Balkinization: Holder Speaks

Holder Speaks

Deborah Pearlstein

Cross-posted at Opinio Juris

Nothing like Friday afternoon with the President overseas for a little news: The men accused of conspiring to commit the 9/11 attacks will be tried in federal court in New York City. Five other men, including a man accused of involvement in the USS Cole bombing in 2000, will face trial before new and improved (if not perfect) military commissions. White House Counsel Greg Craig resigns, over many, rightly disputed accusations that he should have resolved the 8-years-in-the-making Gitmo mess in his first 365 days.

In case those stories don’t give you enough to digest, you might have also done well to catch a series of administration officials (among others) talking about military commissions and the like on panels yesterday and today at the ABA’s Annual Review of the Field of National Security Law in Washington, D.C. (Full disclosure: I did a military commissions panel with Robin Jacobsohn, Deputy General Counsel at DOD; Col. Mary Perry, Director of the Operations and Int’l Law Division at the Air Force TJAG’s office; Scott Silliman of Duke and Jonathan Hafetz of the ACLU. ) You should also probably read yesterday’s white paper from the Center for American Progress think tank (CAP) in D.C. arguing, inter alia, that the remaining Gitmo detainees who may lawfully continue to be held under the AUMF and laws of war should be transferred for continued detention to Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan. And if you want to know how the Afghans are doing in preparation for taking over detention and trial operations themselves one of these days, two new Human Rights First reports on U.S. detention operations in Afghanistan are certainly worth reading, available here and here. Hint: Not so well.

For now, let's stick with today’s blockbuster prosecutions announcement. The decision to pursue the highest profile prosecutions of the 9/11 co-conspirators like Khalid Sheik Mohammed in federal criminal court in New York is wise, welcome and long overdue. We have prosecuted the likes of KSM in federal court before, we can do it again. The decision to use military commissions – improved though they may be – is, as I’ve written here before, a greater gamble.

As the Supreme Court has consistently recognized, our constitutional structure reflects a strong preference that determinations of guilt and innocence be carried out by independent courts created under Article III. In keeping with this constitutional presumption, the extent to which the Court has approved the use of Article I military courts, even with congressional authorization, has been strictly limited. As the Hamdan Court itself noted, military commissions are courts of necessity, whose use must be incident to the conduct of a particular war. So in each case to come before the commissions, we must ask (1) What is the necessity that makes this forum appropriate? What jurisdictional gap exists that would foreclose prosecution of Al Nashiri (the accused USS Cole bomber) in federal criminal courts? What relevant principle distinguishes his crime (accused of attacking a military target) from KSMs (accused of attacking civilians)? And (2) To what armed conflict are these offenses incident? In this respect KSM’s case is easier; the Administration is hardly alone in viewing the attacks of 9/11 as the initiation of a war against the United States. But as far as one can tell from government allegations to date, Al Nashiri is accused of involvement in a conspiracy dating to 1998. See, e.g., here (scroll down). Whether or not one can make the case under international humanitarian law (IHL) that there was a de facto non-international armed conflict already under way between the United States and Al Qaeda in the 1990’s (and the case under IHL is far from clear), our own Congress didn’t pass the Authorization for the Use of Military Force against Al Qaeda until after September 11, 2001.

There may be an available legal theory that explains the decision making here. But I didn’t quite get an answer to any of this from my thoughtful co-panelists from the Administration today (whose job it was, to be fair, not to make news). In all events, for these, among many other reasons, the Administration will have a long road ahead of it as it pursues commissions, hoping the third time is the charm.

Posted 5:48 PM by Deborah Pearlstein [link]