Abrams seeks to move the discussion on Guantanamo detainees forward by bringing law-of-war detention and criminal prosecution into closer alignment. The article analyzes the Obama Administration’s current approach of dealing with terrorists captured abroad and its preference for conducting criminal prosecutions whenever feasible. Abrams proposes several changes to the current system, including a decision-making framework for imposing further military detention after completion of the criminal process, which the administration has indicated is a possibility, and taking into account the criminal culpability of the detainee to impose a presumptive limit on indefinite detention, as ways to reform the two-track system and increase equality accordingly.
Tag Archives: Torture
Harmonizing Policy & Principle: A Hybrid Model for Counterterrorism
This article explores the tension between the policy objectives of United States counterterrorism efforts (deterrence, incapacitation, and intelligence gathering) and the traditional legal frameworks used to justify them (the law of war and the criminal justice model). All three branches of government, the author urges, have worked at cross-purposes in developing a counterterrorism policy that sacrifices legality and principle. A better approach would be to adopt a hybrid, flexible framework that recognizes that terrorism is a serious threat requiring the use of the law of war in some cases but protects against government overreach by relying on the best instincts of the criminal justice model and its promotion of our core values of freedom and liberty.
The Sacrificial Yoo: Accounting for Torture in the OPR Report
The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR) excoriated the legal work done by John Yoo and Jay Bybee of the Office of Legal Counsel on the torture memos, but DOJ’s ultimate decision stopped short of referring Yoo and Bybee for professional discipline. Serious questions remain, particularly since the OPR was unable to obtain the testimony of many high-level officials who played critical roles in authorizing torture. A full-scale investigation, preferably by an independent commission not part of the very department implicated in the wrongdoing, is still necessary. Great Britain conducted such an independent inquiry into the abusive practices used against IRA prisoners in the 1970s, and the United States must do the same. The essential lesson must be that torture and cruel treatment are not policy options, even when lawyers are willing to write opinions blessing illegality.