ADI Terrorism DAADI Terrorism DA..................................................................................................................................1

***1NC***..................................................................................................................................................2Terror DA 1NC........................................................................................................................................3

***Uniqueness***......................................................................................................................................6General.....................................................................................................................................................7Detention................................................................................................................................................11

***Links--- General***...........................................................................................................................12Links--- General Topic Links................................................................................................................13Statutory Restrictions Links..................................................................................................................15Judicial Restrictions Links.....................................................................................................................19

***Links--- Detention***........................................................................................................................21Civilian Trial Link--- Intelligence.........................................................................................................22Civilian Trial Link--- Releases Terrorists..............................................................................................232NC Terrorist Release Link Magnifier..................................................................................................25Civilian Trials Link--- Mission Effectiveness/Future Detention...........................................................27Civilian Trials Link--- Military Base Attacks.......................................................................................29Civilian Trial Link--- Trials Get Attacked.............................................................................................30Civilian Trial Links--- Court Clog.........................................................................................................31Detention Solves Terror.........................................................................................................................32A2 Supermax Prisons Secure.................................................................................................................33A2 Reputation/Cred Link Turn..............................................................................................................35A2 Gitmo = AQ Recruiting Tool...........................................................................................................36A2 Civilian Courts Better......................................................................................................................38

Impacts......................................................................................................................................................40General terrorism...................................................................................................................................41A2: No nuclear terrorim.........................................................................................................................42Impact--- A2 AQAP Fails......................................................................................................................43

Aff...................................................................................................................................................................44UQ..........................................................................................................................................................45Detention Link Turn--- Guantanamo Increases Terrorists....................................................................46A2 Can’t Reverse Guantanamo Perception...........................................................................................48A2 Terrorist Release Link.....................................................................................................................49A2 Too Dangerous to Release...............................................................................................................50Impact D................................................................................................................................................51

***1NC***

Terror DA 1NCTerrorism is no longer a threatCNN 13 (Is terrorism still a threat to American, 7/19/2013, families?http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/19/is-terrorism-still-a-threat-to-american-families/)

After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks on the United States, a majority of Americans were worried about terrorism directly impacting their lives, according to a number of polls.¶

More than a decade later, is that still the case?¶ That was the primary question John Ashcroft, former attorney general under President George W. Bush, and Phillip Mudd, a former senior official at the CIA and FBI, debated at a Friday panel at the Aspen Security Forum.¶ “I think we are still at war,” Ashcroft said bluntly. “I don’t know if I will be able to be sure to say when we will be able to say we are not at war. But as long as they are continuing to hit us and allege that they are at war, I think we can.”¶ In response, Mudd directly challenged

Ashcroft.¶ “I don't agree, by the way, that we are at war,” the author said.¶ Instead, Mudd argued, that we have a dynamic and ever-changing face of terrorism that may prove to be difficult to squash completely.¶ But because of two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, he said the threat of terrorism is not nearly what it used to be.¶ “In 2001, we would have said terrorism is a potential threat to American families,” Mudd said. “And I would say today, that is not true."¶ Mudd added that he believed it was a false distinction.¶ “I have 10 nieces and nephews, I don't think I have ever talked to them about terrorism. … The gang problems in the city that I live in, Memphis, Tennessee, are outrageous. People in this country, partly because there is a racial divide in this country, don’t care. But four people die in an attack and this is a national disaster, I don’t get it,” he said.

Moving terrorist proceedings to civilian courts gives away intel that enables attacks Mukasey 2009 (Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009, October 19, 2009, “Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists,” WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475300052267212.html)

Moreover, the rules for conducting criminal trials in federal courts have been fashioned to prosecute conventional crimes by conventional criminals. Defendants are granted access to information relating to their case that might be useful in meeting the charges and shaping a defense, without regard to the wider impact such

information might have. That can provide a cornucopia of valuable information to terrorists, both those in custody and those at large. ¶ Thus, in the multidefendant

terrorism prosecution of Sheik Omar Abdel Rahman and others that I presided over in 1995 in federal

district court in Manhattan, the government was required to disclose, as it is routinely in

conspiracy cases, the identity of all known co-conspirators, regardless of whether they are

charged as defendants. One of those co-conspirators, relatively obscure in 1995, was Osama bin Laden. It was later learned that soon after the government's disclosure the list of unindicted co-

conspirators had made its way to bin Laden in Khartoum, Sudan, where he then resided. He was able to learn not only that the government was aware of him, but also who else the government was aware of. It is not simply the disclosure of information under

discovery rules that can be useful to terrorists. The testimony in a public trial, particularly under the probing of appropriately diligent defense counsel, can elicit evidence about means and methods of evidence collection that have nothing to

do with the underlying issues in the case, but which can be used to press government witnesses to either disclose information they would prefer to keep confidential or make it appear that they

are concealing facts. The alternative is to lengthen criminal trials beyond what is tolerable by vetting topics in closed sessions before they can be presented in open ones.

Terrorism results in extinctionAyson 2010 (Robert Ayson, Professor of Strategic Studies and Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies: New Zealand at the Victoria University of Wellington,“After a Terrorist Nuclear Attack: Envisaging Catalytic Effects,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Volume 33, Issue 7, July,)A terrorist nuclear attack, and even the use of nuclear weapons in response by the country attacked in the first place, would not

necessarily represent the worst of the nuclear worlds imaginable. Indeed, there are reasons to wonder whether nuclear terrorism should ever be regarded as belonging in the category of truly existential threats. A contrast can be drawn here with the global catastrophe that would come from a massive nuclear exchange between two or more of the sovereign states that possess these weapons in significant numbers. Even the worst terrorism that the twenty-first century might bring would fade into insignificance alongside considerations of what a general nuclear war would have wrought in the Cold War period. And it must be admitted that as long as the major nuclear weapons states have hundreds and even thousands of nuclear weapons at their disposal, there is always the possibility of a truly awful nuclear exchange taking place precipitated entirely by

state possessors themselves.¶ But these two nuclear worlds—a non-state actor nuclear attack and a catastrophic

interstate nuclear exchange—are not necessarily separable. It is just possible that some sort of terrorist attack, and especially an act of nuclear terrorism, could precipitate a chain of events leading to a massive exchange of nuclear weapons between two or more of the states that possess them. In this context, today’s and tomorrow’s terrorist groups might assume the place allotted during the early Cold War years to new state possessors of small nuclear arsenals who were seen as raising the risks of a catalytic nuclear war between the superpowers started by third parties. These risks were considered in the late 1950s and early 1960s as concerns grew about nuclear proliferation, the so-called n+1 problem.¶ It may require a considerable amount of imagination to depict an especially plausible situation where an act of nuclear terrorism could lead to such a massive inter-state nuclear war. For example, in the event of a terrorist nuclear attack on the United States, it might well be wondered just how Russia and/or China could plausibly be brought into the picture, not least because they seem unlikely to be fingered as the most obvious state sponsors or encouragers of terrorist groups. They would seem far too responsible to be involved in supporting that sort of terrorist behavior that could just as easily threaten them as well.¶ Some possibilities, however remote, do suggest themselves. For example, how might the United States react if it was thought or discovered that the fissile material used in the act of nuclear terrorism had come from Russian stocks,40 and if for some reason Moscow denied any responsibility for nuclear laxity? The correct attribution of that nuclear material to a particular country might not be a case of science fiction given the observation by Michael May et al. that while the debris resulting from a nuclear explosion would be “spread over a wide area in tiny fragments, its radioactivity makes it detectable, identifiable and collectable, and a wealth of information can be obtained from its analysis: the efficiency of the explosion, the materials used and, most important … some indication of where the

nuclear material came from.”41¶ Alternatively, if the act of nuclear terrorism came as a complete surprise, and American officials refused to believe that a terrorist group was fully responsible (or responsible at all)

suspicion would shift immediately to state possessors. Ruling out Western ally countries like the United Kingdom and France, and probably Israel and India as well, authorities in Washington would be left with a very short list consisting of North Korea, perhaps Iran if its

program continues, and possibly Pakistan. But at what stage would Russia and China be definitely ruled out in this high stakes game of nuclear Cluedo?¶ In particular, if the act of nuclear terrorism occurred against a backdrop of existing tension in Washington’s relations with Russia and/or China, and at a time when threats had already been traded between these major powers, would officials and political leaders not be tempted to assume the worst? Of course, the chances of this occurring would only seem to increase if the United States was already involved in some sort of limited armed conflict with Russia and/or China, or if they were confronting each other from a distance in a proxy war, as unlikely as these developments may seem at the present time. The reverse might well apply too: should a nuclear terrorist attack occur in Russia or China during a period of heightened tension or even limited conflict with the United States, could Moscow and Beijing resist the pressures that might rise

domestically to consider the United States as a possible perpetrator or encourager of the attack?¶ Washington’s early

response to a terrorist nuclear attack on its own soil might also raise the possibility of an unwanted (and nuclear aided) confrontation with Russia and/or China. For example, in the noise and confusion during the immediate aftermath of the

terrorist nuclear attack, the U.S. president might be expected to place the country’s armed forces, including its nuclear arsenal, on a higher stage of alert. In such a tense environment, when careful planning runs up against the friction of reality, it is just possible that Moscow and/or China might mistakenly read this as a sign of U.S. intentions to use force (and possibly nuclear force) against them. In that situation, the temptations to preempt such actions might grow, although it must be admitted that any preemption would probably still meet with a devastating response.¶ As part of its initial response to the act of nuclear terrorism (as discussed earlier) Washington might decide to order a significant conventional (or nuclear) retaliatory or disarming attack against the leadership of the terrorist group and/or states seen to support that group. Depending on the identity and especially the location of these targets, Russia and/or China might interpret such action as being far too close for their comfort, and potentially as an infringement on their spheres of influence and even on their sovereignty. One far-fetched but perhaps not impossible scenario might stem from a judgment in Washington that some of the main aiders and abetters of the terrorist action resided somewhere such as Chechnya, perhaps in connection with what Allison claims is the “Chechen insurgents’ … long-standing interest in all things nuclear.”42 American pressure on that part of the world would almost certainly raise alarms in Moscow that might require a degree of advanced consultation from Washington that the latter

found itself unable or unwilling to provide.¶ There is also the question of how other nuclear-armed states respond to the act of nuclear terrorism on another member of that special club. It could reasonably be expected that following a nuclear terrorist attack on the United States, both Russia and China would extend immediate sympathy and support to Washington and would work alongside the United States in the Security Council. But there is just a chance, albeit a slim one, where the support of Russia and/or China is less automatic in some cases than in others. For example, what would happen if the United States wished to discuss its right to retaliate against groups based in their territory? If, for some reason, Washington found the responses of Russia and China deeply underwhelming, (neither “for us or against us”) might it also suspect that they secretly were in cahoots with the group, increasing (again perhaps ever so slightly) the chances of a major exchange. If the terrorist group had some connections to groups in Russia and China, or existed in areas of the world over which Russia and China held sway, and if Washington felt that Moscow or Beijing were placing a curiously modest level of pressure on them, what conclusions might it then draw about their culpability?¶ If Washington decided to use, or decided to threaten the use of, nuclear weapons, the responses of Russia and China would be crucial to the chances of avoiding a more serious nuclear exchange. They might surmise, for example, that while the act of nuclear terrorism was especially heinous and demanded a strong response, the response simply had to remain below the nuclear threshold. It would be one thing for a non-state actor to have broken the nuclear use taboo, but an entirely different thing for a state actor, and indeed the leading state in the international system, to do so. If Russia and China felt sufficiently strongly about that prospect, there is then the question of what options would lie open to them to dissuade the United States from such action: and as has been seen over the last several decades, the central dissuader of the use of nuclear weapons by states has been the threat of nuclear retaliation.¶ If some readers find this simply too fanciful, and perhaps even offensive to

contemplate, it may be informative to reverse the tables. Russia, which possesses an arsenal of

thousands of nuclear warheads and that has been one of the two most important trustees of the non-use taboo, is subjected to an attack of nuclear terrorism. In response, Moscow places its nuclear forces very visibly on a higher state of alert and declares that it is considering the use of nuclear retaliation against the group and any of its state supporters. How would Washington view such a possibility? Would it really be keen to support Russia’s use of nuclear weapons, including outside Russia’s traditional sphere of influence? And if not, which seems quite plausible, what options

would Washington have to communicate that displeasure?¶ If China had been the victim of the nuclear terrorism and seemed likely to retaliate in kind, would the United States and Russia be happy to sit back and let this occur? In the charged atmosphere immediately after a nuclear terrorist attack, how would the attacked country respond to pressure from other major nuclear powers not to respond in kind?

The phrase “how dare they tell us what to do” immediately springs to mind. Some might even go so far as to interpret this concern as a tacit form of sympathy or support for the terrorists. This might not help the chances of nuclear restraint.

***Uniqueness***

General

Al Qaeda is weak now but could recover if the US allows them the opportunityMcLaughlin 13 (John McLaughlin was a CIA officer for 32 years and served as deputy director and acting director from 2000-2004. He currently teaches at the Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies and is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution, ¶ 06:00 AM ET¶ Terrorism at a moment of transition7/12, http://security.blogs.cnn.com/2013/07/12/terrorism-at-a-moment-of-transition/)

A third major trend has to do with the debate underway among terrorists over tactics, targets, and ways to correct past errors.¶ On targets, jihadists are now pulled in many directions. Many experts contend they are less capable of a major

attack on the U.S. homeland. But given the steady stream of surprises they’ve sprung – ranging from the 2009 “underwear bomber” to the more recent idea of a surgically implanted explosive – it is hard to believe they’ve given up trying to surprise

us with innovations designed to penetrate our defenses.¶ We especially should remain alert that some of the smaller groups could surprise us by pointing an attacker toward the United States, as Pakistan’s Tehrik e Taliban did in preparing

Faizal Shazad for his attempted bombing of Times Square in 2010.¶ At the same time, many of the groups are becoming intrigued by the possibility of scoring gains against regional governments that are now struggling to gain or keep their balance – opportunities that did not exist at the time of the 9/11 attacks.¶ Equally important, jihadists are now learning from their mistakes, especially the reasons for their past rejection by populations where they temporarily gained sway.¶ Documents from al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, discovered after French forces chased them from Mali, reveal awareness that they were too harsh on local inhabitants, especially women. They also recognized that they need to move more gradually and provide tangible services to populations – a practice that has contributed to the success of Hezbollah in Lebanon.¶ We are now seeing a similar awareness among jihadists

in Syria, Tunisia, Libya, and Yemen. If these “lessons learned” take hold and spread, it will become harder to separate terrorists from populations and root them out.¶ Taken together, these three trends are a cautionary tale for those seeking to gauge the future of the terrorist threat.¶ Al Qaeda today may be weakened, but

its wounds are far from fatal. It is at a moment of transition, immersed in

circumstances that could sow confusion and division in the movement or, more likely, extend its life and

impart new momentum .¶ So if we are ever tempted to lower our guard in debating whether

and when this war might end, we should take heed of these trends and of the wisdom J. R. R. Tolkien has Eowyn speak in “Lord of the Rings”: "It needs but one foe to breed a war, not two ..."

Terrorist attacks are on the declineAtlantic Wire 13 (In Fact, the U.S. Has Been Winning the War on Terror, April 16th 2013, http://news.yahoo.com/fact-u-winning-war-terror-200054845.html)

The University of Maryland is home to a project called START, the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. The

project has tracked every terror attack around the world from 1970 to the end of 2011 and provides a database of their research at their website. (START defines a terror attack as "the threatened or actual use of illegal force and violence by a non-state actor to attain a political, economic, religious, or social goal through fear, coercion, or intimidation.") After seeing the Washington Post cite its data, we took a look at what the full database shows about terror attacks.¶ RELATED: Pressure Cookers, Nails, BBs, and Bags: What We Know About the Boston Bombs¶

Relative to the rest of the world, the United States has had a high number of terror attacks since 1970.¶ The countries that have experienced the most terror attacks over the past four decades are those you might suspect: Iraq, Colombia, India, and Pakistan. Others may be less expected for all but experienced foreign policy buffs: Spain, Peru, Turkey. The United States is 14th on the list — ahead of Chile, Guatemala, and Lebanon.¶ RELATED: A Reminder to Be Good to Each Other¶ RELATED: Saying Something About

Boston¶ But there used to be far more attacks in the United States than there are now.¶ The number of attacks has plummeted since the early 1970s, when radical groups attacked police and businesses. There was a slight resurgence during the mid-1990s, when anti-abortion activists began attacking clinics and supporters. The spike in May of 2002 was the result of a series of 18 pipe bombs placed in mailboxes in the Midwest.¶ RELATED: Boston Updates: Second Bombing Victim Identified, No Link to Al-Qaeda¶ Most attacks in the United States have been in New York, California, and Florida.¶ California, New York, and Florida have, combined, seen as many terror attacks since 1970 as all of the rest of the states (and D.C.) combined. Massachusetts is eighth on the list, but it has seen fewer than 1/11th the attacks that California has.¶

The number of people killed and injured varies widely — but most attacks have zero fatalities.¶ In only 11 percent of attacks was anyone killed. Excluding one attack, all of the terror attacks since 1970 have averaged .19 deaths per attack, making any event with a fatality an aberration. The one exception that skews that number was 9/11. Including that attack raises that figure to 1.46 fatalities per attack. 9/11 comprises 86.6 percent of all terror-attack deaths in the U.S. since 1970. (It also necessitates that the scale used for deaths and injuries be logarithmic.)¶ People are slightly more likely to be wounded in attacks. An average of just over one person is wounded in each attack. The increase in fatalities visible in 2009 is almost entirely due to the shooting at Fort Hood.¶ Businesses are the most common target of attacks.¶ The target of attacks changes over time, but since 1970, more attacks have targeted businesses than anything else. Attacks on private citizens, which one would assume includes the attack in Boston, are third-most common.¶ Bombs are used in attacks most frequently.¶ Almost half of all terror attacks in the United States since 1970 have used bombs. Relatively few attacks have employed firearms as a primary strategy.¶ These trends are not static, but more recent attacks don't

stray too far from the pattern. In a report released last December, START articulates data about attacks since 2001.¶ There were a total of 207 terrorist attacks in the United States between 2001 and 2011.¶ Total attacks declined from a high of 40 in 2001 to nine in 2011.¶ Between 2001 and 2011, we recorded a total of 21 fatal terrorist attacks in the United

States.¶ The highest proportion of unsuccessful attacks since 1970 occurred in 2011, when four out of nine recorded attacks were unsuccessful. …¶ The most common weapons used in terrorist attacks in the United States from 2001 to 2011 were incendiary devices (53 percent of all weapons used) and

explosives (20 percent of all weapons used).¶ Successful attacks are more and more rare; attacks

that result in fatalities, rarer still . The attack in Boston did enormous physical and psychological damage. We

can be somewhat consoled that it is an aberration.

Terrorists are losing - no leadership or recruits.Yousafzai 12 (Newsweek's correspondent in Pakistan and Afghanistan, ‘12[Sami, “Al Qaeda on the Ropes: One Fighter’s Inside Story”, 1-2-12, The Daily Beast http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/01/01/al-qaeda-on-the-ropes-one-fighter-s-inside-story.html, RSR]

Is it still too soon to write al Qaeda’s obituary? Over the past two years, the group’s ranks have been ravaged by America’s unmanned-aerial-vehicle attacks and by a steady exodus of demoralized jihadis fleeing Pakistan’s tribal areas. When Newsweek interviewed Hanif (his nom de guerre) for our Sept. 13, 2010, cover story, “Inside Al Qaeda,” he estimated that the group had roughly 130 Arabs in Waziristan, along with dozens more Chechens, Turks, Tajiks, even recruits from Western Europe. But little more than a

year later, he estimates there are no more than 40 to 60 al Qaeda operatives of any nationality on either side of the border. “Al Qaeda was once full of great jihadis, but no one is active and planning opera-tions anymore,” he complains. “Those who remain are just trying to survive.” The son of longtime Afghan war refugees living in Pakistan, Hanif had just turned 15 when (against his parents’ strenuous objections) he ran away to join the war against the U.S. forces in his home country. That was in early 2009, and for the next year and more, the bright but impressionable boy lived among al Qaeda fighters in the isolated wilds of North Waziristan. His parents finally persuaded him to return home in June 2010, but he headed out again this past June in hope of reconnecting with his old unit. He was shocked by

what he found. “The flower is wilting,” he told a Newsweek correspondent who met with him in December in a Taliban safe house

near the Afghan town of Khost. “I think the once-glorious chapter of al Qaeda is being closed.” Few Americans share Hanif’s regret at the terrorist group’s decline. But by all accounts, al Qaeda has been practically wiped out in its former Afghan and Pakistani strongholds. Although America has suspended its drone attacks inside Pakistan since mid-November—the program’s longest hiatus in three years—the respite seems to have come too late for bin Laden’s old associates. “The drone attacks may have ended, but only after the near ending of al Qaeda in the tribal areas,” says a senior Taliban intelligence officer who has been in contact with surviving members of the

group. “As far as I can tell, the operational command of al Qaeda has almost been eliminated.” Hanif’s uncle, a Taliban operative, tells Newsweek he’s been in contact with a few al Qaeda members who have

taken refuge outside the tribal areas. “All of al Qaeda’s assets who had a strategic vision have been eliminated,” they’ve told him. Hanif says it’s been months since anyone in Waziristan has seen or heard directly from bin Laden’s successor, Ayman al-Zawahiri. The Egyptian-born physician did post a video message on Dec. 1 boasting that al Qaeda had seized aid worker Warren Weinstein, a 70-year-old American, in Lahore—as if holding one old man hostage was an achievement. “I think the martyrdom of our great Sheik was the end,” Hanif says. “As long as the Sheik was alive, our leaders were strong and were determined to fight. But his death and the drones have sucked the blood out of our leadership. Now leaders seem to spend all their time moving from one place to another for their safety.” Lying low didn’t save Sheik Ayatullah; the drones got him

soon after Hanif’s return to Waziristan. New recruits have stopped coming, Hanif says. “When new people came they brought new blood, enthusiasm, and money. All that has been lost.” The money may be a bigger problem than the

manpower, he says. Al Qaeda used to receive millions of dollars a year from Arabian Gulf contributors, but Hanif’s uncle says his contacts tell him the donations have dried up. Instead, he believes, the money is going to the more productive and generally nonviolent Arab Spring movements in North Africa, Syria, and Yemen. “I think Arab people now think the fight should be political at home and not terrorism

aimed at the West,” says the uncle. “The peaceful struggle on Arab streets has accomplished more than bin Laden and Zawahiri ever have.”

The US is winning the war on terrorismBoot 8 (Are We Winning the War on Terror?Max Boot, Max Boot is a senior fellow in national-security studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, a regular contributor to COMMENTARY's blog CONTENTIONS, July 2008 , http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/are-we-winning-the-war-on-terror/)

On balance, we are doing pretty well. Near strategic defeat of al Qaeda in Iraq. Near strategic defeat for al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia. Significant setbacks for al Qaeda globally—and here I’m going to use the word “ideologically”—as a lot of the Islamic world pushes back on their

form of Islam. ¶ Thus spoke CIA Director Michael Hayden in an interview with the Washington Post

published on May 30 under the headline, “U.S. Cites Big Gains Against al Qaeda.”¶ Hayden’s upbeat assessment is shared by a surprising number of analysts who have written recently about al Qaeda’s decline and possible fall, including Fareed Zakaria in Newsweek, David Ignatius in the Washington Post, Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker, Peter Bergen and Paul Cruikshank in the New Republic, former CIA analyst Marc Sageman in a new book, Leaderless Jihad: Terror Networks in the 21st Century, and Michael Sheehan, a former New York Police Department counterterrorism chief, in Crush the Cell: How

to Defeat Terrorism Without Terrorizing Ourselves.¶ There is much evidence to support their optimistic conclusions—certainly more evidence than there was to support the previous conventional wisdom, propounded by many of these same writers not so long ago, that the American-led invasion of Iraq was a great gift to al Qaeda and that as a result we were losing the global war on terror. (Bergen, for instance, published an article just last fall entitled, “War of Error:

How Osama bin Laden Beat George W. Bush.”)¶ It turns out that, far from emerging victorious, al Qaeda in Iraq has been driven out of its erstwhile strongholds in Anbar, Baghdad, and Diyala provinces. Its last refuge is in the northern city of Mosul, and even there, thanks to a joint Iraqi-American offensive, attacks

were cut in half during the month of May. From Basra to Baghdad, Shiite terrorists loosely affiliated with Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi army are also in retreat, thanks primarily to the operations of the Iraqi security forces under the direction of Prime Minister Nouri al-

Maliki. Outside of Iraq and Afghanistan, al Qaeda has not managed to mount any major attacks on an American target, much less on the American homeland, since 9/11. Those attacks that have succeeded have been fairly minor compared with past al-Qaeda atrocities: a 2004 assault on the U.S. consulate in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, killed five local employees and no Americans.¶ There is good

reason to think that al Qaeda is still reeling from the blows it suffered in the aftermath of 9/11. As Wright notes, “nearly 80 percent of al Qaeda’s members in Afghanistan were killed in the final months of 2001,” and since then more have been killed or captured in countries ranging from Yemen and Pakistan to Spain and Indonesia. In his Washington Post interview, Hayden mentioned that since the beginning of this year alone, “al Qaeda’s global leadership has lost three senior officers, including two who succumbed ‘to violence,’ an apparent reference to Predator strikes that killed terrorist leaders Abu Laith al-Libi and Abu Sulayman al-Jazairi in Pakistan.” In an effort to avoid a similar fate, Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri, the top leaders, have gone into progressively deeper hiding, probably in the rugged tribal areas of western Pakistan. This has kept them alive and free but made it difficult for them to communicate with their followers or guide their efforts.¶ _____________¶ ¶ The thinning of its ranks and the loss of central direction have had an obvious impact on al Qaeda’s operational

effectiveness. A new study from Simon Fraser University in British Columbia, Human Security 2007, finds that since 2001, there has been a net decline of 40 percent in casualties from terrorism around the world. (That is excluding Iraq, which is after all a war zone; if you include it, there has been an overall increase since 2001 but a decrease since 2006.) Another 2007 analysis, by the U.S.-based IntelCenter, “came to the conclusion,” according to Zakaria, “that the number of Islamist attacks had declined 65 percent from a high point in 2004, and fatalities from such attacks had declined by 90 percent.”¶ With only a handful of exceptions—the bombings in Bali (2002), Madrid (2004), and London (2005) come to mind—the attacks staged by al Qaeda and its affiliates have mostly killed fellow Muslims. This has led to a major backlash in the Muslim world. The survey data are summarized by the Simon Fraser report:¶ Muslim support for terrorist violence against civilians [as of July 2007] had declined by half or more over five years in all of the four countries polled: Afghanistan, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, and Iraq.¶ By late 2007 in Afghanistan, just 1 percent of Afghans “strongly supported” the presence of the Taliban and foreign jihadi fighters in their country. In Pakistan, support for Islamist political parties has collapsed—dropping by more than four-fifths between the 2002 and 2008 national elections. And in the North-West Frontier Province where al Qaeda has its strongest presence in Pakistan, support for Osama bin Laden dropped from 70 percent in August 2007 to 4 percent in January 2008.¶ A December 2007 poll in Saudi Arabia found that Osama bin Laden’s fellow countrymen had “dramatically turned against him, against al Qaeda, and against terrorism in general.” And in Iraq, where the Islamists have suffered their greatest recent strategic setback, a major poll also released in December 2007 found that 100 percent of Iraqis—Sunnis as well as Shiites—found al Qaeda in Iraq’s attacks on civilians to be “unacceptable.”¶ Al Qaeda has not only lost support among the Muslim masses. It has lost support even among some of its strongest adherents. Sayyid Imam al-Sharif, better known as “Dr. Fadl,” was a co-founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and al Qaeda. He was a mentor to Ayman al-Zawahiri, and the author of one of the most important jihadist tracts, Guide to the Path of Righteousness for Jihad and Belief. Last year, from an Egyptian prison cell, he issued a ground-breaking manifesto, Rationalizing Jihad in Egypt and the World. While stipulating that some jihadist activity (e.g., in Afghanistan) is still justified, al-Sharif denounces the sort of indiscriminate bombings perpetrated by al Qaeda and particularly disagrees with attacks on Christians and Jews: “They are the neighbors of the Muslims . . . and being kind to one’s neighbors is a religious duty.” Zawahiri took this well-publicized challenge so seriously that he issued a response running to nearly 200 pages.

Detention

Detention is helping us win the war on terror now Tenet 9 (George, Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) for the United States Central Intelligence Agency, Distinguished Professor in the Practice of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, At the Center of the Storm, Oct 13 2009, By George Tenet, http://books.google.com/books?id=Xbh-fxt7ZIwC&lpg=PA255&dq=%22I%20believe%20that%20none%20of%20these%20successes%20would%20have%20happened%20if%20we%20had%20to%20treat%20KSM&pg=PP1#v=onepage&q=%22I%20believe%20that%20none%20of%20these%20successes%20would%20have%20happened%20if%20we%20had%20to%20treat%20KSM&f=false, p.255)

I believe none of these successes would have happened if we had had to treat KSM like a white-collar criminal – read him his Miranda rights and get him a lawyer who surely would have insised that his client simply shut up. In his initial interrogation by CIA officers,

KSM was defiant. “I’ll talk to you guys,” he said, “after I get to New York and see my lawyer.” Apparently he thought he would be immediately shipped to the United States and indicted in the Southern District of

New York. Had that happened, I am confident that we would have obtained none of the information he had in his head about imminent threats against the American people. From our interrogation of KSM and other senior al-Qa’ida members, and our examination of

documents found on them, we learned many things – not just tactical information leading to the next capture. For example, more than twenty plots had been put in motion by al-Qa’ida against U.S. infrastructure targets, including comunications nodes, nuclear power plants, dams, bridges, and tunnels. All these plots were in various stages of planning when we captured or killed the pre-9/11 al-Qa’ida leaders behind them.

We’re winning the war on terrorism – detention is whyThiessen 12 (Marc Thiessen, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, is a columnist and the author of "Courting Disaster." He was chief speech writer for President George W. Bush and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. , “no intelligence without detention”, 11/18/2012, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/11/18/should-obama-close-guantanamo-and-end-military-tribunals/dead-terrorists-cant-give-us-intelligence)

Dead terrorists cannot tell you their plans for new attacks. When we kill high-value terrorists, we vaporize all the intelligence they possess — information we cannot get

anywhere else about Al Qaeda’s operations, recruits, safe houses, communications and plans for new attacks. We need this intelligence to save lives.¶ As the author Mark Bowden makes clear in his new book, "The Finish,"

intelligence from captured terrorists played an important role in the operation that killed Osama bin Laden. The Obama administration uses the treasure trove of intelligence it inherited from the Bush administration every day. But with each passing year, that intelligence becomes increasingly dated. New leaders rise through the ranks. New plots are conceived. And new networks form in places like Yemen, Somalia, Mali and eastern Libya, about which we know little.

***Links--- General***

Links--- General Topic Links

Strong executive war powers key to fighting terrorists Royal 2011 (John Paul Royal, Institute of World Politics, “War Powers and the Age of Terrorism,” Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress The Fellows Review, http://www.thepresidency.org/storage/Fellows2011/Royal-_Final_Paper.pdf)

Proliferation of weapons of mass destruction (WMD), especially nuclear ¶ weapons, into the hands of these terrorists is the most dangerous threat to the ¶ United States. We know from the 9/11 Commission Report that Al Qaeda has ¶ attempted to make and obtain nuclear weapons for at least the past fifteen years. Al ¶ Qaeda considers the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction to be a religious ¶ obligation while “more than two dozen other terrorist groups are pursing CBRN ¶ [chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear] materials” (National Commission ¶ 2004, 397). Considering these statements,

rogue regimes that are openly hostile to ¶ the United States and have or seek to develop nuclear weapons capability such as ¶ North Korea and Iran, or extremely unstable nuclear countries

such as Pakistan, ¶ pose a special threat to American national security interests. These nations were ¶ not necessarily a direct threat to the United States in the past. Now, however, due ¶ to proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile technology, they can inflict damage ¶ at considerably higher levels and magnitudes than in the past. In addition, these ¶ regimes may pursue proliferation of nuclear weapons and missile technology to ¶ other nations and to allied terrorist organizations. ¶ The United States must pursue condign punishment and appropriate, rapid ¶

action against hostile terrorist organizations, rogue nation states, and nuclear ¶ weapons proliferation threats

in order to protect American interests both at home ¶ and abroad. Combating these threats are the “top national security priority for the ¶ United States…with the full support of Congress, both major political parties, the ¶ media, and the American people” (National

Commission 2004, 361). Operations ¶ may take the form of pre-emptive and sustained action against those who have ¶ expressed hostility or declared war on the United States. Only the executive branch ¶ can effectively execute this

mission , authorized by the 2001 AUMF. If the national ¶ consensus or the nature of the threat changes,

Congress possesses the intrinsic ¶ power to rescind and limit these powers.

Only a strong executive solvesRoyal 2011 (John Paul Royal, Institute of World Politics, “War Powers and the Age of Terrorism,” Center for the Study of the Presidency & Congress The Fellows Review, http://www.thepresidency.org/storage/Fellows2011/Royal-_Final_Paper.pdf) Alexis de Tocqueville, that prescient and inimitable observer of America, ¶ noted in his classic work Democracy in America that circumstances eventually ¶ would cause executive power to grow over time as the United States expanded in ¶ power and prestige. Observing the diminutive size and strength of the

American ¶ armed forces of the period, he wrote that the “President of the United States is in ¶ the possession of almost royal prerogatives, which he has no opportunity of ¶ exercising; and those privileges which he can at present use are very circumscribed: ¶ the laws allow him to possess a degree of influence which circumstances do not ¶ permit him to employ” (de Tocqueville 1839, 119). Indeed at the time, the United ¶ States had little need for strong defenses since the country was isolated from the ¶ great powers of the day by two vast oceans; had few threats from its direct ¶ neighbors; and did not have major conflicting interests with other nations around ¶ the world. ¶ But Tocqueville stated

that as the United States grew and threats to the ¶ nation increased, so too

would its dependence on executive power. In foreign ¶ affairs and national security, the executive power of a nation must “exert its skill ¶ and its vigor.” As Tocqueville predicted: ¶ If the existence of the Union were perpetually threatened, and if its chief ¶ interests were in daily connection with those of other powerful nations, ¶ the executive government would assume an increased importance in ¶ proportion to the measures expected of it, and those which it would ¶ carry into effect (de Tocqueville 1839, 119). ¶ And

so it has come to pass. Certainly, the Executive has grown but so have ¶ the intelligence services, armed forces, and foreign policy apparatus of the United ¶ States. Congress created, funded, trained, and organized an international U.S. ¶ national security presence throughout the world capable of quickly deployable ¶ global missions executed by the President. In an increasingly dangerous and ¶ globalized world filled with “perpetual threats,” it was prudent and judicious of the ¶ Founders to establish a flexible and fluid constitutional order to protect national ¶ interests during times of uncertainty, crisis, and war.

Statutory Restrictions Links

Statutory restrictions hurt war fighting effectiveness--- strong executive keyYoo 2012 (John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, February 1, 2012, “War Powers Belong to the President,” ABA Journal, http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/war_powers_belong_to_the_president)

Congress’ track record when it has opposed presidential leadership has not been a happy one. Perhaps the most telling example was the Senate’s rejection of the Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I. Congress’ isolationist urge kept the United States out of Europe at a time when democracies fell and fascism grew in their place. Even as Europe and Asia plunged into war, Congress passed the Neutrality Acts designed to keep the United States out of the conflict. President Franklin Roosevelt violated those laws to help the Allies and draw the nation into war against the Axis. While pro-Congress critics worry about a president’s foreign adventurism, the real threat to our national security may come from inaction and isolationism.¶ Many point to the Vietnam War as an example of the faults of the “imperial presidency.” Vietnam, however, could not have continued without the consistent support of Congress in raising a large military and paying for hostilities. And Vietnam ushered in a period of congressional dominance that witnessed American setbacks in the Cold War and the passage of the ineffectual War Powers Resolution. Congress passed the resolution in 1973 over President Richard Nixon’s veto, and no president, Republican or Democrat, George W. Bush or Obama, has ever accepted the constitutionality of its 60-day limit on the use of troops abroad. No federal court has ever upheld the

resolution. Even Congress has never enforced it.¶ Despite the record of practice and the Constitution’s institutional design, critics nevertheless argue for a radical remaking of the American way of war. They typically base their claim on Article I, Section 8, of the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to “declare war.” But these observers read the 18th century constitutional text through a modern lens by interpreting “declare war” to mean “start war.” When the Constitution was written, however, a declaration of war served diplomatic notice about a change in legal relations between nations. It had little to do with launching hostilities. In the century before the Constitution, for example, Great Britain—where the framers got the idea of the declare-war power—fought

numerous major conflicts but declared war only once beforehand.¶ Our Constitution sets out specific procedures for passing laws, appointing officers and making treaties. There are none for waging war because the framers expected the president and Congress to struggle over war through the national political process. In fact, other parts of the Constitution, properly read, support this reading. Article I, Section 10, for example, declares that the states shall not “engage” in war “without the consent of Congress” unless “actually invaded, or in such imminent danger as will not admit of delay.” This provision creates exactly the limits

desired by anti-war critics, complete with an exception for self-defense. If the framers had wanted to require congressional permission before the president could wage war, they simply could have repeated this provision and applied it to the executive.¶

Presidents, of course, do not have complete freedom to take the nation to war. Congress has ample powers to control presidential policy, if it wants to. Only Congress can raise the military, which gives it the power to block, delay or modify war plans. Before 1945, for example, the United States had such a small peacetime military that presidents who started a war would have to go hat in hand to Congress to build an army to fight it. Since World War II, it has been Congress that has authorized and funded our large standing military, one primarily designed to conduct offensive, not defensive, operations (as we learned all too tragically on 9/11) and to swiftly project power worldwide. If Congress wanted to discourage presidential initiative in war, it could build a smaller, less offensive-minded military.¶ Congress’ check on the presidency lies not just in the long-term raising of the military. It can also block any immediate armed

conflict through the power of the purse. If Congress feels it has been misled in authorizing war, or it disagrees with the president’s decisions, all it need do is cut off funds, either all at once or gradually. It can reduce the size of the military, shrink or eliminate units, or freeze supplies. Using the power of the purse does not even require affirmative congressional action. Congress can just sit on its hands and refuse to pass a law funding the latest presidential adventure, and the war will end quickly. Even the Kosovo war, which lasted little more than two months and involved no ground troops, required special funding legislation.¶

The framers expected Congress’ power of the purse to serve as the primary check on presidential war. During the 1788 Virginia ratifying convention, Patrick Henry attacked the Constitution for failing to limit executive militarism. James Madison responded: “The sword is in the hands of the British king; the purse is in the hands of the Parliament. It is so in America, as far as any analogy can exist.” Congress ended America’s involvement in Vietnam by cutting off all funds for the

war.¶ Our Constitution has succeeded because it favors swift presidential action in war, later checked by Congress’ funding power. If a president continues to wage war without congressional authorization, as in Libya, Kosovo or Korea, it is only because Congress has chosen not to exercise its easy check. We should not confuse a desire to escape political responsibility for a defect

in the Constitution.¶ A radical change in the system for making war might appease critics

of presidential power. But it could also seriously threaten American national security. In order to forestall another 9/11 attack, or to take advantage of a window of opportunity to strike terrorists or rogue nations, the executive branch needs flexibility. It is not hard to think of situations where congressional consent cannot be obtained in time to act. Time for congressional deliberation, which

leads only to passivity and isolation and not smarter decisions, will come at the price of speed and secrecy. ¶ The Constitution creates a presidency that can respond forcefully to prevent serious threats to our national security. Presidents can take the initiative and Congress can use its funding power to

check them. Instead of demanding a legalistic process to begin war, the framers left war to politics. As we confront the new challenges of terrorism, rogue nations and WMD proliferation, now is not the time to introduce sweeping, untested changes in the way we make war.

Congressional decisionmaking process hurts war fighting effectiveness Yoo 2012 (John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, February 1, 2012, “War Powers Belong to the President,” ABA Journal, http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/war_powers_belong_to_the_president)

The framers realized the obvious. Foreign affairs are unpredictable and involve the highest of stakes, making them unsuitable to regulation by pre-existing legislation. Instead, they can demand swift, decisive action—sometimes under

pressured or even emergency circumstances—that is best carried out by a branch of government that does not suffer from multiple vetoes or is delayed by disagreements. Congress is too large and unwieldy to take the swift and decisive action required in wartime. Our framers replaced the Articles of Confederation, which had failed in the management of foreign relations because they had no single executive, with the

Constitution’s single president for precisely this reason. Even when it has access to the same intelligence as the executive branch, Congress’ loose, decentralized structure would paralyze American policy while foreign threats grow.

Congressional oversight is bad, broad executive war powers key to WOTYoo 2006 (John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, September 2006, “How the Presidency Regained Its Balance,” AEI, http://67.208.89.102/files/2006/09/25/20060925_YooOTIPresidentialPower.pdf)

To his critics, President Bush is a “King ¶ George” bent on an “imperial presidency.” But the ¶ inescapable fact is that war shifts power to the ¶ branch most responsible for its waging: the executive. Harry Truman sent troops to fight in Korea¶ without Congressional authority. George H. W.¶ Bush did not have the consent of Congress when¶ he invaded Panama to apprehend Manuel Noriega.¶ Nor did Bill Clinton when he initiated NATO’s¶ air war over Kosovo.¶ The Bush administration’s decisions to terminate the 1972 antiballistic missile treaty and to¶

withdraw from the International Criminal Court¶ and the Kyoto accords on global warming rested¶ on constitutional precedents going all the way¶ back to Abraham Lincoln.¶ The administration has also been energetic on¶ the domestic front. It has reclassified national¶ security information made public in earlier administrations and declined, citing executive privilege,¶ to disclose information to Congress or the courts¶

about its energy policy task force. The White¶ House has declared that the Constitution allows¶ the president to sidestep laws that invade his executive authority. That is why President Bush has¶ issued hundreds of signing statements—more than¶ any previous president—reserving his right not to¶ enforce unconstitutional

laws. A reinvigorated presidency enrages President Bush’s critics, who seem to believe that the Constitution created a ¶ system of judicial or Congressional supremacy. Perhaps¶ this is to be expected of the generation of legislators that¶ views the presidency

through the lens of Vietnam and¶ Watergate. But the Founders intended that wrongheaded ¶ or obsolete legislation and judicial decisions would be ¶ checked by presidential action, just as executive overreaching is to be checked by the courts and Congress. ¶ The changes of the 1970s occurred largely because we¶ had no serious national security threats to¶ United States soil, but plenty of paranoia¶ in the wake of Richard Nixon’s use of¶ national

security agencies to spy on¶ political opponents. Congress enacted ¶ the War Powers Resolution, which purports to cut off presidential uses of force¶ abroad after sixty days. It passed the Budget and Impoundment Act to eliminate¶ the modest presidential power to rein in¶ wasteful spending. The Foreign Intelligence and Surveillance Act required the¶ government to get a warrant from a

special court to conduct wiretapping for¶ national security reasons.¶ These statutes have produced little ¶ but dysfunction, from flouting of the war ¶ powers law, to ever- higher pork barrel spending, to the ¶ wall between intelligence and law enforcement that contributed to our failure to stop the 9/11 attacks . ¶ The 1970s

shifted power from the president to Congress,¶ and the latter proved a far more accommodating boss to ¶ federal agencies looking for budget dollars—a fragmented ¶ legislature is obviously much easier to game than a chief ¶ executive. But 535 members of Congress cannot manage ¶ day-to-day policy. A legislature’s function is to draft the¶ laws of the land, set broad goals, and spend taxpayer revenues

in the national interest—not to micromanage.

Congressional oversight can’t work against terrorist threatsYoo 2003 (John Yoo, deputy assistant attorney general from 2001 to 2003, professor at the University of California at Berkeley School of Law, “Applying the War Powers Resolution to the War on Terrorism,” Green Bag, http://www.greenbag.org/v6n2/v6n2_article_yoo.pdf)

At the same time, however, we must recognize that we are in a war against, to use¶ Chairman Feingold’s words again, “a loose network of terrorists,” and not “a

state with¶ clearly defend borders.” When fighting “a¶ highly mobile, diffuse enemy that operates¶ largely beyond the reach of our conventional¶ war-fighting techniques,” extensive congressional discussions will often be a luxury we¶ cannot afford. Our enemy hides in the civilian populations of the nations of the world.¶ As Chairman Feingold pointed out, “there¶ can be no peace treaty with such an¶ enemy.”43

Likewise, there can be no formal,¶ public declaration of war against such an¶ enemy.¶ The attacks of September 11 introduced the¶ United States into an unprecedented military¶ situation. This Administration is confident¶ that the allocation of war powers contemplated¶ by the Founders of our Constitution is fully¶ adequate to address the dangers of the Twenty First Century, and that, armed with the war¶ powers conferred upon him by the Constitution and recognized by the War Powers¶ Resolution, the President will be able to work¶ effectively with this Committee and with Congress to ensure the protection of the United¶ States from additional terrorist attack.

Judicial Restrictions Links

Court involvement hinders the War on Terror--- Executive flexibility is keyWittes 2008 (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School, “The Necessity and Impossibility of Judicial Review,” in Law and the Long War, https://webspace.utexas.edu/rmc2289/National%20Security%20and%20the%20Courts/Law%20and%20the%20Long%20War%20%20Chapter%204.pdf)The second option, asking judges to okay those decisions, should be at ¶ least as uncomfortable as the possibility of a more modest conception of the ¶ judicial function in the current conflict. To go back to the capture of Auschwitz commandant Rudolf Hoess, would we really want a panel of judges, far ¶ from the action and with no conception of how vulnerable Hoess's wife might ¶ have been to more traditional interrogation, to declare that those British soldiers' agonizingly coercive interrogation of her was lawful? Would we really ¶ prefer that the interrogation had not taken place and Hoess gone free? Or are ¶ we perhaps content with what happened? The interrogation happened, the ¶ British caught Hoess, and no court

anywhere had to stamp its approval on an ugly action. There is an honorable place for judicial silence-one that too easy recourse to the courts obliterates-a place that neither precludes nor validates options. When the Supreme Court, as it has

done since September 11, ¶ positions itself as a central actor in the design of the rules of the war on terror, ¶ it risks obliterating its capacity for silence. Those who cheer its incipient but ¶ growing role need to think hard about whether they want in the future the ¶ courts to be obliged-by the very nature of their role in society-to pronounce on the capture of Rudolf Hoesses. ¶ Indeed, if we don't leave judges space for silence, we will end up either ¶ paralyzing our response to

terrorism or corrupting the judiciary. We will have ¶ to decide as a society whether we want to prohibit

highly coercive interrogation in all circumstances or to put judges in charge of it. If we are entirely ¶ honest, the answer to this question, which I address in Chapter 7, is that we ¶ don't want to prohibit it in all circumstances-but that we just as surely don't ¶ want to say that, much less write it into our laws.

Insulating judges from such ¶ questions offers a measure of permission for a kind of constructive hypocrisy ¶ that allows us more restrictive rules than we could probably otherwise afford. ¶ The gaps let us ban torture and conduct just shy of it, and when we need to ¶ practice it anyway, protect those we ask to do the dirty work from branding as war criminals. That hypocrisy, so deplored by human rights groups, seems to ¶ me valuable. It's a messy marriage of the twin facts that, on the one hand, no ¶ society can survive in the long run while shrinking from the steps necessary to ¶ secure its survival and, on the other hand, that some ofthese steps are ones of ¶ which no democracy can be proud.

Judicial checks undermine WOT effectivenessWittes 2008 (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School, “The Necessity and Impossibility of Judicial Review,” in Law and the Long War, https://webspace.utexas.edu/rmc2289/National%20Security%20and%20the%20Courts/Law%20and%20the%20Long%20War%20%20Chapter%204.pdf)

A broad conception of judicial review in this conflict also suffers from an ¶ unrealistic assessment of judicial competence and capacity to evaluate military actions. This is true partly because of the limits of judges as people un-trained in military

matters and the limits of evidence collected in a fashion so ¶ far removed from the one to which judges are

accustomed. Even when the ¶ military uses evidence it did not obtain through any untoward coercion, it will ¶ generally not have observed such standard law enforcement practices as preserving chains of custody of physical evidence. Society asks a lot of a judge ¶ who has never been to Afghanistan, who has never served in the military, and ¶ who has no intimacy with the day-to-day conduct of its overseas antiterrorism operations to decide not merely how to handle a morass of evidence of ¶ questionable probative value about a detainee who may pose an extreme danger if allowed to walk free but also to make up the rules and standards under ¶ which he will consider that evidence. The temptation among some judges in ¶ that situation, understanding their own limitations,

will be to defer absolutely ¶ to the military's judgment. Other judges, like the carpenter whose only tool is

¶ hammer and for whom every problem therefore resembles a nail, will try to ¶ apply criminal justice evidentiary standards to combat operations. The public ¶ should find neither reaction an appealing prospect.

The link is big--- Courts are uniquely bad at conducting the WOTWittes 2008 (Benjamin Wittes, Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, where he is the Research Director in Public Law, and Co-Director of the Harvard Law School, “The Necessity and Impossibility of Judicial Review,” in Law and the Long War, https://webspace.utexas.edu/rmc2289/National%20Security%20and%20the%20Courts/Law%20and%20the%20Long%20War%20%20Chapter%204.pdf) Yet the case against a dominant role for the judiciary in designing the legal ¶ architecture of the conflict is a

strong one. The risks of a big judicial footprint ¶ the war on terrorism are significant, far more significant than those who ¶ keen to leverage judicial power as a counterweight to

executive power ¶ acknowledge. What's more, the judiciary's capacity to design the kind of creative policies America needs in this conflict is exceptionally limited. Even ¶ as a check on the executive branch, the courts have proven erratic, useful more ¶

in spurring congressional action than in the restraint they have imposed ¶ themselves-for notwithstanding the popular mythology, they have not yet ¶ imposed much actual restraint. This is not to say that judges

have no role in ¶ overseeing the legal architecture of the war. But their proper role is not everything that human rights advocates imagine it to be. And critically, it is not a ¶ leading role in the design of the architecture but, rather, an important one in ¶ the fabric of that architecture as designed by others.

***Links--- Detention***

Civilian Trial Link--- Intelligence

Either the aff spills the beans on our intel or it releases terroristsMukasey 2009 (Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009, October 19, 2009, “Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists,” WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475300052267212.html)

Moreover, it appears likely that certain charges could not be presented in a civilian court because the proof that would have to be offered could, if publicly disclosed, compromise sources and methods of intelligence gathering. The military commissions regimen established for use at Guantanamo was designed with such considerations in mind. It provided a way of handling classified information so as to make it available to a defendant's counsel while preserving confidentiality. The courtroom facility at

Guantanamo was constructed, at a cost of millions of dollars, specifically to accommodate the handling of classified information and the heightened security needs of a trial of such defendants.

Civilian Trial Link--- Releases Terrorists

The aff imports terrorists into the USMcCarthy 2009 (Andy McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, October 23, 2009, “Imprison Here, Release Here,” National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228465/imprison-here-release-here/andrew-c-mccarthy)

Here’s the thing: Because we still have Gitmo, at least Mutairi was outside the United States. When the judge voided his combatant status and the Justice Department declined to challenge the ruling, Kollar-Kotelly was in no position to force Mutairi’s release inside our country. He either had to go home to Kuwait or bide his time, like the Uighur detainees, until a country willing to take

him was found.¶ Rest assured that this will not happen if the detainees are transferred to U.S. prisons, so that Gitmo can be shuttered. Once they are here, we will have the perfect storm: Federal judges, inherently hostile to detention without trial, running amok with no guidance from Congress, no political accountability, and no jury to check their excesses; combatant-designations judicially voided for scores of trained jihadists no trustworthy country is willing to take in; and a combatant-friendly Justice Department unwilling to challenge the judicial

usurpation of the military’s war-fighting powers. Inexorably, the judges will order that the detainees be released in the United States. One judge already tried to do that with the Uighurs, even though they were outside the United States and had no legal right to enter.

Aff releases terrorists and hurts the WOTStimson 2009 (Charles Stimson, Manager, National Security Law Program and Senior Legal Fellow, September 28, 2009, “Punting National Security to the Judiciary,” Heritage, http://www.heritage.org/research/commentary/2009/09/punting-national-security-to-the-judiciary)

Addressing Bush's "ad hoc legal approach" at Gitmo in his National Archives speech, Obama said, "I can tell you that the wrong answer is to pretend like this problem will go away if we maintain an unsustainable status quo." He continued, promising to "reshape these [legal] standards to ensure they are in line with the rule of law . . . Our goal is to construct a legal framework for Guantanamo detainees -- not to avoid one."¶ Yet yesterday's announcement that he won't seek legislation specifically authorizing prolonged

detention means he is embracing the very thing he was most critical of, and purposefully avoiding

that which is most necessary: establishing a durable, long-term, and sustainable framework for legal detention, not just for detainees currently at Guantanamo, but for future high-value captures outside of Afghanistan.¶ Instead, he will rely on the current congressional Authorization of Use of Military Force, which authorizes the president to "use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks." Thus, President Obama will decide who is to be detained, where, and for how long. Yet, when addressing this very issue in his National Archives speech, President Obama asserted, "In our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man." Apparently, there is the Obama exception to the one-man prohibition.¶ So what is really going on here? To those of us who have either served in senior policy posts and dealt with these issues on a daily basis, or followed them closely from the

outside, it is becoming increasingly clear that this administration is trying to create the appearance of a tough national-security policy regarding the detention of terrorists at Guantanamo, yet allow the courts to make the tough

calls on releasing the bad guys. Letting the courts do the dirty work would give the

administration plausible cover and distance from the decision-making process. The numbers speak

for themselves. ¶ Of the 38 detainees whose cases have been adjudicated through the habeas process in federal court in Washington, 30 have been ordered released by civilian judges. That is close to an 80 percent loss rate for the government, which argued for continued detention. Yet, how many of these decisions has this administration appealed, knowing full well that many of those 30 detainees should not in good conscience be let go? The answer: one.

2NC Terrorist Release Link Magnifier

Terrorists cannot be released safelyTaylor 2009 (Stuart Taylor, January 30, 2009, “Obama's Dangerous Detainees,” National Journal, http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20090117_2727.php)

Indeed, the Pentagon said on January 13 that 18 of the approximately 500 Guantanamo detainees already released have definitely returned "to the fight" against America and that another 43 are suspected of doing so. Critics gave these claims little credibility because the Pentagon refused to provide details.¶ Meanwhile, human-rights activists have been seeking to create the false impressions that not many of the Guantanamo detainees are dangerous; that those who are can be prosecuted; and that the rest can be safely released.¶ But

the military has determined that only about 60 of the 250 detainees could be released relatively safely, if other countries would take them, and that only 80 of the rest (including 9/11 mastermind Khalid Shaikh Mohammed) could face trial for war crimes by Bush's special "military commissions." ¶ Obama may decide that more than 60 are not dangerous. Otherwise, that leaves 110 or so detainees who are considered both too dangerous to release and not-prosecutable; at least, military commission prosecutors have found no basis for charging them or (in some cases) the charges have

been dismissed.¶ The number who could be prosecuted might well be lower than 80 if Obama follows through on his declared intent to move any and all prosecutions of detainees to ordinary federal or military courts. The president-elect reportedly, and in my view rightly, plans to suspend use of the military commissions. They have been an international embarrassment, in part because their rules allow for use of some evidence obtained through

coercive interrogation.¶ Some of the apparently dangerous detainees could not be convicted because there is no (or not enough) evidence that they have acted on their declared intent to kill Americans; some because the evidence against them was obtained by intelligence sources and methods too sensitive to be aired in a public trial or even shown to defendants; and some (perhaps including

Qahtani) because the only strong evidence was obtained through coercive interrogation, involves hearsay, or is otherwise inadmissible.

The aff releases all these terroristsTaylor 2009 (Stuart Taylor, January 30, 2009, “Obama's Dangerous Detainees,” National Journal, http://www.nationaljournal.com/njmagazine/or_20090117_2727.php)

News reports suggest that the Obama transition team may be pushing for an approach that could mean releasing within a year as many as 100 (or perhaps even more) Guantanamo

detainees who appear to be dangerous but may not be prosecutable for any crimes. ¶ In particular, a New York Times front-pager reported on January 13 that sources "said the incoming administration appeared to have rejected a proposal to seek a new law authorizing indefinite detention inside the United States" of any of the approximately 250 Guantanamo detainees.¶ This seems to imply that Obama will either continue to rely on Bush's legal arguments for continued detention without charges -- arguments that many Obama supporters have assailed -- or yield to the demands of left-leaning human-rights groups that he release any and all Guantanamo detainees who cannot be criminally prosecuted.¶ But the president-elect said on January 11, on ABC's This Week , that he wants "a process that adheres to [the] rule of law [but] doesn't result in releasing people who are intent on blowing us up." He

also said that "many" detainees who "may be very dangerous" present special problems because "some of the evidence against them may be tainted even though it's true." And Eric Holder testified on Thursday, during the Senate confirmation hearing on his nomination to be attorney general, that "I don't think . . . we

can release" people known to be dangerous.¶ What kind of process does Obama have in mind? If seeking a new detention law has been ruled out -- a scoop that The Times attributed

somewhat shakily to "people who have conferred with transition officials" -- Obama would have only two options for dealing with the 100 or so apparently-dangerous-but-perhaps-not-prosecutable detainees. ¶ The first option would be to continue Bush's military detention of these men as "enemy combatants," presumably in the mainland United States. But doing so would open Obama to accusations of simply relocating Bush's Guantanamo prison camp in the guise of closing it. It also would risk continuing Bush's losing streak in the courts, which are now hearing petitions for release by many Guantanamo detainees and also by some of the hundreds of U.S. prisoners in

Afghanistan.¶ The second option would be to release or transfer to other countries all of those who cannot be prosecuted. That group could include men such as these: ¶ * Abd al Rahman al Zahri, who the government claims had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks and who declared at a military hearing: "I'm not one of [Osama bin Laden's] men and not one of his individuals. I am one of his sons. I will kill myself for him and will also give my family and all of my money to him.... With the help of God, we will stand mujahedeen and terrorists against Americans."¶

* Mohammed al Qahtani, who, the public evidence strongly suggests, was sent by Al Qaeda from London to Orlando, Fla., to be the 20th hijacker in the 9/11 suicide attacks. He was turned back by an alert immigration agent at the Orlando airport on August 4, 2001, while Mohamed Atta was waiting to meet him. Qahtani has become a cause celebre among human-rights groups because he was subjected in 2002 to what many call torture. Susan Crawford, the senior official in charge of deciding whether to bring Guantanamo detainees to trial, dismissed all charges against him last May. She recently told The Washington Post's Bob Woodward that she would not allow any new charges to go forward because "we tortured Qahtani." But she added: "He's a very dangerous man. What do you do with him now if you don't charge him and try him? I would be hesitant to say, 'Let him go.' " The left-leaning Center for Constitutional Rights, which represents Qahtani, has said that he "should be sent

back to Saudi Arabia's highly successful custodial rehabilitation program."¶ * Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh al Hanashi, who is probably more typical of the apparently-dangerous-but-perhaps-not-prosecutable group. He was Taliban cannon fodder. He admitted during a military hearing, "I was with the Taliban" and said he fought on the front lines against the Northern Alliance. Men such as him may

be unlikely recruits for terrorist attacks against the U.S. but might well, if released, rejoin Taliban attacks on U.S. forces in Afghanistan.

Civilian Trials Link--- Mission Effectiveness/Future Detention

Judicial limitations cause decrease in mission effectivenessJacob 2012 (Greg Jacob, partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, October 1, 2012, “Detention Policies: What Role for Judicial Review?,” ABA Review, http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/detention_policies_what_role_for_judicial_review/)

More than a decade into the war on terror, no federal court has seriously called into question the government’s potentially unending authority to detain captured combatants until the conflict “ends.” Whether there are or should be any temporal limitations to that authority is a question that future judges and political leaders may well address. Boumediene, however, demonstrates the judiciary’s concern that as the war on terror drags on, and with it the length of ongoing detentions (at the time of the Boumediene decision, some of the detainees had been held for more than six years), we need to at least be increasingly sure that the individuals we are detaining are in fact enemy combatants. Boumediene expressly declined to state how greater certainty concerning the validity of military detentions should be achieved, noting that “our opinion does not address the content of the law that governs [enemy combatant] detention” and directing the lower courts to establish a framework capable of reconciling “liberty and security … within the framework of the law.” This is what the D.C. Circuit has attempted to do.¶ Probably the most important war on terror decision handed down by the D.C. Circuit since Boumediene was decided is Maqaleh, in which the court declined to extend the writ of habeas corpus to aliens captured abroad, designated enemy combatants and held at

Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan. From the military’s perspective, the nightmare scenario has always been the prospect that the judiciary would assert the right to engage in a searching inquiry into the basis for every capture and detention of an alien abroad, even while active combat operations are ongoing. In World War II, such a rule could have required the government to litigate hundreds of thousands of habeas claims, costing the government significant expense and causing substantial disruption to military operations. Maqaleh puts such fears to rest.

The aff wrecks our strategyJacob 2012 (Greg Jacob, partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, October 1, 2012, “Detention Policies: What Role for Judicial Review?,” ABA Review, http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/detention_policies_what_role_for_judicial_review/)

The government created the detention facility at Guantanamo Bay so that it would have a secure location, not easily susceptible to prison breaks or the vagaries of war, at

which high-value detainees could be securely held and mined for intelligence. Now that the Supreme Court has determined that keeping captured enemy combatants at Guantanamo will subject the government to the vagaries of habeas litigation, the usefulness of the facility has been substantially diminished. That does not mean, however, that the military has been incentivized to switch from capturing enemy combatants to killing

them. Rather, it means that in the future the military will simply keep detainees where it captures them, preferring the risk of prison breaks and enemy attacks to the certain cost and disruptions to intelligence-gathering that are inevitably caused by repeatedly being dragged into court.

Makes future detentions impossibleJacob 2012 (Greg Jacob, partner at O’Melveny & Myers in Washington, October 1, 2012, “Detention Policies: What Role for Judicial Review?,” ABA Review, http://www.abajournal.com/magazine/article/detention_policies_what_role_for_judicial_review/)

Professor Vladeck simply cannot imagine how judicial review of military detentions, even in

active theaters of war, could possibly disrupt the government’s war efforts. If the courts order that detainees be released, then judicial review was clearly necessary to correct erroneous detentions. And if the courts do not order that detainees be released, then what does the government have to complain about? By this standard, judicial review of military detentions is always justified, without regard to cost or outcome.¶ But of course, this standard does not measure the true cost of judicial review. It must be remembered that the kind of judicial review at issue here was not carefully constructed and balanced by our political leaders, but rather was imposed by the courts as a matter of constitutional requirement. The war on terror and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq are wars of choice waged against vastly outmatched opponents, but constitutional requirements apply equally during wars of necessity in which the nation’s very survival is at stake. We held hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war during the Civil War and World War II—

how is Professor Vladeck’s expansive judicial review supposed to be administered under such circumstances without seriously compromising our security interests? No practicable answer is even remotely suggested in my sparring partner’s essay.¶ Until the new kind of war presented by the war on terror came along, the courts uniformly recognized that war is a matter best handled by the political branches, and that at least in active theaters of combat operations, the judiciary should stay out. That is why the D.C. Circuit’s decision in Maqaleh is so important: It recognizes there are times and places in which the substantial costs in time, energy and resources that necessarily accompany the judiciary’s error-correcting function simply aren’t worth it, and to which the framers accordingly never intended to extend constitutional habeas protections. To be sure, the circumstances in which constitutional habeas protections do not apply are carefully circumscribed; U.S. citizens, for example, will always be entitled to habeas review. And after Boumediene, most if not all aliens detained domestically will be as well. But within that narrow sphere from which the judiciary has been excluded—and has by and large accepted its exclusion—the time, energy and resources at stake can be a matter of life or death for our troops, and for the nation as a whole.¶ Professor Vladeck does not believe the stakes could possibly be so high. And in a war of choice in which only a few hundred detainees being held an ocean away from the front lines are permitted access to our courts, perhaps they are not. But how could the military possibly have defended hundreds of thousands of habeas petitions in the midst of World War

II? With the witnesses to captures primarily being front-line soldiers still engaged in fighting, should we pull half of Easy Company out of Operation Market Garden to type up detention affidavits? With military intelligence attempting to secure mission-critical information that could turn the tide of war, should we allow their operations to be chilled and disrupted by a stream of discovery requests? And having disarmed enemy troops on the battlefield and placed them in

detention camps where they can do no further harm, should we rearm them with legal causes of action that will consume significant time and manpower to defend, and further provide them a public platform from which to denounce the United States? In light of these costs and disruptions, it is unsurprising that the Geneva Conventions, for example, do not even hint at any kind of judicial review requirement for the ordinary detention of military prisoners.

Civilian Trials Link--- Military Base Attacks

Bringing them onshore is badMcCarthy 2010 (Andy McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, February 25, 2010, “Going Off Senator Graham’s Cliff,” National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229203/going-senator-grahams-cliff/andrew-c-mccarthy/page/0/2)

Being offshore is no small matter. Military bases are generally not just headquarters for

military operations. In the United States, they are like small towns where members of our armed forces live with their families — which is to say, where military families live while the

troops are deployed fighting to defend us. Why does that matter? Because countless times in the last 30 years, jihadists have targeted military bases for attack. ¶ The most damning piece of evidence in my 1995 prosecution of Omar Abdel Rahman (the “Blind Sheikh”) was his instruction that, rather than bombing the United Nations, his underlings should target an American military base. Hezbollah, of course, famously bombed a Marine barracks in Beirut in 1983, killing 241 of our military personnel. In 1996 Iran-backed terrorists — probably in collusion with al-Qaeda — bombed the Khobar Towers facility in Saudi Arabia, killing 19 U.S. airmen based there. To reel off just a few recent domestic plots, six jihadists conspired in 2007 to, in their words, “kill as many soldiers as possible” at the Fort Dix army base in New Jersey. Two others were apprehended later that year near a Navy brig in Goose Creek, S.C., plotting to attack U.S. military vehicles with explosives. Last year, seven other terrorists were arrested planning an attack on the U.S. Marine Corps base in Quantico, Va. And let’s not forget the Fort Hood massacre only a few months back. That happened while we were still hearing the echoes of shots fired outside a Little Rock recruiting station by a gunman who murdered one soldier and gravely wounded

another.¶ Here’s a brute fact that folks at the edge of the cliff don’t want to hear: Islamic law deems American service personnel to be legitimate targets of violent jihad. That is not a

fringe position held only by al-Qaeda. It is a mainstream interpretation of sharia in the Muslim world. It is held, for example, by Sheikh Yusuf Qaradawi, the renowned inspiration of the Muslim Brotherhood — those nice fellas President Obama insisted on inviting to his sermon on the cliff in Cairo. And by the way, after Qaradawi issued a fatwa in 2004 urging attacks on American troops in Iraq, he was promptly seconded by authoritative scholars at al-Azhar University, the ancient seat of Sunni learning

and the site chosen for said sermon.¶ If Gitmo is closed, the nearly 200 remaining jihadists now housed there would probably be transferred to military bases. Those bases would have to be hardened for the purpose, at a cost of untold millions of dollars — unjustifiable when it does not cost us an extra dime at this point to detain them at Gitmo. More

significantly, such a base and its environs would become even more of a terror target than it is now. That would increase the danger and monumental inconvenience not only to the young men and women who are already bearing disproportionate burdens in this war, but also to the family members who accompany them from base to base, supporting their sacrifice for our country. What conceivable rationale can there be for that when we already have a perfectly suitable offshore detention center?

Civilian Trial Link--- Trials Get Attacked

The trial will get attackedMukasey 2009 (Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009, October 19, 2009, “Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists,” WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475300052267212.html)

Moreover, there is every reason to believe that the places of both trial and confinement for such defendants would become attractive targets for others

intent on creating mayhem, whether it be terrorists intent on inflicting casualties on the local population, or lawyers intent on filing waves of lawsuits over issues as diverse as whether those captured in combat must be charged with crimes or released, or the conditions of confinement for all prisoners, whether convicted or not. Even after conviction, the issue is not whether a maximum-security

prison can hold these defendants; of course it can. But their presence even inside the walls, as

proselytizers if nothing else, is itself a danger. The recent arrest of U.S. citizen Michael Finton, a

convert to Islam proselytized in prison and charged with planning to blow up a building in Springfield, Ill., is only the latest example of that problem.

Civilian Trial Links--- Court Clog

The aff clogs the courtsMukasey 2009 (Michael B. Mukasey, attorney general of the United States from 2007 to 2009, October 19, 2009, “Civilian Courts Are No Place to Try Terrorists,” WSJ, http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704107204574475300052267212.html)

The Obama administration has said it intends to try several of the prisoners now detained at Guantanamo Bay in civilian courts in this country. This would include Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, and other detainees allegedly

involved. The Justice Department claims that our courts are well suited to the task. ¶ Based on my experience trying such cases, and what I saw as attorney

general , they aren't. That is not to say that civilian courts cannot ever handle terrorist prosecutions,

but rather that their role in a war on terror—to use an unfashionably harsh phrase—should be, as the term

"war" would suggest, a supporting and not a principal role.¶ The challenges of a terrorism trial are overwhelming. To maintain the security of the courthouse and the jail facilities where defendants are housed, deputy U.S. marshals must be recruited from other jurisdictions; jurors must be selected anonymously and

escorted to and from the courthouse under armed guard; and judges who preside over such cases often need protection as well. All such measures burden an already overloaded justice system and interfere with the handling of other cases, both criminal and civil.

Detention Solves Terror

Detention has stopped numerous attacksHolmes 2012 (Kim R. Holmes, Ph.D., Marc A. Thiessen, Clifford D. May and Helle C. Dale, May 8, 2012, “The Obama Doctrine at Year Three: An Assessment,” Heritage Foundation, http://www.heritage.org/research/lecture/2012/05/the-obama-doctrine-at-year-three-an-assessment)The problem is that Obama is using drone strikes as a substitute for operations to actually capture terrorists

alive and bring them in for questioning. After 9/11, we worked with Pakistan and other countries to hunt down senior terrorist leaders and bring them in for interrogation. We captured people like Abu Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, Ramzi bin al

Shibh, Ammar al-Baluchi, and many, many others—about a hundred of them in all that were brought into the CIA’s interrogation program and questioned. They gave us information that stopped terrorist attacks: plots to blow up the U.S. consulate in Karachi; to blow up the U.S. Marine camp in Djibouti; to explode seven airplanes flying over the Atlantic from cities in Europe to North America; to fly hijacked airplanes into Heathrow Airport, London’s financial district, and Big Ben—they wanted to bring down Big Ben when they brought down

the Twin Towers—and also a plot to fly an airplane into the tallest building on the West Coast, the U.S. Bank Tower of Los Angeles. ¶ Those are all plots that were broken up because there was open interrogation. The information we got was obtained from the interrogation of captured live terrorists.

A2 Supermax Prisons Secure

It’s not a question of supermaxes being secure or notMcCarthy 2009 (Andy McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, October 23, 2009, “Imprison Here, Release Here,” National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/228465/imprison-here-release-here/andrew-c-mccarthy)

If Guantanamo Bay is closed, scores of trained jihadists, committed to killing

Americans, will be released to dwell among us: It is that simple. ¶ Pres. Barack

Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder contend that America’s civilian federal prisons are secure. Our “supermaxes,” they insist, are up to the task of confining the most lethal terrorists. Even if that were true (and history shows it is not), the argument is the most hollow of strawmen.

These terrorists are not going to escape — they are going to walk right out the prison gates. They are going to be freed by a perverse new legal system, an ad hoc creation of progressive federal judges, assisted mightily by an Obama Justice Department rife with lawyers whose former firms and institutions spent the last eight years representing

America’s enemies.¶ The civilian criminal-justice system is neither designed for nor capable of handling wartime detention cases. The basic presumptions of the civilian system — innocence, privacy, the preference that the prosecution lose any case in which there

is the slightest doubt about guilt — have no bearing on the detention of enemy operatives in wartime. Yet, international terrorists present challenges that traditional enemy combatants do not: They do not wear uniforms, they do not carry their weapons openly, they conduct their operations in secret, and they blend into the general population, intentionally creating ambiguity about

whether they are combatants or civilians.¶ This ambiguity is a military issue, not a legal one. In our system, the conduct of war is a political exercise in which the judiciary has no proper role. Under separation-of-powers principles, a judge has no more business telling a field commander who the enemy is than a general has telling a judge how to rule on the validity of a contract. Unfortunately, our system has become over-lawyered, and our leaders lack the political will to tell judges to butt out — something Congress and the president have the power to do.¶ Criminal trials also proceed in accordance with a pair of centuries-old legal principles. First, pieces of evidence are viewed not in isolation but in conjunction; second, jurors do not check their common sense at the door when they enter the courtroom. This is why the vast majority of defendants who go to trial get convicted. Even a not-so-clever defense lawyer can always come up with a reason to degrade this or that aspect of the prosecution’s case: Maybe the teller didn’t get a good look at the bank robber; the defendant’s fingerprint could have been left in the getaway car weeks before the robbery; the robbery money might be in his house because he unknowingly borrowed it from the real robber; and the accomplice may have falsely fingered him in hopes of saving his own skin. But if the prosecution shows an identification by the teller, a fingerprint in the getaway car, possession of the robbery proceeds, and a co-conspirator saying the defendant was in on it, that’s not a

shaky case. Taken together, those facts spell slam dunk to a rational, objective fact-finder.¶ But Gitmo terrorists don’t have to deal with jurors vetted to ensure their objectivity. They get highly opinionated judges. Those judges first make up the rules, procedures, and presumptions, and then purport to apply this “law” to the facts — in many cases, just as a defense lawyer would do. As Joscelyn demonstrates, Kollar-Kotelly simply ignored some of the facts (like the Kuwaiti intelligence that Mutairi was an al-Qaeda operative) and speciously minimized or explained away others, studiously averting her gaze from the mosaic composed by the proof.

Even if they don’t escape they’ll cause all sorts of problemsMcCarthy 2013 (Andrew C. McCarthy, July 24, 2013, “Closing Gitmo Is Still a Terrible Idea,” National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/corner/354298/closing-gitmo-still-terrible-idea-andrew-c-mccarthy)But back to Gitmo. What has just happened in Iraq – and terrorist attacks to facilitate escapes have happened before in Iraq as well as in Yemen and Afghanistan — underscores one of the many fallacies in

the anti-Gitmo arguments posited by the president and Attorney General Eric Holder. They claim that closing Gitmo and lodging the enemy combatant military prisoners in stateside civilian prisons would pose no security threat to the American people because our federal prisons – especially the “supermax” facilities – are so secure escape is impossible. But escape is not and has never been our principal concern; the security challenge is attempted escape. That is, just because we’re

confident that violent people cannot successfully break themselves out does not mean they and their

confederates will not forever plot and occasionally try to break them out — increasing considerably the threat of violence at and around the prisons.

A2 Reputation/Cred Link Turn

Aff can’t solve the turn--- doesn’t reverse perception of indefinite detentionDrew 2009 (Anne Marie Drew, English instructor at US Naval Academy, visited Guantanamo Bay detention facilities, September 11, 2009, “Closing Guantanamo will be a mistake,” Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/0911/p09s01-coop.html)

The general perception of the detention camps is erroneous. What I saw was a state-of-the-art, climate-controlled, clean facility.¶ President Obama is determined to close these camps by winter. Gitmo, he said in May, "has weakened American national security. It is a rallying cry for our enemies.... By

any measure, the costs of keeping it open far exceed the complications involved in closing it."¶ It will be wrong to close these camps, in what can only be a symbolic gesture , simply for the sake of closing them.¶ Whatever moral authority America has lost by its treatment of these detainees will not be regained by moving them. Whatever mistakes we made will not be erased. Closing Gitmo will not make us safer.¶ Many people believe that the executive order Mr. Obama issued just two days after taking office means shutting down torture chambers and freeing innocent detainees, held for years without due process.¶ It does no such thing.¶

The problems, real or imagined, will simply move if the camps close. ¶ There is no geographic cure for Gitmo.¶ The executive order does not release the suspects. If they are not freed or deported, then they will be transferred. But moving them to another prison somewhere in the United States seems pointless at best and dangerous at worst.

A2 Gitmo = AQ Recruiting Tool

Detention isn’t a big recruiting toolJoscelyn 2010 (Thomas Joscelyn, December 27, 2010, “Gitmo Is Not Al Qaeda's 'Number One Recruitment Tool',” http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/gitmo-not-al-qaedas-number-one-recruitment-tool_524997.html)

During a press conference on December 22, President Obama was asked about the difficulties his administration has encountered in trying to close Guantanamo. The president explained (emphasis added):¶ Obviously, we haven’t gotten it closed. And let me just step back and explain that the reason for wanting to close Guantanamo was because my number one priority is keeping the American people safe. One of the most powerful tools we have to keep the American people safe is not providing al Qaeda and jihadists recruiting tools for fledgling terrorists.¶ ¶ And

Guantanamo is probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations. And we see it in the websites that they put up. We see it in the messages that they're delivering.¶ President Obama and his surrogates have made this argument before, but they have provided no real evidence that it is true. In fact, al Qaeda’s top leaders rarely mention Guantanamo in their messages to the West, Muslims and the world at large.¶ No journalist in attendance had the opportunity to challenge

President Obama’s assertion. The president should have been asked: If Guantanamo is such a valuable recruiting tool, then why do al Qaeda’s leaders rarely mention it?¶ THE WEEKLY STANDARD has reviewed translations of 34 messages and interviews delivered by top al Qaeda leaders operating in Pakistan and Afghanistan (“Al Qaeda Central”), including Osama bin Laden and Ayman al Zawahiri, since January

2009. The translations were published online by the NEFA Foundation. Guantanamo is mentioned in only 3 of the 34 messages. The other 31 messages contain no reference to Guantanamo. And even in the three messages in which al Qaeda mentions the detention facility it is not a prominent theme. ¶ Instead, al Qaeda’s leaders repeatedly focus on a narrative that has dominated their propaganda for the

better part of two decades. According to bin Laden, Zawahiri, and other al Qaeda chieftains, there is a Zionist-Crusader conspiracy against Muslims. Relying on this deeply paranoid and conspiratorial worldview, al Qaeda routinely calls upon Muslims to take up arms against Jews and Christians, as well as any Muslims rulers who refuse to fight this imaginary coalition.¶ This theme forms the backbone of al Qaeda’s messaging – not Guantanamo.¶ To illustrate this point, consider the results of some basic keyword searches. Guantanamo is mentioned a mere 7 times in the 34 messages we reviewed. (Again,

all 7 of those references appear in just 3 of the 34 messages.)¶ By way of comparison, all of the following keywords are mentioned far more frequently: Israel/Israeli/Israelis

(98 mentions), Jew/Jews (129), Zionist(s) (94), Palestine/Palestinian (200), Gaza (131),

and Crusader(s) (322). (Note: Zionist is often paired with Crusader in al Qaeda’s rhetoric.)¶ Naturally, al Qaeda’s leaders also focus on the wars in Afghanistan (333 mentions) and Iraq (157). Pakistan (331), which is home to the jihadist hydra, is featured prominently, too. Al Qaeda has designs on each of these three nations and implores willing recruits to fight America and her allies there. Keywords related to other jihadist hotspots also feature more prominently than Gitmo, including Somalia (67 mentions), Yemen (18) and Chechnya (15). ¶ Simply put, there is no evidence in the 34 messages we reviewed that al Qaeda’s leaders are using Guantanamo as a recruiting tool. Undoubtedly, “Al Qaeda Central” has released other messages during the past two years that are not included in our sample. Some of those messages may refer to Guantanamo. And some of the al Qaeda messages provided by NEFA, which does a remarkable job collecting and translating al Qaeda’s statements and interviews, may be only partial translations of longer texts.¶ However, the messages we reviewed also surely include most of what al Qaeda’s honchos have said publicly since January 2009. These messages do not support the president’s claim.

Err neg, their arg is a truism with no evidenceWittes 2010 (Benjamin Wittes, editor in chief of Lawfare and a Senior Fellow in Governance Studies at the Brookings Institution, December 24, 2010, “Thoughts on Obama’s Gitmo Remarks,” Lawfare Blog, http://www.lawfareblog.com/2010/12/thoughts-on-obamas-gitmo-remarks/)“Obviously, we haven’t gotten it closed. And let me just step back and explain that the reason for wanting to close Guantanamo was because my number one priority is keeping the American people safe. One of the most powerful tools we have to keep the American people safe is not providing al Qaeda and jihadists

recruiting tools for fledgling terrorists. And Guantanamo is probably the number one recruitment tool that is used by these jihadist organizations.”¶ The more I think about this claim, the less I believe it is true. I claim no expertise on Al Qaeda recruiting–or, indeed, on Al

Qaeda itself. And clearly, the President has access to a huge range of intelligence which I don’t see. But I

just have never seen any evidence that Guantanamo plays a particular role in Al Qaeda recruiting–an important role relative to other complaints about the United States or a role different from that which any facility that might replace it would play. I know the claim that Gitmo creates more terrorists than it holds is a common argument for closing the facility, but I have never seen a

serious piece of reporting of any kind that purports to support it. Sure, there are

mentions of Guantanamo in Al Qaeda propaganda, and there are mentions of detainees (who would presumably be held somewhere else were Gitmo closed), but where is the evidence that Guantanamo is playing some outsized role in Al Qaeda’s recruitment efforts–let alone in its actual recruitment?

A2 Civilian Courts Better

Civilian courts aren’t suited to trying terroristsKittel 2013 (Larkin Kittel, J.D. candidate at the Georgetown University Law Center, “TRYING TERRORISTS: THE CASE FOR¶ EXPANDING THE JURISDICTION OF MILITARY¶ COMMISSIONS TO U.S. CITIZENS,” Georgetown Journal of International Law, Vol 44, http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/law-journals/gjil/recent/upload/zsx00213000783.PDF)Military commissions were authorized by Congress “to provide the¶ executive with an additional forum for

the prosecution of [offenses¶ against the law of nations].”78 As a result, with respect to noncitizen¶ suspected terrorists, the government can choose from multiple forum¶ options based on the circumstances of the cases. Prosecutorial choice¶ between forums is based on factors such as “the available evidence¶ about a suspect, the suspect’s nationality, the locus of capture,”79 the¶ offenses alleged, and concerns about the reaction of the international¶

community.80 “Jurisdictional redundancy,”81 or the ability to choose¶ between forums, is desirable because it allows the United States to¶ consider the circumstances of each case.82¶ Military commissions may help to address practical needs arising¶ from the context of war in ways that might be challenging for federal¶

courts. As noted by President Obama, military commissions “allow for¶ the protection of sensitive sources and methods of intelligence- gathering,”83 which may be important in the context of the ongoing¶ War on Terror. Military commissions are also portable, so the likelihood that a federal courtroom will become a target for terrorism is¶ smaller.84 Military commissions are also claimed to be efficient, which,¶ if true, would be significant because most of the Guantanamo detainees¶ have been held for years without charge.85 However, “[b]etween 2006¶ and 2009, only six individuals were sentenced in the statutory military¶ commissions—four after plea bargains.”86 Given this “less-than-stellar¶ record,” the efficiency argument is not particularly persuasive.87¶ The use of military commissions may resolve some of the other¶ “unique challenges,”—such as the need to address protection of highly¶ classified evidence and

security clearance, for example—posed by the¶ prosecution of Guantanamo detainees.88 As noted by Aziz Huq, however, the text of the Military Commissions Act “forces military prosecutors to provide proof of a defendant’s connections to a terrorist group¶ in every case, a requirement that a civilian prosecutor... would not¶ often have to satisfy,”89 which results in the need to introduce more¶ classified intelligence information than might otherwise be necessary.90

Federal judges won’t hold the lineMcCarthy 2010 (Andy McCarthy, former Assistant United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, February 25, 2010, “Going Off Senator Graham’s Cliff,” National Review, http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/229203/going-senator-grahams-cliff/andrew-c-mccarthy/page/0/2)

This is exactly the sort of thing that would happen if the detainees were brought into this country. Except then, it won’t just be the Obama Justice Department failing to hold the line. It will be the federal courts striking prison restrictions and releasing detainees. ¶

Neither Senator Graham nor the Obama administration can refute this point. Once the terrorists are physically in the United States, they are undeniably within the jurisdiction of the federal courts for all purposes. Up until now, the Supreme Court has manufactured for the detainees only a single constitutional right to habeas corpus (i.e., judicial review of their designation as enemy combatants). The Left claims they should have all constitutional rights. Yet the Court, in the 2008 Boumediene case, went no further than habeas, because the justices in the razor-thin

majority understood how radical it was to vest constitutional rights in aliens who were situated outside our country.¶ In his Boumediene dissent, Justice Scalia stressed “the primacy of territorial sovereignty” in determining the rights of non-Americans. To underscore the point, Scalia quoted from the opinion of Justice Robert Jackson — Holder’s claimed inspiration — in the 1950 Eisentrager case: “The alien, to whom the United States has been traditionally hospitable, has been accorded a generous and ascending scale of rights as he increases his identity with our society. . . . But, in extending constitutional protections beyond the citizenry, the Court has been at pains to point out that it was the alien’s presence within its

territorial jurisdiction that gave the Judiciary power to act.”¶ Once the alien detainees are physically inside our country, all bets are off. Judges will conclude that they have the power to order the prisoners’ release, to endow them with the full gamut of U.S. constitutional rights, and to give them any privilege a judge would feel comfortable giving to an American prisoner. ¶ Maybe Senator Graham has convinced himself that he can head that problem off. He could propose a law that prohibits the courts from releasing former Gitmo detainees in the United States and from giving them rights beyond those prescribed by Congress. If that’s what he’s figuring, it’s a delusion. If the Supreme Court holds that any accommodations it orders for the detainees are rooted in the Constitution — as the justices did in Boumediene — Congress will be powerless to do anything about it. Unless you have political branches with the will to stand up to judicial usurpations of this kind (and we don’t), the Supreme Court’s claim that a ruling is based on the Constitution is final. Case closed.

Impacts

General terrorism

A terrorist attack escalates to a global nuclear exchangeSpeice 6 (Patrick Speice, JD, 2006, William & Mary Law Review, February, p. 1437-8)

Accordingly, there is a significant and ever-present risk that terrorists could acquire a nuclear device or fissile material from Russia as a result of the confluence of Russian economic decline and the end of stringent Soviet-era nuclear security measures. Terrorist groups could acquire a nuclear weapon by a number of methods, including "steal[ing] one intact from the stockpile of a country possessing such weapons, or ... [being] sold or given one by such a country, or [buying or stealing] one from another subnational group that had obtained it in one of these ways." Equally threatening, however, is the risk that terrorists will steal or purchase fissile material and construct a nuclear device on their own. Very little material is necessary to construct a highly destructive nuclear weapon . Although nuclear devices are extraordinarily complex, the technical barriers to constructing a

workable weapon are not significant. Moreover, the sheer number of methods that could be used to deliver a nuclear device into the United S tates makes it incredibly likely that terrorists could successfully employ a nuclear weapon once it was built. Accordingly, supply-side controls that are aimed at preventing terrorists from acquiring nuclear material in the first place are the most effective means of countering the risk of nuclear terrorism. Moreover, the end of the Cold War eliminated the rationale for maintaining a large military-industrial complex in Russia, and the nuclear cities were closed. This resulted in at least 35,000 nuclear scientists becoming unemployed in an economy that was collapsing. Although the economy has stabilized somewhat, there are still at least 20,000 former scientists who are unemployed or underpaid and who are too young to retire, raising the chilling prospect that these scientists will be tempted to sell their nuclear knowledge, or steal nuclear material to sell, to states or terrorist organizations with nuclear ambitions. The potential consequences of the unchecked spread of nuclear knowledge and material to terrorist groups that seek to cause mass destruction in the United States are truly horrifying. A terrorist attack with a nuclear weapon would be devastating in terms of immediate human and economic losses. Moreover,

there would be immense political pressure in the United States to discover the perpetrators and retaliate with nuclear weapons, massively increasing the number of casualties and potentially triggering a full-scale nuclear conflict. In addition to the threat posed by terrorists, leakage of nuclear knowledge and material from Russia will reduce the barriers that states with nuclear ambitions face and may trigger widespread proliferation of nuclear weapons. This proliferation will increase the risk of nuclear attacks against the United States or its allies by hostile states, as well as increase the likelihood that regional conflicts will draw in the United States and escalate to the use of nuclear weapons.

A2: No nuclear terrorim

Terrorists can get nukesCameron 8 (writer for America.gov “Nuclear Terrorism: Weapons for Sale or Theft?” http://www.america.gov/st/peacesec-english/2008/July/20080815122156XJyrreP0.8970606.html)

As with intact nuclear devices, nuclear materials have been the target of several groups, most notably al-Qaida and Aum Shinrikyo. Both sought to acquire weaponizable material from the states of the former Soviet Union in the 1990s, although Aum Shinrikyo also tried and failed to enrich natural uranium. In spite

of the difficulties both experienced in their acquisition efforts, the risk of terrorists gaining access to nuclear material remains considerable. The amount of existing nuclear material scattered around the world in military and civilian sectors is enormous. Harvard University's Graham Allison says there is sufficient plutonium and highly enriched uranium to produce 240,000 nuclear weapons. Of course, security practices vary. In many states, such material is adequately protected, controlled, and accounted for, but elsewhere

security measures are much looser. Consequently, there have been regular reports of the embezzlement, theft, or

smuggling of nuclear materials from facilities. In this respect, the Newly Independent States of the former Soviet Union represent a particular concern, largely due to the quantities of material present there; but similar reports have

emanated from states around the world. So far, the majority of incidents have involved small quantities of weapons-grade material, or larger quantities of non-weapons-grade nuclear material. The risk, however, is clearly

present. Moreover, given that accounting standards are not universally high in all states, it is far from clear whether authorities would know in all cases if a significant quantity of weapons-grade material, sufficient to construct a nuclear device, were to go missing.

Impact--- A2 AQAP Fails

AQAP has the intent and capability to strike the US homelandZimmerman 2012 (Katherine Zimmerman, senior analyst and the al Qaeda and Associated Movements Team Lead for the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project, October 19, 2012, “Al Qaeda in Yemen: Countering the Threat from the Arabian Peninsula,” AEI Critical Threats, http://www.criticalthreats.org/yemen/zimmerman-qaeda-yemen-countering-threat-arabian-peninsula-october-19-2012)

The evolution of AQAP into an insurgent group aiming at controlling and governing territory in Yemen could seem to indicate that the threat the group poses to the U.S. directly is declining. The devotion of resources to AQAP’s internal operations, it could be argued, subtracts resources from its efforts to attack Americans outside of Yemen. One might even suggest that American interests could be served by encouraging AQAP, in a sense, to focus

on its insurgent activities. Events do not support such a conclusion, however. AQAP has

demonstrated that it retains both the will and the capability to attempt attacks on the U.S. homeland even as it seeks to expand territorial control within Yemen.¶ AQAP operatives mailed bombs disguised as printer cartridges to a Chicago synagogue in October 2010 while the campaign against Yemeni military and security

targets was picking up speed.[13] The bombs were discovered after they were already en route to the U.S. AQAP attempted another attack in May 2012, improving on the bomb design used in the December 25, 2009 attack by Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab (which AQAP had also planned, resourced, and

directed).[14] The attempt shows that AQAP still seeks to conduct international attacks, even though the details of the attack were purported to be known to American and other intelligence agencies before it became fully operational.[15] Should AQAP succeed in holding a significant territorial safe haven in Yemen, of course, its ability to plan and conduct attacks abroad could increase considerably.

Aff

UQ

The US is losing the war on terrorismGoldberg 13 (By J.J. Goldberg, editor in chief of Forward,¶ Published May 31, 2013, issue of June 07, 2013, Real Winner of War on Terror: Osama Bin Laden¶ Decade Later, Terrorists Are Flexing Muscle More Than Ever¶ Read more: http://forward.com/articles/177683/real-winner-of-war-on-terror-osama-bin-laden/?p=all#ixzz2a0jD4R3M)

The question is, how far along are we in this war? How much safer are we now than we were before we

started? The answer: We are much, much worse off than we were when we started. Whatever it may have done

to the Constitution, the war on terror has been great for terror.¶ In plain terms, the number of terrorist incidents per year around the world has more than quadrupled in the decade since we declared war on terror. Fatalities have doubled. To be specific, there were 982 terrorist incidents worldwide in 2002, resulting in 3,823 deaths. In 2011, the latest year for which numbers are available, there were 4,564 incidents resulting in 7,493 deaths. Simply put, the war on terror has made terror worse.¶ The good news is that deaths have

been declining since 2007, when they peaked at 10,000.¶ The numbers come courtesy of an Australian-based think tank, the Institute for Economics and Peace, which published its first-ever Global Terrorism Index in December 2012. It works with a terrorism database maintained by the University of Maryland.

Nuclear terrorism is already a threat nowReuters 13 (Governments warn about nuclear terrorism threat, 7/1, http://uk.reuters.com/article/2013/07/01/uk-nuclear-security-idUKBRE96010G20130701)

(Reuters) - More action is needed to prevent militants acquiring plutonium or highly-enriched uranium that could be used in bombs, governments agreed at a meeting on nuclear security in Vienna on Monday, without deciding on any concrete steps.¶ A declaration adopted by more than 120 states at the meeting said "substantial progress" had been made in recent years to improve nuclear security

globally, but it was not enough.¶ ¶ Analysts say radical groups could theoretically build a crude but deadly nuclear bomb if they had the money, technical knowledge and materials needed.¶

Ministers remained "concerned about the threat of nuclear and radiological terrorism ... More needs to be done to further strengthen nuclear security worldwide", the statement said.¶ The document "encouraged" states to take various measures such as minimising the use of highly-enriched uranium, but some diplomats said they would have preferred firmer commitments.¶ Many countries regard nuclear security as a sensitive political issue that should be handled primarily by national authorities. This was reflected in the statement's language.¶ Still, Yukiya Amano, director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), which hosted the conference, said the agreement was "very robust" and represented a

major step forward.¶ Amano earlier warned the IAEA-hosted conference against a "false sense of security" over the danger of nuclear terrorism.¶ Holding up a small lead container that was used to try to traffic highly enriched uranium in Moldova two years ago, the U.N. nuclear chief said it showed a "worrying level of knowledge on the part of the smugglers".¶ "This case ended well," he said,

referring to the fact that the material was seized and arrests were made. But he added: "We cannot be sure if such cases are just the tip of the iceberg."

Detention Link Turn--- Guantanamo Increases Terrorists

Guantanamo causes an increase in terrorist recruitmentPostel 2013 (Therese Postel, April 12, 2013, “How Guantanamo Bay's Existence Helps Al-Qaeda Recruit More Terrorists,” The Atlantic, http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2013/04/how-guantanamo-bays-existence-helps-al-qaeda-recruit-more-terrorists/274956/)

Guantanamo Bay has often been the focus of jihadist media and propaganda. Just recently, the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan--the mouthpiece of the Taliban-- put out a statement calling attention to the ongoing hunger strike at Guantanamo Bay. The brief message claims that the hunger strike at the prison has been going on for forty days (as of March 24) and calls for international rights

organizations to "spread awareness about the plight of the destitute inmates." Guantanamo Bay has become a salient issue used in jihadist propaganda. ¶ In 2010, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) released the first issue of Inspire , their English language recruitment magazine. To date, AQAP has released 10 issues of Inspire, and the plight of prisoners at Guantanamo Bay has been featured prominently in several issues.¶ In the 2010 inaugural issue of Inspire, an essay by Osama bin Laden mentions "the crimes at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo . . . which shook the conscience of humanity." Tellingly, bin Laden points out that "there has been no mentionable change" at Guantanamo and the prison is noted again later in the issue.¶ Gitmo features even more prominently in Issue 2 of Inspire. The essays of Abu Sufyan al-Azdi and Uthman al-Gamidi, two former detainees who returned to AQAP upon their release, call new individuals to join the jihad, whether at home or abroad. In Issue 7, Yahya Ibrahim notes that Guantanamo Bay "exposed the West for what it really is" and "showed the world the American

understanding of human rights."¶ Most troubling, in the latest issue of Inspire released early this month, AQAP mentions Guantanamo Bay several times. In a prelude to the attention that the hunger strikers have been paid lately, Abu Musab al-Suri notes that Guantanamo is not only "filled with . . . mujahedeen" but also with "hundreds of innocent civilians." While it is quite rich to hear AQAP's concern for the plight of innocent civilians, given the high number of Yemenis cleared for release still at Guantanamo, this

is a very salient message for AQAP's base in Yemen.¶ The constant refrain about Guantanamo Bay may be inspiring jihadist action. Anwar al-Awlaki issued a lecture discussing the plight of prisoners in Guantanamo Bay before his death by drone strike in 2011. Awlaki's lectures still play an important role in recruiting impressionable individuals to jihad. As we know, Fort Hood shooter Nidal Hassan was impressed by Awlaki's message and was encouraged (although not directed) to carry out an attack on the states by the cleric himself.

Guantanamo undermines United States soft powerSikkink 2005 (Kathryn Sikkink, University of Minnesota, April 18, 2005, “Mixed Signals: U.S. Human Rights Policy and Practice,” http://www8.georgetown.edu/centers/cdacs/sikkinkpaper.pdf)

These are the mixed signals that the United States is sending to the world on ¶ human rights. But in the signals we send to the world, none are as important as our own ¶ human rights practices. And

of the recent signals we have sent, none is as grave as ¶ recent U.S. practice of torture in Abu

Ghraib, Guantánamo, and Afghanistan. In this talk ¶ I will explore the case of U.S. compliance and non-compliance with the prohibition on ¶ torture. I will argue that the U.S. was substantially in compliance with the prohibition of ¶ torture until late summer

2002, when the first known cases of ill-treatment of detainees at ¶ Guantánamo were reported.4 From 2002 until today, the U.S. is in violation of the ¶ prohibition on torture and cruel and degrading treatment. In a memo issued late last year, however, the Justice Department signaled a retreat from the most

egregious forms of ¶ explicit policy non-compliance. This raises the issue of why the United States moved ¶ first from compliance to non-compliance, both in practice, but also as a matter of policy, ¶ and then moved away from some aspects of an explicit policy of

non-compliance. ¶ U.S. noncompliance with the prohibition on torture is such a grave departure ¶ from core international norms and from past U.S. practice that I feel compelled to try to ¶ understand its causes. But the case is also interesting to me as a scholar of international ¶ relations and global civil society. Many

scholars of international relations and global ¶ civil society have long said that the real test of international law and the power of ¶ transnational human rights networks will be their ability to limit the action of the most ¶ powerful states. I will argue that in the long term, this case will show

that even the ¶ United States is not above the reach of international human rights law that it itself helped ¶ build. As a result, I believe that there will be consequences of these grave decisions for ¶ U.S. policy and for the individuals responsible for them. The policy has already ¶ undermined the soft power and the legitimacy of the U.S. in the world. But I also predict ¶ that the policy will be personally and professionally costly in much more specific ways to ¶ the individuals who instigated or carried out the policy of violating the prohibition on ¶ torture.

Gitmo has destroyed international credibilityParmar 2010 (Inderjeet Parmar, March 12, 2010, “Soft Power and US Foreign Policy: Theoretical, Historical and Contemporary,” google books)In the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, there was an outpouring of goodwill toward the USA from

abroad. This sympathy for the USA dissipated quickly, however, as public opinion around the world registered its disapproval of the George W. Bush administration’s essentially unilateral decision to invade Iraq in March 2003, and the policies it

employed in prosecuting the so-called War on Terror – including torture, renditions and the incarceration of suspected terrorists at the US naval base in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The backlash of world public opinion against the USA during the Bush administration became a major foreign policy issue during the 2008 campaign.

A2 Can’t Reverse Guantanamo Perception

Closing Guantanamo repairs US reputationGreenberg 2013 (Karen Greenberg, May 7, 2013, “Five myths about Guantánamo Bay,” http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2013/may/07/five-myths-about-guantanamo-bay)5. Guantánamo has indelibly stained America's reputation¶ If the hunger strikers die, Guantánamo will

become an even stronger terrorist recruitment tool. While Obama missed the chance at the start of his presidency to show that detainees can be treated more justly and compassionately than they were under his predecessor, any positive change

could begin to repair the damage to America's reputation. ¶ The administration's one-

person-at-a-time approach to closing Guantánamo has proved fruitless. Bold gestures are needed – for starters, the cleared detainees should be sent to their home countries, even to Yemen. And paying restitution to detainees and helping them reintegrate into their home countries

or new locations would go a long way toward eliminating the stain of Guantánamo.¶ Time is of the essence. Of the 100 hunger-striking detainees, four are hospitalised, and 23 are being force-fed. The best option is to release the inmates who can't be tried, end the policy of detention outside the laws of war and restore the sense of moral dignity that has withered with every day of Guantánamo's existence. As Obama said this past week: "It needs to stop."

A2 Terrorist Release Link

Official data prove released terrorists aren’t a threatBergen 2013 (Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Jennifer Rowland, Special to CNN, May 24, 2013, “9 myths about drones and Guantanamo,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/opinion/bergen-nine-myths-drones-gitmo)

7. Many of the Guantanamo detainees who have been released return to the battlefield.¶ The U.S. government claims that 27% of those released from Guantanamo are suspected or confirmed to have taken up arms. For security reasons the government hasn't released the names of these men since 2009, but a review of the public record suggests that number is

quite inflated.¶ According to a review by the New America Foundation of news articles, Pentagon reports, and other relevant documents, of the 603 detainees who have been released from the prison, only 17 individuals (2.8%) are confirmed to have engaged in terrorist or insurgent activities against the United States or its citizens, while 21 individuals (3.5%) are suspected of engaging in such activities.

A2 Too Dangerous to Release

The vast majority aren’t a big threatBergen 2013 (Peter Bergen, CNN National Security Analyst, and Jennifer Rowland, Special to CNN, May 24, 2013, “9 myths about drones and Guantanamo,” CNN, http://www.cnn.com/2013/05/22/opinion/bergen-nine-myths-drones-gitmo)8. The detainees still held at Guantanamo are too dangerous to release.¶ Some undoubtedly are, such as the

operational commander of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. But contrary to the fulminations of officials such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-South Carolina -- who said last year that Guantanamo

detainees are "crazy bastards that want to kill us all" -- half of the men still held at the prison

camp were cleared for release three years ago by a task force of Department of

Justice and Pentagon officials.¶ To be exact, 86 of the 166 men still imprisoned at

Guantanamo were either found to be guilty of nothing, or were low-level fighters who could be repatriated subject to some continued monitoring by their home country's government.

Impact D

No impact to terror – their evidence is fear mongering. Mueller and Stewart 12 [John Mueller is Senior Research Scientist at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science, both at Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Mark G. Stewart is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Professor and Director at the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at the University of Newcastle in Australia, “The Terrorism Delusion”, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Summer 2012), pp. 81–110, Chetan]

It seems increasingly likely that the official and popular reaction to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, has been substantially deluded —massively disproportionate to the threat that al-Qaida has ever actually presented either as an international menace or as an inspiration or model

to homegrown amateurs. Applying the extensive datasets on terrorism that have been generated over the

last decades, we conclude that the chances of an American perishing at the hands of a terrorist at present rates is one in 3.5 million per year—well within the range of what risk analysts hold to be “acceptable risk.”40 Yet, despite the importance of

responsibly communicating risk and despite the costs of irresponsible fearmongering , just about the only official

who has ever openly put the threat presented by terrorism in some sort of context is New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg, who in

2007 pointed out that people should “get a life” and that they have a greater chance of being hit by lightning than of being a victim of terrorism—an observation that may be a bit off the mark but is roughly accurate.41 (It might be noted that, despite this unorthodox outburst, Bloomberg still managed to be re-elected two years later.) Indeed, much of the reaction to the September 11 attacks calls to mind Hans Christian Andersen’s fable of delusion, “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” in which con artists convince the emperor’s court that they can weave stuffs of the most beautiful colors and elaborate patterns from the delicate silk and purest gold thread they are given. These stuffs, they further convincingly explain, have the property of remaining invisible to anyone who is unusually stupid or unfit for office. The emperor finds this quite appealing because not only will he have splendid new clothes, but he will be able to discover which of his officials are unfit for their posts—or in today’s terms, have lost their effectiveness. His courtiers, then, have great professional incentive to proclaim the stuffs on the loom to be absolutely magnificent even while mentally justifying this conclusion with the equivalent of “absence of evidence is not evidence of

absence.” Unlike the emperor’s new clothes, terrorism does of course exist. Much of the reaction to the threat, however, has a distinctly delusionary quality . In Carle’s view,

for example, the CIA has been “spinning in self-referential circles” in which “our premises were flawed, our facts

used to fit our premises, our premises determined, and our fears justified our operational actions, in a self-contained process that arrived at a conclusion dramatically at odds with the facts.” The process “projected evil actions where there was, more often, muddled indirect and unavoidable complicity, or not much at all.” These “delusional ratiocinations,” he further observes, “were all sincerely, ardently held to have constituted a rigorous, rational process to identify terrorist threats” in which “the avalanche of reporting confirms its validity by its quantity,” in which there is a tendency to “reject incongruous or contradictory facts as erroneous, because they do not conform to accepted reality,” and in which potential dissenters are not-so-subtly reminded of career dangers: “Say what you want at meetings. It’s your decision. But you are doing yourself no favors.”42 Consider in this context the alarming and profoundly imaginary estimates of U.S. intelligence agencies in the year after the September 11 attacks that the number of trained al-Qaida operatives in the United States was between 2,000 and 5,000.43 Terrorist cells, they told reporters, were “embedded in most U.S. cities with sizable Islamic communities,” usually in the “run-down sections,” and were “up and active” because electronic intercepts had found some of them to be “talking to each other.”44 Another account relayed the view of “experts” that Osama bin Laden was ready to unleash an “11,000 strong terrorist army” operating in more than sixty countries “controlled by a Mr. Big who is based in Europe,” but that intelligence had “no idea where

thousands of these men are.”45 Similarly, FBI Director Robert Mueller assured the Senate Intelligence Committee on February 11, 2003, that, although his agency had yet to identify even one al-Qaida cell in the United States, “I remain very concerned about what we are not seeing,” a sentence rendered in bold lettering in his prepared text. Moreover, he claimed that such unidentified entities presented “the greatest threat,” had “developed a support infrastructure” in the country, and had achieved both the “ability” and the “intent” to inflict “signi ficant casualties in the US with little warning.”46

Over the course of time, such essentially delusionary thinking has been internalized and

institutionalized in a great many ways . For example, an extrapolation of delusionary

proportions is evident in the common observation that, because terrorists were able, mostly by thuggish means, to crash airplanes into buildings, they might therefore be able to construct a nuclear bomb. Brian Jenkins has run an internet search to discover how often variants of the term “al-Qaida” appeared within ten words of “nuclear.” There were only seven hits in 1999 and eleven in 2000, but the number soared to 1,742 in 2001 and to 2,931 in 2002.47 By 2008, Defense Secretary Robert Gates was assuring a congressional committee that what keeps every senior government leader awake at night is “the thought of a terrorist ending up with a weapon of mass destruction, especially nuclear.”48 Few of the sleepless, it seems, found much solace in the fact that an al-Qaida computer seized in Afghanistan in 2001 indicated that the group’s budget for research on weapons of mass destruction (almost

all of it focused on primitive chemical weapons work) was $2,000 to $4,000.49 In the wake of the killing of Osama bin Laden, officials now have many more al-Qaida computers, and nothing in their content appears to suggest that the group had the time or inclination, let alone the money, to set up and staff a uranium-seizing operation, as well as a fancy, super-high-technology facility to fabricate a bomb. This is a process that requires trusting corrupted foreign collaborators and other criminals, obtaining and transporting highly guarded material, setting up a machine shop staffed with top scientists and technicians, and rolling the heavy, cumbersome, and untested finished product into position to be detonated by a skilled crew—all while attracting no attention from outsiders.50 If the miscreants in the American cases have been unable to create and set off even the simplest conventional

bombs, it stands to reason that none of them were very close to creating, or having anything to do with, nuclear weapons—or for that matter biological, radiological, or chemical ones. In fact, with perhaps one exception, none seems to have even

dreamed of the prospect; and the exception is José Padilla (case 2), who apparently mused at one point about creating

a dirty bomb—a device that would disperse radiation—or even possibly an atomic one. His idea about isotope separation was to put

uranium into a pail and then to make himself into a human centrifuge by swinging the pail around in great arcs.51 Even if a weapon were made abroad and then brought into the United States, its detonation would require individuals in-country with the capacity to receive and handle the complicated weapons and then to set them off. Thus far, the talent pool appears, to put mildly, very thin.

Even if there is an attack – it would be small scale and disorganizedMueller and Stewart 12 [John Mueller is Senior Research Scientist at the Mershon Center for International Security Studies and Adjunct Professor in the Department of Political Science, both at Ohio State University, and Senior Fellow at the Cato Institute in Washington, D.C. Mark G. Stewart is Australian Research Council Professorial Fellow and Professor and Director at the Centre for Infrastructure Performance and Reliability at the University of Newcastle in Australia, “The Terrorism Delusion”, International Security, Vol. 37, No. 1 (Summer 2012), pp. 81–110, Chetan] Calculating the Costs of the Counterterrorism Delusion Delusion is a quality that is difficult to quantify. Nevertheless, there may be a

way to get a sense of its dimensions—or at least of its cost consequences. We have argued that terrorism is a limited problem with limited consequences and that the reaction to it has been excessive, and even delusional. Some degree of effort to deal with the terrorism hazard is, however, certainly appropriate—and is decidedly not delusional. The issue then is a quantitative one: At what point does a reaction to a threat that is real

become excessive or even delusional? At present rates, as noted earlier, an American’s chance of being killed by terrorism is one in 3.5 million in a given year. This calculation is based on history (but one that includes the September 11 attacks in the count), and things could, of course, become worse in the future. The analysis here, however,

suggests that terrorists are not really all that capable, that terrorism tends to be a counterproductive exercise, and that September 11 is increasingly standing out as an aberration, not a harbinger. Moreover, it has essentially become officially

accepted that the likelihood of a large-scale organized attack such as September 11 has declined and that the terrorist attacks to fear most are ones that are small scale and disorganized.66 Attacks such as these can inflict painful losses, of course, but they are quite limited in their effect and, even if they do occur, they would not change the fatality risk for the American population very much.