this point to try to “clarify” the law in those habeas cases would only set back the litigation clock another 8 years. We were also quite in agreement about many of the deficits of the military commissions. And there was vigorous, bipartisan consensus on the panel about Congress’ foolhardiness – either as a matter of constitutional power or as disastrous policy or both – in trying to prevent the criminal prosecution of any of the Guantanamo detainees under any circumstances.

On the subject of Congress’ attempts to prohibit the transfer of Gitmo detainees to the United States for trial, a number of people in and outside government have floated the idea of creating D.Gtmo – bringing Article III judges to Guantanamo to hold federal criminal trials there. The question was raised again Friday. (Feel free to out yourselves in comments, I just didn’t want to do it for you without asking.) The notion is that detainees might waive jury trial (so avoid the deeply problematic question of how to get impartial civilian jurors to Gitmo) in exchange for an actual prosecution of some kind. And there is (Steve Vladeck notes) at least some, albeit equivocal precedent for the idea of creating a federal district of sorts outside the territorial United States. It’s a creative suggestion, and in principle I don’t much care where Article III trials are held as long as they involve Article III judges and Article III process. But this proposal, like everything with Gitmo, comes with its own set of problems. First and probably most problematic, one would still need congressional authorization. Perhaps the politics of trials at Gitmo are different from the politics of trials in NYC. Hope springs eternal. Then there must be some question of venue, which as Padilla reminded us, may actually matter from time to time. And there is also the dilemma of detainee incentives. Detainees have done quite well for themselves overall in reaching plea agreements under the military commission system, achieving rather minor sentences compared to the equivalent defendants facing federal courts. (Only one of the ironic features of Congress’ preference for commissions over courts.) Defense counsels’ relative success in this regard hardly makes the outcomes legitimate. Among other things, commission defendants may be pleading “guilty” to offenses that don’t actually exist as war crimes under international law. But if they can get a lesser ‘sentence’ in commission bargaining than in criminal plea bargaining, why would any defense attorney recommend that her client waive jury trial to get access to the potentially more punitive federal courts?

To my ear, the single area of most apparent disagreement was on the question of the need for some additional, military detention power going forward. That is, setting aside the thorny dilemma of how to resolve the unique mess at Guantanamo Bay, aren’t we losing something as a matter of policy, or creating incentives (to kill rather than capture) if we don’t find some source of authority more robust and enduring than Congress’ 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force to enable the ongoing detention of international terrorists? A fair and important question. I’ve written about this a lot before e.g. here and here and at the panel today, so I won’t rehearse my arguments again. For what it’s worth, I argued Friday I don’t think we are losing much.

The Times and others are reporting that current Acting Head of the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) at the Department of Justice, David Barron, will be leaving his post this summer to head back to his professorship at Harvard Law School. (OLC rose to national prominence during the last administration as the home of John Yoo and colleagues, who crafted unsupported legal arguments to justify the use of torture against detainees.) Barron has been the de facto head of the office throughout the Obama Administration, his tenure a result of Congress’ failure to confirm the President’s nominee for permanent head, Dawn Johnsen. Barron’s announcement comes on the heels of rumors in recent weeks that Barron’s OLC colleague, Marty Lederman, had also been planning to depart OLC sometime in the coming year, to return to his post as professor at Georgetown Law School.

At one level, such departures should be no surprise, coming around (or at least near) the 2-years-in-service mark, a time when many political appointees find themselves up against academic leave deadlines, or are otherwise longing for a return to their pre-government families and lives. Fair enough. Nonetheless, the departure of either or both will be a real loss to the Administration. Barron and Lederman have been deeply engaged in the suite of detainee issues the Administration has been grappling with since transition. We can hope to welcome them back to the blogosphere one of these days. But their real-time efforts inside DOJ will undoubtedly be missed.

Cross-posted at Balkinization

Nothing like summertime to catch up on a little light reading I spent too little time with during the semester. So especially after being re-energized at this year’s American Constitution Society Convention (where I did a panel with Gene Fidell and others far more interesting than I on military commissions vs. federal courts, and got treated to a Cory Booker barn-burner of a “do something” speech), herewith my first catching-up blog.

If you read any new document this summer in the ongoing detention-interrogation-trial saga that is Guantanamo Bay, make it the (relatively) recently released final report of the Guantanamo Review Task Force. This was the inter-agency body established by Executive Order a few days after President Obama took office and charged with reviewing (which required first collecting) all of the government’s existing information about the then-current residents of Guantanamo Bay and making recommendations for their disposition. The report is available here and was the subject of a few articles (in the Times and Wash Post),though my sense is that it was largely overlooked when it was released. The report itself is a concise 32 pages, and contains (among other instructive passages), the most detailed official public description (beginning p. 22) I’ve seen explaining why the executive branch has determined that 48 detainees at Gitmo should still be detained but cannot be prosecuted in either an Article III or military commission court.

Before I get to the reasons why 48 detainees have been deemed unprosecutable-but-unreleaseable, I must start out by pausing on the number, which seems pretty striking in the eight years I’ve spent following U.S. counterterrorism detention operations post-9/11. Out of the 800-some originally shipped to Guantanamo, out of the tens of thousands detained by the United States since 2001(in operations from Afghanistan to Iraq and beyond), out of the millions of people on the planet who undoubtedly wish to do us harm – the whole debate, and the future of U.S. detention policy, has now evidently come to down to the apparent intractability of these 4 dozen cases.

Indeed, as the Task Force report indicates, the real fraction of the post-9/11 detainee population who might fit into the ‘intractable’ category if seized today is almost certainly smaller than that. For example, some of the final 48 aren’t prosecutable because the federal criminal material support law that existed in 2001, when these detainees were seized, did not extend to offenses committed outside the territory of the United States. That territorial gap has long since been filled by an amendment to the material support statute. So if the U.S. picked up one of those men today, prosecution would be an option. Others of the 48 (unclear from the report how many, but at least a handful) have been rendered ‘unprosecutable’ because of decisions the last administration made – which decisions cannot now be undone. Like what? Some of these men have been detained so long, the statute of limitations on the offense for which they might have been prosecuted has run. For some of them, the only/best evidence we have of any wrongdoing were statements gleaned from witnesses subject to torture or cruel treatment. And there are others (like a Taliban military commander) who – had we treated them in accordance with international law in the first place – it appears would have been far less controversially detainable by the U.S. and/or the Afghans under existing detention authorities (like the statutory Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the international laws of armed conflict, and/or specific U.S.-Afghan and/or UN authority).

For apparently a large subset of the 48, the United States simply made no attempt to collect (or save) any information about them at the time of their capture that might subsequently be used in a prosecution, for war crimes or otherwise. In some cases, such a decision might well make sense. A Taliban commander caught by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002 was picked up in a classic international armed conflict, and, particularly had he been afforded the protections of the Geneva Conventions, could be lawfully detained for the duration of that conflict without need for trial. But it’s not at all clear that the set of men detained-without-effort-at-evidence-collection is the same as the set of men lawfully detainable under the international law of armed conflict. On the contrary, much in the detention practice of the last administration suggested that people were detained (in CIA facilities and elsewhere) without any concept of an end-game – whether the plan was to prosecute them for war crimes some day, or to detain them until the end of the Afghan conflict, or simply to detain them forever without much worrying about the law of why or how. In short, it seems likely that for some of these remaining 48, there was simply no plan at all. Presumably, for the wouldbe terrorist detainee we pick up tomorrow, we have a plan now.

In all events, if we subtract all of those but-for cases from the Gitmo 48, how many remain who would pose an intractable detention dilemma, seemingly fall into a gap in existing legal authority, if we picked them up today? A dozen? A handful? For the sake of this group, some still argue, we should pursue new statutory authorization for the (indefinite?) detention of (which?) terrorist suspects for the (indefinite?) future of the United States. When Holmes wrote that hard cases make bad law, he wasn’t kidding.

Ok, so what it is about these 48 men such that, as the report put it, “the totality of available information – including credible information that might not be admissible in a criminal prosecution – indicated that the detainee poses a high level of threat that cannot be mitigated sufficiently except through continued detention.” The report says these detainees “were characterized by one or more of the following factors…”: (1) “Significant organizational role within al-Qaida, the Taliban, or associated forces.” (2) “Advanced [jihadist] training or [combat] experience.” (3) “Expressed recidivist intent;” or, (4) “History of associations with extremist activity.”

While there remain questions about what it means “forces…associated” with the Taliban or al-Qaida, category (1) above seems to fall pretty squarely into the interpretation of the AUMF the Administration has now successfully advanced before the D.C. federal courts. It is at least in part consistent with the kind of detention contemplated by the international law of armed conflict. And beyond that – as the habeas cases are making clear – the legality of such detentions depends a lot on the particular facts of the case. Category (2), while also leaving some ambiguities, sounds a fair bit like conduct that is now – but was not necessarily in 2001 – covered by the federal criminal laws of the United States. Receiving military training from a terrorist organization is its own independent federal crime and/or is almost certainly prosecutable under the extraterritorial material support offense. Category (4) – “History of associations with extremist activity” – seems to me simply too vague to make heads or tails of. It is not – and the report does not suggest that it is – a legal category of some kind. But even as a descriptive tag, it seems to me broad enough to include almost anything. Or not. So for now I leave it to one side.

Which brings us to Category (3) – those with “[e]xpressed recidivist intent.” Assuming such men do not also fall into any of the other descriptive categories, I take it that such an individual is one for whom the circumstances of his seizure are either unknown or not plausibly in the context of armed conflict, for whom there is no available information as to his past activities, but who, at some point during the past 8 years of detention in/around Guantanamo Bay, has indicated that if released, he’d like to, for example, kill Americans. If I were President Obama, this is the guy whose case would keep me up nights. But here’s a question, and it is a genuine one: By what law may the United States detain someone who, without more (i.e. no evidence of Al Qaeda membership, of engagement in armed conflict, etc.), expresses an intention to do harm?

Cross-posted at Balkinization

I hate to interrupt the terrific insta-symposium on the Supreme Court’s decision in Samantar already underway at Opinio Juris, but I did want to note the much-anticipated release of Philip Alston’s report as UN Special Rapporteur on Extra-Judicial Killings. I take it the relevant press release and report will be available here. I’m just now paging through it, but for now, a few brief notes.

Broadly, while acknowledging the sometime-legality of targeted killing, the report cautions that “circumstances in which targeted killings are alleged to be legal” have become “excessively broad,” and mechanisms that might help ensure accountability for their legality – including any measure of transparency – are missing. From the press release:

“[T]here are indeed circumstances in which targeted killings may be legal. Targeted killings are permitted in armed conflict situations when used against combatants or fighters, or civilians who directly engage in combat-like activities,” Mr. Alston noted, “but they are increasingly being used far from any battle zone.” According to the UN Special Rapporteur, the United States, in particular, has put forward a novel theory that there is a ‘law of 9/11’ that enables it to legally use force in the territory of other States as part of its inherent right to self-defence on the basis that it is in an armed conflict with al-Qaeda, the Taliban and ‘associated forces’, although the latter group is fluid and undefined. “This expansive and open-ended interpretation of the right to self-defence goes a long way towards destroying the prohibition on the use of armed force contained in the UN Charter. If invoked by other States, in pursuit of those they deem to be terrorists and to have attacked them, it would cause chaos,” he said. Mr. Alston emphasized that “I do not for a moment question the seriousness of the challenges posed by terrorism. I condemn wholeheartedly the actions of al-Qaeda and all other groups that kill innocent civilians, as well as any groups that increase the danger of attacks on civilians by hiding in their midst. These actions unequivocally violate international law. But the fact that such enemies do not play by the rules does not mean that a Government can cast those rules aside or unilaterally re-interpret them. The credibility of any Government’s claim that it is fighting to uphold the rule of law depends on its willingness to disclose how it interprets and applies the law – and the actions it takes when the law is broken.”

As for the accountability issue, again from the press release, Alston is quoted as saying:

“[I]t is an essential requirement of international law that States using targeted killings demonstrate that they are complying with the various rules governing their use in situations of armed conflict.” The clearest challenge to this principal today, according to the independent expert, comes from the program operated by the US Central Intelligence Agency in which targeted killings are carried out from unmanned aerial vehicles or drones. “It is clear that many hundreds of people have been killed, and that this number includes some innocent civilians. Because the program remains shrouded in official secrecy, the international community does not know when and where the CIA is authorized to kill, the criteria for individuals who may be killed, how it ensures killings are legal, and what follow-up there is when civilians are illegally killed.” The UN Special Rapporteur stressed that “in a situation in which there is no disclosure of who has been killed, for what reason, and whether innocent civilians have died, the legal principle of international accountability is, by definition, comprehensively violated.”

Importantly, Alston contrasts the CIA program in this regard with “the well-established practice of the US Department of Defense. While it is by no means perfect, the US military has a relatively public accountability process, as demonstrated earlier this week by its report on the incident in Uruzgan, Afghanistan, in which at least 23 civilians were killed based on erroneous intelligence from surveillance drone operators. Intelligence agencies, which by definition are determined to remain unaccountable except to their own paymasters, have no place in running programs that kill people in other countries.”

A final note for now. The report provides, among other things, the clearest, most concise (and usefully footnoted) summary of the complex and overlapping areas of law governing targeted killing I have yet seen – addressing law of war, self-defense, and international human rights law issues. I’ll be most interested to hear from Ken, among others, on what if anything the report gets wrong in this respect. On first glance, it looks awfully solid to me.

Cross-posted at Balkinization

Following my co-blogger Ken Anderson’s lead, I wanted to add a few additional notes on the D.C. Circuit’s holding today that a group of detainees held at the U.S. military base at Bagram, Afghanistan, do not have a constitutional right to seek a writ of habeas corpus in U.S. federal court. While acknowledging that at least two of the detainee-petitioners had been picked up far outside the Afghan borders (one, most notably, in Thailand) and only came to be in the Afghan theater because the U.S. government brought them there, the court concluded that the “practical obstacles inherent in resolving the prisoner’s entitlement to the writ” while petitioners were detained in an active theater of war weighed against recognizing an extraterritorial constitutional right to habeas.

Many things to say on the decision’s import and meaning, but here I’ll just start with two unrelated points. First, on the import. Whatever one thinks of the opinion on the merits, it may be easy to overstate its practical significance. The Obama Administration’s litigation strategy in all of its highest profile detention cases has been to moot key cases on their facts before they can be finally resolved by the Supreme Court. Such was the case with, for example, the weighty claim by a group of Gitmo detainees that winning their habeas cases entitled them to release in the United States. So too here, all indications are the Administration is scurrying not only to hand over its detention operations in Afghanistan to the Afghans generally (a move key human rights organizations endorse as a matter of international law), but also reportedly to transfer remaining non-Afghan detainees to their home countries for continued detention and/or trial. It’s possible the Administration may not succeed in its mooting strategy this time. But given the months they now have between petitions for rehearing en banc in the D.C. Circuit and (failing that) for cert sure to follow, I wouldn’t necessarily bet against them. If the U.S. cedes control of Bagram before the case reaches the Supreme Court, what will remain on the books is the ruling of an appeals court, in a decision, as Ken also seems to see it, highly and self-consciously limited to its particular facts.

Second, on the content. It seems fair to say the reasoning in the opinion was slight. And not just because out of the 26 pages of published writing, one doesn’t reach the meet of the analysis until the bottom of page 19 (after which follows about a page’s worth of block quotes, and another nearly full page of conclusion restating the decision in summary). What reasoning there is doesn’t especially engage the particular facts of the case. Consider, for example, how heavily today’s decision rested on the analysis in the Supreme Court’s 1950 decision in Johnson v. Eisentrager, in which the Court declined to allow U.S. military detainees held in Germany (following their war crimes convictions in China) to seek habeas in U.S. courts. In particular, the Maqaleh court quoted in block the following passage from Eisentrager in support of its conclusion that habeas for the 3 Bagram detainees here would be unwise to pursue:

“Such trials would hamper the war effort and bring aid and comfort to the enemy. They would diminish the prestige of our commanders, not only with enemies but with wavering neutrals. It would be difficult to devise more effective fettering of a field commander than to allow the very enemies he is ordered to reduce to submission to call him to account in his own civil courts and divert his efforts and attention from the military offensive abroad to the legal defensive at home. Nor is it unlikely that the result of such enemy litigiousness would be a conflict between judicial and military opinion highly comforting to enemies of the United States.”

To be clear, in suggesting that habeas for Bagram would “bring aid and comfort to the enemy” and “diminish the prestige of our commanders” in Afghanistan, the appeals court here did not expressly (or even impliedly) cite to some particular claim in the record before it. Neither was it discernably deferring to some perceived superiority of the Executive’s assessment of the strategic or practical import of allowing the Bagram detainees captured outside Afghanistan to seek a writ of habeas corpus. Rather, the D.C. Circuit seemed to be doing exactly what the Eisentrager Court did – asserting, based on the court’s own impression, that greater legal process would only hamper the strategic cause for which the United States is fighting in (on this occasion) Afghanistan.

Yet particularly in the counterinsurgency context in which the U.S. is now fighting, it seems an odd – and overstated – position for the court to take. Indeed, as the Commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, U.S. General McChrystal, explained in his pivotal strategy report last year, “the Afghan people see U.S. detention operations as secretive and lacking in due process.” Because detention operations could thus become “a strategic liability,” the United States faces a “critical” need “to conduct all detention operations in this country in accordance with international and national law.” McChrystal went on to recommend the turnover of detention operations to the Afghans, once they developed the capacity to sustain such operations lawfully and effectively. There is nothing in his report that would support the conclusion the Maqaleh court reached about the impact of judicial review on “the enemy,” and much in it that might support the view that habeas in the limited context presented here – where detainees have been shipped from a country at peace with the United States into a country where the United States is at war – might be of some strategic benefit with “wavering neutrals” pending handover to the Afghan government.

I don’t mean to overstate the point. The government here, after all, opposed extending habeas to Bagram. Nonetheless, especially given the stakes, it seems insufficient for the court to rely centrally on an assertion that seems at least somewhat in tension with positions the government has itself elsewhere taken on this particular issue. In Hamdan, the government had argued that it was impracticable to pursue war crimes trials under existing court martial rules on the bare grounds that the demands of counterterrorism were great. Writing for a majority of the Supreme Court, Justice Stevens rejected this claim as, among other things, lacking basis in the record. Hard to demonstrate the D.C. Circuit crossed that threshhold here.

Still catching up on yesterday’s news that DOD released the much-anticipated 2010 edition of the Manual for Military Commissions (MMC). The Manual is here.

Among its many provisions of interest (I’m still skimming) are the rules set forth for prosecutions for the commission crime of material support for terrorism – a crime I and others have argued does not exist as a war crime under international law. (None of the major international criminal tribunals have included it as an offense, for example; neither is there any evidence of its existence as a criminal offense under customary international law.) Given this, the singular international law defense for the inclusion of the “material support” offense in the 2009 version of the Military Commissions Act I’ve been able to imagine is the possibility that it would be used as some version of the expansive theory of vicarious contemplated at some level by the ICTY. (In my final international law class of the year, for example, I happened to teach Furundzija – a 1998 ICTY case finding that a soldier could be prosecuted under a vicarious liability theory for giving “practical assistance, encouragement, or moral support that had a substantial effect” on the perpetration of a war crime committed, provided that the soldier had the requisite intent. It’s debatable what intent was in fact required in that case, but it was either knowledge that one’s actions would assist perpetrator OR intent to facilitate the crime – hardly a meaningless difference.) One might have argued that the MCA offense of “material support” could mitigate the international law problems if deployed, against odds, in this way.

The MCA itself defines the offense as either (1) providing “material support” (a term it defines) “knowing or intending” that it will be used “in preparation for, or in carrying out, an act of terrorism,” or (2) intentionally providing material support to an international terrorist organization engaged in hostilities against the United States if he knows that organization engages in terrorism. By its terms, one might imagine option (1) was crafted to cover the bases in Furundzija; indeed “material support” under the statute doesn’t include something as vague as the “moral support” Furundzija recognized (in a rape case), so perhaps in this respect an intent-based a prosecution could survive. Option (2), on the other hand, seems less likely to survive Furundzija’s more exacting intent requirement. It requires intent only as to the provision of money to the organization; it doesn’t require that the supporter intend that the organization use the support to facilitate or carry out terrorism (only that the supporter have knowledge that the organization has ever engaged in such activities).

So does the MMC provide clarification or cure? In a word – no. It clarifies at least that the charging conduct must take place “in the context of and … associated with hostilities.” This seems a sine qua non for a war crimes charge – it’s not a war crime if there’s not a war – that wasn’t entirely clear by the terms of the statute itself. On the other hand, the MMC preserves knowledge as a potential basis for prosecution for material support for an act of terrorism, and preserves knowledge as the singular basis for prosecution for support to a terrorist organization. In other words, material support could still just be a knowledge-based offense. If Furundzija is in fact the model, and if Furundzija’s more exacting “intent to facilitate” standard applies, then no knowledge-based prosecution could survive. Seems like yet another of many potential issues as these cases are brought and appealed. In the meantime, I hope those international criminal law experts out there will tell me what I’m getting wrong.

Cross-posted on Balkinization and Scotusblog

Since Justice Stevens announced his intention to retire, discussions about what his departure will mean for the Court have regularly noted his military service in World War II. The justice enlisted the day before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor (and has joked about how the enemy responded to the news immediately). There is little doubt that a Court without substantial military experience among its justices will be missing an important perspective on the unique role the U.S. military plays in American policy and society. Judges are ideally made wiser from their range of life experiences; a broader range of experience among the justices seems likely only to enhance the Court’s collective wisdom. In that respect alone, Justice Stevens’ absence from the Court will leave a gap.

But Justice Stevens’ national security jurisprudence reflects a very particular kind of wisdom, drawn not only from his military service, but from a lifetime of attention to the persuasiveness of executive reason. As illustrated in a series of thoughtful histories in recent years (see here, here or here), the young John Stevens was likewise informed by his service immediately after the war as a law clerk at the Court to Justice Wiley Rutledge, who himself had struggled with the questions of executive power, individual rights, and national security that the Court has faced repeatedly in the years since September 11. Over his relatively short tenure on the Court, Rutledge seemed quickly to regret his early deference to a powerful President Roosevelt during World War II. With the majority in Hirabayashi v. United States (upholding a military curfew on Japanese-Americans living in certain “military areas” in California) and Korematsu v. United States (upholding the exclusion of Japanese-Americans from designated zones), Rutledge had reluctantly accepted the military assertion of wartime necessity. But the positions Rutledge took in these cases did not sit easily. As Rutledge later wrote to a colleague, “I have had more anguish over [Hirabayashi] than any I have decided, save possibly one death case” that he had encountered in the court of appeals. Indeed, Rutledge had written separately in concurrence in Hirabayashi, to emphasize that the Court’s acceptance of the military’s necessity justification here did not mean that such reasoning would invariably succeed, or that all such reasoning was beyond the power of the courts to review.

By In re Yamashita (upholding the military commission trial of a Japanese general), issued the year before Justice Stevens took up work at the Court, Rutledge was writing in dissent, rejecting the Government’s position “that there is no law restrictive upon these proceedings other than whatever rules and regulations may be prescribed for their government by the executive authority or the military,” in favor of the view that the U.S. Constitution, statutes and treaties here – as elsewhere – apply. Exigencies could arise, Rutledge understood, but particularly where the Government response imposed a burden on individual rights, it was within the power of the courts to check the reasons for the response, in security matters as anywhere else. The capacity to evaluate reasons was not the Commander-in-Chief’s alone. Thus, when Justice Stevens took up the challenge to the legality of President Bush’s military commission system at Guantanamo Bay 60 years later in Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, it was not surprising that it was Rutledge’s dissent the justice invoked.

It is certainly possible writing from some remove to overstate the impact Rutledge’s evolving views in the 1940’s had on Justice Stevens’ thinking some 60 years later. Justice Stevens is, after all, also the author of Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council, the watershed administrative law decision typically understood to have cemented the importance of judicial deference to executive branch interpretations of statutory authority – a deference driven by the Court’s view of the Executive’s superior political accountability and expertise. Indeed, at first glance, it seems difficult to reconcile the Justice Stevens of Chevron – embracing judicial deference to the Executive – and the Justice Stevens of Hamdan – rejecting any notion of even modest deference to the Executive in interpreting the statutory Authorization for Use of Military Force and Uniform Code of Military Justice. One might argue the decisions are better read simply as a sign of the evolution of Justice Stevens’ own views during his long tenure on the bench.

This view seems to me to miss the value of what is in fact a rather consistent sensibility on the value of executive views. By the time Chevron came down, the Court had long recognized – as Justice Stevens reiterated in that decision – that executive views could help illuminate statutory meaning when the executive has special expertise in the face of a “regulatory scheme [that] is technical and complex,” when competing policy interests are at stake, and when it is clear the agency’s consideration of the matter had been “detailed and reasoned.” It was precisely the lack of such detail and reason in the President’s justification for pursuing military commissions at Guantanamo that troubled Justice Stevens in Hamdan. “Nothing in the record before us demonstrates that it would be impracticable to apply court-martial rules in this case…. [T]he only reason offered in support of that determination is the danger posed by international terrorism. Without for one moment underestimating that danger, it is not evident to us why it should require, in the case of Hamdan’s trial, any variance from the rules that govern courts-martial.” The Executive had presented no record or even detailed reason why it could not follow standard court martial procedures. Indeed, as briefing surrounding the case had made evident, the Executive had largely excluded from the design process those lawyers in the military who were actually expert in how one might conduct a military commission trial. Expertise and record evidence could be valuable indeed. Far less valuable was the mere assertion of Executive authority.

Justice Stevens’ familiarity with the military and the important demands of national security perhaps made it possible for him to see what many have not – that there is nothing so extraordinary about the field of foreign relations per se that absolves the Executive of all need to be put to particular reason and compelling proof. It seems unlikely that the justice who takes his place will have Justice Stevens’ breadth of life experience in this regard. We will be fortunate if he or she nonetheless shares his insight.