Putting National Security Back in National Security Law
There is a great op-ed in today's Des Moines Register: Restore rule of law to security, foreign policy. The author, Damon Terrill, a former legal advisor at the State Department, makes this key recommendation:
Simply put: Guantanamo, renditions, torture, and the rest of the extralegal acts of the Bush Administration have made us less safe. For every genuine terrorist we've kept locked up at Guantanamo, we've created a dozen because of the perceived injustice of the detention system. For every tidbit of information extracted by torture -- and there are almost certainly at least a few useful ones -- we've created a hundred new plots by the revulsion of these techniques. It isn't that everything we've done has been useless, it is that it has been, on the whole, counter-productive.
The problem with the Bush Administration is that too many of these decisions were made by amateurs trying to burnish their tough-guy credentials. Terrill's call to involve the national security experts in this debate will help craft a policy that both protects our rights and our nation.
A longer version of Terrill's argument can be found here, as well as my own thoughts on this issues here.
Obama's national security adviser should coordinate a comprehensive review of the law of America's international relations as it has developed since 2000. A working group composed of the principal legal officers of the departments of state and defense, of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence and the CIA, and the attorney general should perform that review, in consultation with Congress.Though this may seem like a conventional argument, the call for the National Security Advisor to play the lead role is significant. It serves as a reminder that we have to look at outputs, not just process. Many critics of the Bush Administration have been reluctant to look at the issues of detainees and interrogation through a national security lens, presumably out of fear that doing so would legitimize the administration's unlawful acts. But, from my perspective, the greatest sin of the Bush Administration is not violation of law in the name of national security, but their violation of law at the expense of national security.
Simply put: Guantanamo, renditions, torture, and the rest of the extralegal acts of the Bush Administration have made us less safe. For every genuine terrorist we've kept locked up at Guantanamo, we've created a dozen because of the perceived injustice of the detention system. For every tidbit of information extracted by torture -- and there are almost certainly at least a few useful ones -- we've created a hundred new plots by the revulsion of these techniques. It isn't that everything we've done has been useless, it is that it has been, on the whole, counter-productive.
The problem with the Bush Administration is that too many of these decisions were made by amateurs trying to burnish their tough-guy credentials. Terrill's call to involve the national security experts in this debate will help craft a policy that both protects our rights and our nation.
A longer version of Terrill's argument can be found here, as well as my own thoughts on this issues here.
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