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Newsroom: Interrogation Expert Warns Against Use Of Torture 2-2-2018, Roger Williams University School Of Law

Life of the Law School (1993- )

No abstract provided.

Introduction, Brandt Goldstein

Articles & Chapters

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A Rose By Any Other Name: How The United States Charges Its Service Members For Violating The Laws Of War, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

This chapter examines the US practice of not charging its service members with war crimes. The chapter briefly explains how the United States asserts criminal jurisdiction over its service members before turning to how the US military reports violations of the laws of war. It then sets out the US methodology for charging such violations as applied to its service members, and compares this methodology to that applied to those tried by military commissions. The chapter then discusses the varied meanings of the term ‘war crimes’ and the way in which the 1949 Geneva Conventions can provide a benchmark against …

Just Between Yoo And He: Two Justice Department Lawyers' Imaginary Torturous Email, Stephen A. Rosenbaum

Publications

On December 9, 2014, the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence released its long-awaited Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, which The New York Times described as “a portrait of depravity that is hard to comprehend and even harder to stomach.” The Times had reported four years earlier that a number of Department of Justice (DoJ) emails were determined to be missing during the Office of Professional Responsibility's investigation of the Bush Administration memoranda providing legal justification for “enhanced interrogations,” the so-called torture memos. What follows is an imaginary exchange of emails between two young …

The Ssci Report And Its Critics: Torturing Efficacy, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Al-Nashiri, The Cole Bombing, And The Start Of The Conflict With Al-Qaeda, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Presumed Imminence: Judicial Risk Assessment In The Post-9/11 World, Avidan Y. Cover

Faculty Publications

Court opinions in the terrorism context are often distinguished by fact-finding that relates to risk assessment. These risk assessments — inherently policy decisions — are influenced by cultural cognition and by cognitive errors common to probability determinations, particularly those made regarding highly dangerous and emotional events. In a post-9/11 world, in which prevention and intelligence are prioritized over prosecution, courts are more likely to overstate the potential harm, neglect the probability, and presume the imminence of terrorist attacks. As a result, courts are apt to defer to the government and require less evidence in support of measures that curtail civil …

The Janus Moon Rising - Why 2014 Heralds United States' Detention Policy On A Collision Course...With Itself, Chris Jenks

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

2014 will serve as a test of the United States’ claims that its detention policy is consistent with the law of armed conflict (LOAC). If, as President Obama has repeatedly stated, U.S. involvement in the armed conflict in Afghanistan will end this year, then any LOAC based detention of belligerents linked solely to that conflict ends as well. That should mean the release or transfer of members of the Taliban currently detained at Guantanamo. It won’t.

Understanding The Exceptional And Dynamic Nature Of Boumediene Rights To Court Access, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

This short piece replies to Professor Steve Vladeck's comments on my essay 'Do Boumediene Rights Expire?' 161 U. Pa. L. Rev. Pennumbra 20 (2012), available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=2166103. In this reply, I further develop the argument that Boumediene rights to court access may have expired for those Guantanamo detainees determined through habeas litigation to be enemy fighters; and whether these judicially-confirmed enemy fighters have continuing rights court access under Boumediene goes to the federal courts' subject matter jurisdiction, meaning that the Obama administration's concession of continued court access is inoperative and federal courts must sua sponte raise and decide the issue.

Do Boumediene Rights Expire?, Andrew Kent

Faculty Scholarship

In 2008, Guantanamo detainees won a landmark victory in Boumediene v. Bush, which held that the Congress and the President could not prevent the detainees from accessing the courts to seek release via habeas corpus. The Court decided that persons claiming to be innocent civilians deserved a day in court, even though they were noncitizens held by the U.S. military as enemy combatants on foreign territory. The Court applied a fact-specific test that granted habeas rights to noncitizens outside the United States only when a balance of factors — including citizenship, enemy status, the nature of status review procedures, the …

Guantánamo Bodies: Law, Media, And Biopower, Cary Federman, Dave Holmes

Department of Justice Studies Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

The idea of the Guantánamo detainee as a Muselmann, the lowest order of concentration camp inmates, contains within it important implications for the new understanding of sovereignty in the era of Guantánamo, in an age of exception. The purpose of this article is to explain the status of those who are detained at Guantánamo Bay. Stated broadly, in assessing that status, we will emphasize the connection between the altered meaning of sovereignty that has accompanied the placing of prisoners in an American penal colony in Cuba and the biopolitical status of the prisoners who reside there. More particularly, we …

Obama's Failed Attempt To Close Gitmo: Why Executive Orders Can't Bring About Systemic Change, Erin B. Corcoran

Law Faculty Scholarship

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No Virtue In Passivity: The Supreme Court And Ali Al-Marri, Bruce K. Miller

Faculty Scholarship

This Article discusses the case of Al-Marri v. Spagone, which the U.S. Supreme Court unjustifiably dismissed as moot on March 6, 2009. By dismissing this appeal, the Court ignored its duty to determine whether the military detention of a non-citizen residing lawfully in the United States was authorized by law. And that failure has in turn contributed significantly, and unnecessarily, to the cloud of legal uncertainty which now hovers over the preventive detention measures adopted and proposed by the Obama Administration.

Beyond The Guantánamo Bind: Pragmatic Multilateralism In Refugee Resettlement, Melissa J. Durkee

Scholarly Works

The international refugee protection system is under threat. States weary of increased refugee flows and preoccupied with national security increasingly exploit legal gaps or avoid refugee law altogether. The U.S. approach to resettlement of Guantánamo detainee refugees exemplified this trend. Yet, in the Guantánamo context, U.S. avoidance of international refugee law put the executive in a bind that it could not easily escape: Because the U.S. executive was unwilling to assume the political cost of resettling the refugee detainees domestically, it resorted to peddling them for resettlement to foreign states while, at the same time, mounting a robust legal defense …

American Vertigo: Dual Use, Prison Physicians, Research, And Guantanamo, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Physicians can be used by governments for nonmedical purposes, and physician acceptance of their nonmedical use is usually denoted as "dual loyalty, " although it is more analytically helpful to frame it "dual use. " Dual use of physicians has been on display at Guantanamo where physicians have consistently been used to break hunger strikes as part of the military security mission in ways that directly violate medical ethics. Guantanamo itself has also been seen worldwide as a uniquely horrible prison, which can tell us little about other American prisons. The contrary seems to be true: Guantanamo, and the use …

An Unintended Casualty Of The War On Terror, Aya Gruber

Publications

As the dust of the Bush administration's war on terror settles, casualties are starting to appear on the legal battlefield. The United States' human rights reputation and the Supreme Court's international influence lay wounded in the wake of U.S. policies that flouted international law by advocating torture, suborning indefinite detention, and erecting irregular tribunals. Through declining citation, the courts of the world are telling the Supreme Court that if it does not respect international and foreign law, international and foreign courts will not respect it. Some might object that the Supreme Court should not be lumped with the Bush administration …

Indefinite Detention Under The Laws Of War, Chris Jenks, Eric Talbot Jensen

Faculty Journal Articles and Book Chapters

The recent acquittal of the first Guantanamo Bay detainee to stand trial in U.S. federal court on all but one of the 286 charges he faced stemming from the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in Africa has reinvigorated the discussion on indefinite detention under the laws of war. While the issue has been raised in the past, the discussion hasn’t extended beyond stating that the law of war, or law of armed conflict (LOAC) as it is often called, provides a legal basis for detention, including detention for the duration of hostilities. In fact, the Obama Administration has made …

The Ivory Tower At Ground Zero: Conflict And Convergence In Legal Education's Responses To Terrorism, Peter Margulies

Law Faculty Scholarship

No abstract provided.

Bush V. Boumediene: The Court Is Back, Jay Dratler

Akron Law Faculty Publications

This short article is a follow-up to a piece I wrote two years ago on Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, SSRN No. 913822. While applauding the result in Hamdan, I critiqued the Supreme Court for missing a “teachable moment” and obscuring the great issues at stake in prolixity and mind-numbing technical detail.

In this article, I applaud the Boumediene v. Bush Court not only for its result—that the Constitution’s Suspension Clause can require habeas corpus for aliens held abroad under certain circumstances—but for its reasoning and style as well. This time, the majority of five did not miss its “teachable …

Supreme Court Report 2007-2008, Julie M. Cheslik, Aimee L. Morrison, Tyler J. Scott

Faculty Works

This article reviews the decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court for the 2007-2008 Term that are of particular relevance to state and local governments including those involving voting and elections, speech, class-of-one equal protection claims, immunity, taxation, preemption, and the Fourth and Sixth Amendments.

Against the backdrop of the 2008 presidential election between Democrat Barack Obama and Republican John McCain, and an economy plagued by recession and federal bailouts of the finance and mortgage industries, the Court continued in a largely conservative vein, reflecting the policies and predilections of the majority of justices. The Court reasserted its distaste for unfettered …

"The Constitution Follows The Flag...But Doesn't Quite Catch Up With It": The Story Of Downes V. Bidwell, Pedro A. Malavet

UF Law Faculty Publications

Some may consider a 1901 case to be ancient history, but Downes v. Bidwell and its progeny still govern all of these regions. This chapter will explore the Insular Cases as a way to understand the role of race in articulating the relationship between American territorial expansion and American citizenship-between American empire and American democracy. The chapter begins by historicizing the Downes opinion. My aim here is threefold: (1) to provide a brief description of the effects of Spanish colonial rule on Puerto Rico; (2) to set forth the circumstances leading up to the Spanish American War; and (3) to …

Detention And Interrogation In The Post-9/11 World, Kermit Roosevelt Iii

All Faculty Scholarship

Our detention and interrogation policies in the wake of the terrorist attacks of 9/11 have been a disaster. This paper, delivered as a Donahue Lecture at Suffolk University Law School in February 2008, explores the dimensions and source of that disaster. It first offers a clear and intelligible narrative of the construction and implementation of executive detention and interrogation policy and then analyzes the roles played by the different branches of government and the American people in order to understand how we have ended up in our current situation.

Congress's Transformative Republican Revolution In 2001-2006 And The Future Of One-Party Rule, Charles Tiefer

All Faculty Scholarship

In 2001 - 2006, Republican leadership in the legislature circumvented procedural norms to implement an ideological agenda that precluded the minority party from making alternative proposals and voicing criticisms. With the Republican majority in the Senate falling to 50-50 in 2000, President Bush's assumption of office, despite having lost the popular vote, set the tone for what would become an era of illegitimate procedural reform cloaked in secrecy and deniability. Through closed-door conferences and closed-rules, Republican leadership in the House and Senate turned the clock back on civil liberties, passed unfavorable and convoluted tax cuts, and used transformed health care …

The Unitary Executive, Jurisdiction Stripping, And The Hamdan Opinions: A Textualist Response To Justice Scalia, Gary S. Lawson, Steven Calabresi

Faculty Scholarship

In Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, a five to three majority of the United States Supreme Court held unlawful the Bush Administration's use of military commissions to try alien combatant detainees held at the United States airbase in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The most basic issue in Hamdan was whether the Supreme Court had jurisdiction to hear the case. Justice Scalia's dissenting opinion argued that the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 stripped the Supreme Court and all other courts of jurisdiction to hear habeas cases such as Hamdan's.

Hamdan argued in the Supreme Court that to read the Detainee Treatment Act to …

The Cost Of Confusion: Resolving Ambiguities In Detainee Treatment, Kenneth Anderson

Reports

This short policy paper considers US counterterrorism policy with particular attention to treatment of detainees in matters of challenging detention, interrogation, trial of detainees, and release. It analyzes the existing US war on terror and considers future policies that would address both national security concerns and human rights/civil liberties concerns. The paper is written by two experts and advocates in counterterrorism-related issues, coming from the center right and the center left in American politics, as part of a project of the Stanley Foundation, Bridging the Foreign Policy Divide, which publishes papers by pairs of experts coming from conservative and progressive …

U.S. Counterterrorism Policy And Superpower Compliance With International Human Rights Norms, Kenneth Anderson

Articles in Law Reviews & Other Academic Journals

This essay, originally prepared for a symposium on Guantanamo and international law, provides an brief overview of the elements that a comprehensive US counterterrorism should encompass. This overview is set against the question of how the US, as the world's superpower, ought to address its international law obligations. The essay then sets that question against the still-further question of what it means to be the superpower in a world that some believe is gradually evolving into a multipolar world, but which is currently a world of a conjoined US-international global system of security.

The essay defends the concept of counterterrorism …

Who's Afraid Of Geneva Law?, Aya Gruber

Publications

According to many internationalists, the terrorism detention cases Hamdi v. Rumsfeld and Hamdan v. Rumsfeld are exemplary of a movement on the part of the Supreme Court toward greater incorporation of and respect for international law. Recent death penalty cases, statements of individual justices, and the increasing transnationalism of the Court's docket have lead many to believe, as Justice Ginsburg does, that the Court's "island or lone ranger mentality is beginning to change." This Article takes the contrary position that Hamdi and Hamdan are not internationalist because of their meticulous avoidance of the issue of Geneva Convention self-execution. Briefly, the …

Physicians And Torture: Lessons From The Nazi Doctors, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

How is it possible? What are the personal, professional and political contexts that allow physicians to use their skills to torture and kill rather than heal? What are the psychological characteristics and the social, cultural and political factors that predispose physicians to participate in human rights abuses? What can be done to recognize at-risk situations and attempt to provide corrective or preventive strategies? This article examines case studies from Nazi Germany in an attempt to answer these questions. Subjects discussed include the psychology of the individual perpetrator, dehumanization, numbing, splitting, omnipotence, medicalization, group dynamics, obedience to authority, diffusion of responsibility, …

Raising The Red Flag: The Continued Relevance Of The Japanese Internment In The Post-Hamdi World, Aya Gruber

Publications

In the years since the terrorist attacks of September 11th, the Japanese interment has re-emerged as a topic of serious discourse among legal scholars, politicians, civil libertarians, and society in general. Current national security policies have created concerns that the government has stepped dangerously close to the line crossed by the Roosevelt administration during World War II. Civil libertarians invoke the internment to caution policy-makers against two of the most serious dangers of repressive national security policies: racial decision-making and incarceration without process. Bush defenders advance several arguments in response to internment comparisons. The most conservative is an ardent defense …

Hunger Strikes At Guantanamo: Medical Ethics And Human Rights In A “Legal Black Hole”, George J. Annas

Faculty Scholarship

Being Human, a collection of readings assembled by President George W. Bush's Council on Bioethics, contains a powerful description of the force-feeding of Soviet political prisoner Vladimir Bukovsky, who was on a hunger strike to protest the refusal of prison authorities to provide a lawyer for a fellow inmate who was awaiting trial:

They started feeding me forcibly through the nostril. By a rather thick rubber tube with a metal end on it. . . . The procedure will be that four or five KGB guys will come to my cell, take me to a medical unit, put a straitjacket …

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