Remember that post from a while back saying I’d rediscovered a huge trove of personal files from 2006 that I’d considered lost or erased? Well, this is my first exhibit. It has to do with debate, and I find that fitting, since the debate post-season is coming to an end with the Kansas state tournament on the 14th and 15th.
Debate was a huge part of my high school career. While it was incredibly rewarding in a multitude of ways, it was also equally stressful. Each weekend that I went out to a debate tournament (basically, any week that I didn’t have a marching band competition), I got knots in my stomach thinking of going into direct competition against two other students in suits from another school. Something about confrontation always got me nervous. I joined debate to research and speak prettily, and not necessarily because I wanted to intellectually spar with other people… although I clearly knew that would be a part of it. It was the speech aspect that drew me into it in eighth grade, when we learned about high school debate, emulated it, and watched high school students do a demo round on our middle school stage. When I participated and witnessed all of this, I was enthralled.
In any case, I was fortunate enough to have a decent amount of success in debate. I invested a great amount of time to preparing for tournaments and making evidence for the entire debate squad. I loved the feeling of being productive. The most productive I felt was probably when I worked on the affirmative case, or the 1AC.
The scuttling around of anxious debaters at State.
My senior year, the annual topic involved civil liberties. My partner (Greg) and I spent a while at the beginning of the year whittling down the list of potential affirmatives we wanted to try, and we eventually settled on Guantanamo Bay. I think we were both personally intrigued and dismayed by the secret prisons, so we thought it would make a compelling case that we could eagerly defend in rounds. (In October of 2005, we tried shifting gears and doing a 1AC on Iraqi prisons, but then we promptly went back to Guantanamo Bay.) Our case continued to evolve all season, and by the end, we had a solid case that carried our utmost confidence. We hardly ever lost any rounds when we were Aff, because we’d designed our case to have strong evidence that preemptively responded to the most common Negative arguments. Most likely because of this, our coach made us the Affirmative team in our 4-Speaker team for the 2006 Kansas Class 6A state debate competition. I’m proud to say that Greg and I were undefeated at State, going 7-0.
Have you ever fathomed such beauty?
That 1AC always had a special place in my heart. In college, I was sad to realize that I couldn’t find a copy of that case anywhere on my computer. I’d always wanted to see it again.
I found it on the hard drive, buried in a several layers of subfiles that archived my senior year. While this is really long, I thought it might be fun to post here. Any debaters who are reading this post might find it vaguely interesting.
Visuals aren't allowed in debates.
…
During the Vietnam War, an Air Force pilot named Alvarez was shot down and captured by the North Vietnamese. He believed that he would be protected by the Geneva Conventions, until the interrogators said this: “You’re not a prisoner of war. There’s no war. There are no diplomatic relations between your country and my country. You don’t think that there’s somebody going to come in here and represent you? He says you’re in our hands now. We consider you a criminal. A war criminal.” For the next seven years, Alvarez was subjected daily to beatings, chokings, slashings, starvation, and poisoning. More than three decades later, the tables have turned. It is now our country that declares our enemies to be war criminals without rights. At Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the United States is holding 540 enemy combatants without trial, without charge, but in conditions Air Force pilot Alvarez would be all too familiar with. To end these abuses and cycle of hypocrisy, my partner and I stand firmly
Resolved: That the United States federal government should substantially decrease its authority either to detain without charge or search without probable cause.
First, we examine the shortcomings of the status quo in
Observation 1: Inherency
A. Prisoners are held at Guantanamo Bay without protections of the Geneva Convention.
Kaplan, Amy (President, American Studies Association) “Violent Belongings and the Question of Empire Today Presidential Address to the American Studies Association” Given October 17, 2003. American Quarterly, March 2004. Volume 56, Number 1.
In the naval base at Guantánamo, the U.S. has infiltrated close to seven hundred prisoners from more than forty countries, some under the age of fifteen, most of whom were captured in Afghanistan since January 2002. No charges have been brought against them. The United States has labeled them unlawful or enemy combatants and refuses to classify them as prisoners of war, an international status that would afford them the protection of the Geneva Conventions, which mandate humane treatment, an impartial trial, and limit to interrogations. Held in small, isolated cells and under intense surveillance, they are denied access to legal representation and subject to unlimited interrogations and to indefinite terms of detention. They may be tried by military tribunals, which have the power to hand down death sentences without the right to appeal. According to the Department of Defense, as “enemy combatants in the global war on terrorism,” they can be “lawfully detained until the cessation of hostilities.” Yet we are told that this is a war without end. Twenty-three men have tried to commit suicide, many more than once, in response to their indefinite future. If the prisoners have been denied rights under international agreements, they also have had no access to the U.S. constitution to challenge their detention. The courts have ruled that the U.S. has no sovereignty over Guantánamo even though it exerts total control there. This decision was based not on what the prisoners did or who they are but on where they are being held. According to Michael Ratner of the Center for Constitutional Rights, “It is as if Guantánamo is on another planet, a permanent United States penal colony in another world.”
B. The same defense bill that included the McCain anti-torture amendment had another amendment which canceled all positive benefits.
Mariner, Joanne (Columnist, Human Rights Attorney) “The Loopholes in McCain’s Bill.” Counterpunch Magazine, December 23, 2005. Online http://www.counterpunch.org/mariner 12232005.html. Accessed 30 December 2005.
The bad news is that the McCain Amendment was part of a larger package that takes some dismaying steps backward in the treatment of detainees. Think of the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 as McCain plus anti-McCain: protection plus protection-stripping. Think of it, in other words, as a self-contradictory political compromise.
Via provisions that bar detainees from bringing suits against torture and abuse, the bill stops them from enforcing the very rights that the McCain amendment is supposed to protect. And it undercuts the McCain protections in another important way, as well: by permitting statements obtained coercively to be relied upon in quasi-judicial proceedings.
C. The Administration’s current system of confidential and restricted abuse monitoring is the same one that failed to detect torture at Abu Ghraib.
Human Rights Watch “Diplomatic Assurances are No Safeguard against Torture” Human Rights Watch, April 2005. Online http://hrw.org/reports/ 2005/eca0405/4.htm. Accessed 18 November 2005.
Moreover, the idea that confidential monitoring alone can exert sufficient pressure to forestall abuses is misguided. The April 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal further reveals the limits of confidential monitoring. Although the ICRC had access to the Abu Ghraib prison, military and intelligence personnel deliberately obstructed monitors’ efforts to meet with and evaluate certain detainees. When the ICRC confidentially transmitted its concerns regarding the ill-treatment of some detainees, the United States government virtually ignored those complaints.
The challenges of monitoring for torture indicate that even the most expert monitors cannot provide the necessary safeguards against, and accountability for, acts of torture perpetrated in secrecy.
Observation 2: Harms
A. Guantanamo Bay tortures violate the Geneva Conventions and have been validated by the FBI.
Thomas, Helen (Columnist, Hearst Papers) “American Shame: Treatment of Guantanamo Prisoners.” The Houston Chronicle, December 29, 2004. Online Lexis-Nexis.
THE FBI has blown the whistle on the Defense Department’s military investigators by accusing them of abusive treatment of prisoners of war in Iraq and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The FBI was especially outraged that the interrogators of suspected terrorists had posed as FBI agents. Administration officials are usually pretty clubby folks who close ranks in times of trouble. But apparently, the FBI was not ready to take the fall for the Pentagon’s atrocious treatment of some prisoners of war. The International Committee of the Red Cross has labeled the Pentagon’s behavior as “tantamount to torture.” The big question is why President Bush has tolerated inhumane treatment of detainees and why he has not ordered a full stop to this shaming of America. He has to accept some of the blame for rejecting the Geneva Conventions on humane treatment of prisoners of war for so-called “enemy combatants” at Guantanamo Bay, site of a U.S. Navy base and the prison holding about 550 people from 40 different nations. There are indications that prison guards and interrogators thought they were following orders from higher ups when they abused detainees. The FBI didn’t complain publicly against the Department of Defense – or DOD – but a lawsuit by the American Civil Liberties Union has smoked out memos written by FBI agents about the treatment of the detainees. The records claimed the FBI learned that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had approved the impersonation of the FBI. An ACLU attorney said the methods adopted by the military were “illegal, immoral and counterproductive.” The documents showed that FBI agents were particularly upset with what they saw as physical and mental abuse of the detainees, including the sticking of lighted cigarettes in their ears, choking, beatings, temperature changes, hooding, the use of dogs and other forms of harassment. One detainee was wrapped in an Israeli flag. One of the agents complained that the military’s aggressive interrogation was “beyond the bounds of standard FBI practice.” In Iraq, an agent observed “serious abuses of civilian detainees,” including strangulation, beatings and other physical harm and humiliations. One detainee was described as “almost unconscious on the floor, with a pile of hair next to him.” The agent surmised that the prisoner “had apparently been literally pulling his own hair.” Another report said that soldiers at Guantanamo spat upon a detainee and beat him when he tried to protect himself. At one point, the soldiers beating the prisoner, “grabbed his head and beat it into the cell floor,” knocking him unconscious, the report said. Describing an assault on a detainee, an agent wrote: “If this detainee is ever released or his story made public,” the Defense Department will not be held accountable and the FBI will be left “holding the bag.” The morbid accounts run counter to the administration’s claim that there has been no torture at the Guantanamo prison. Incredibly, the abuses continued even after the photos of the mistreatment of the Abu Ghraib prisoners shocked the world.
B. United Nations inspectors have refused to examine Guantanamo without full access to the facility.
Xinhua News “UN abandoms Guantanamo inspection over row with US” November 18, 2005. Online http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2005-11/18/content_3801617.htm. Accessed 18 November 2005.
A United Nations (UN) inspection of the Guantanamo Bay US military prison has been abandoned after access to detainees was denied by the American authorities, human rights experts announced here on Friday.
In a joint statement, five UN experts who had planned to carry out the visit expressed regret over the US’s refusal to their demand for an “objective and fair assessment” of the Guantanamo Bay prison.
“We deeply regret that the United States government did not accept the standard terms of reference for a credible, objective and fair assessment of the situation of the detainees at the Guantanamo Bay detention facility,” said the statement.
“Under the circumstances, we will not be traveling to Guantanamo Bay Naval Station, as doing so would undermine the principles” governing UN fact-finding missions,” the statement added.
The United States had previously set the date for the five experts to visit Guantanamo on Dec. 6, to investigate alleged violations of human rights at the prison.
These unjust conditions can no longer be tolerated, and thus we present the following
Plan:
The Executive branch of the United States federal government should extend prisoner of war status under the Geneva Convention to all prisoners held at Guantanamo Bay and all combatants captured by the United States forces from now forward. The administration should allow United Nations inspectors full access to the facility.
Prisoner of War status necessitates a trial for prisoners of conflicts that the International Red Cross has declared over. Accordingly, all prisoners to which that applies will either be released or charged as unlawful combatants under the Geneva Convention. For the trials, a new, independent Habeas court will be established solely for dealing with those people formerly designated as enemy combatants. The Habeas court will be analogous to a FISA court for enemy combatants.
The Affirmative claims the right to fiat and clarify intent.
Advantage 1: Terrorism
A. Guantanamo hasn’t prevented a single terrorist attack.
Bright, Martin (Home Affairs Editor) “Guantanamo has ‘failed to prevent terror attacks.’ The Observer, October 3, 2004. Online http://observer.guardian.co. uk/uk_news/story/0,6903,1318633,00.html. Accessed 12 September 2005.
PRISONER interrogations at Guantanamo Bay, the controversial US military detention centre where guards have been accused of brutality and torture, have not prevented a single terrorist attack, according to a senior Pentagon intelligence officer who worked at the heart of the US war on terror.
Lieutenant Colonel Anthony Christino, who retired last June after 20 years in military intelligence, says that President George W Bush and US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld have ‘wildly exaggerated’ their intelligence value.
Christino’s revelations, to be published this week in Guantanamo: America’s War on Human Rights , by British journalist David Rose, are supported by three further intelligence officials. Christino also disclosed that the ‘screening’ process in Afghanistan which determined whether detainees were sent to Guantanamo was ‘hopelessly flawed from the get-go’.
It was performed by new recruits who had almost no training, and were forced to rely on incompetent interpreters. They were ‘far too poorly trained to identify real terrorists from the ordinary Taliban militia’.
According to Christino, most of the approximately 600 detainees at Guantanamo – including four Britons – at worst had supported the Taliban in the civil war it had been fighting against the Northern Alliance before the 11 September attacks, but had had no contact with Osama bin Laden or al-Qaeda.
For six months in the middle of 2003 until his retirement, Christino had regular access to material derived from Guantanamo prisoner interrogations, serving as senior watch officer for the central Pentagon unit known as the Joint Intelligence Task Force-Combating Terrorism (JITF-CT). This made him responsible for every piece of information that went in or out of the unit, including what he describes as ‘analysis of critical, time-sensitive intelligence’.
Additionally, Subpoint
B. Regardless of abuses, Guantanamo Bay serves as a rallying point for terrorism.
Buffalo News “Close Guantanamo Jail; Continued Operation of Terrorist Prison Serves as Rallying Point for Our Enemies” June 19, 2005. Online Lexis-Nexis. Accessed 4 September 2005.
Even if none of the horror stories emerging about the American “terrorist jail” at Guantanamo Bay is accurate, this much is true: By operating the installation away from prying eyes, without oversight, the administration has guaranteed that its assurances to the contrary will fall on deaf ears. It should close the jail and start over, with new policies in place.
Any administration would face this dilemma under similar circumstances, but the Bush administration faces problems of its own making. It has been so insular, so frequently dishonest (consider its manipulation of scientific data to suit its ideological preferences) and so unwilling to admit its mistakes, that it has earned a presumption of guilt by many critics.
Every administration makes enemies, of course. That’s an inevitable outgrowth of making choices. But few have taken to stick-in-the-eye government as eagerly as the Bush administration, and in this case, the consequences can be severe.
As Sen. Joseph Biden recently observed, allegations of mistreatment at Guantanamo along with reports of other abuses have “become the greatest propaganda tool that exists for recruiting of terrorists around the world. And it is unnecessary to be in that position.”
C. The War on Terrorism is critical to protect civilization.
Alexander, Yonah (Professor and Director, Inter-University Center for Terrorism) “Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century: Threats and Responses” DePaul Business Law Journal, Fall 1999/Spring 2000. Pgs. 66-67.
More specifically, present-day terrorists have introduced into contemporary life a new scale of terror violence in terms of both threats and responses that has made clear that we have entered into an Age of Terrorism with all of its serious implications to national, regional, and global safety concerns. Perhaps the most significant dangers that evolve from modern day terrorism are those relating to the safety, welfare, and rights of ordinary people; the stability of the state system; the health of economic development; the expansion of democracy; and possibly the survival of civilization itself.
The plan will solve for the troubles in Guantanamo, as we see in
Observation 3: Solvency
A. Prisoner of War status for detainees will prevent abuses at Guantanamo.
Sweeney, Michael (Adjunct Professor of Law, former Fellow in International Human Rights, Fordham University School of Law) “Detention at Guantanamo Bay: A Linguistic Challenge to Law” Winter 2003.
Further, the administration’s position violates the spirit of the Geneva Conventions: that combatants in enemy hands are entitled to respect for their human dignity and status as combatants. The cramped cells; shackling; and severe restrictions on exercise, personal hygiene, and communications at Camp Delta violate this guiding principle of the Conventions. The administration’s attempt to justify the treatment simply by denying that the detainees are POWs is illegitimate. If avoiding obligations were so simple, the Geneva Conventions would have no practical significance.
This denial of POW status eliminates two important administration concerns: (1) acknowledging POW status may inhibit the ability to interrogate the detainees and (2) POW status could mandate the release of detainees who are in fact dangerous terrorists. But acknowledging POW status does not limit the ability to interrogate or prosecute any more than do other applicable legal obligations.
• Interrogation. Article 17 of the Geneva Conventions provides that POWs must give only their name, rank, serial number, and birth date. It does not preclude requests for more information, and obtaining information is bound to be difficult in some cases, regardless of POW status. Although Article 17 prohibits the use of physical coercion to gain information, so do applicable U.S. and other international laws (e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 2340A, Convention Against Torture; International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights). Acknowledging POW status would prohibit the use of detention conditions like those at Camp Delta to punish the detainees or “soften them up” for interrogation; but, regardless of official status, the underlying principle of the Geneva Conventions—that combatants are not criminals per se and are entitled to human respect—would prohibit such treatment.
• Release. Article 118 of the Third Geneva Convention provides that POWs “shall be released and repatriated without delay after the cessation of active hostilities.” Despite the legal obligation, the administration seems intent on holding the detainees after the war in Afghanistan ends. Questioned about when the Guantanamo Bay detainees might be released, Secretary Rumsfeld responded, “when we feel that there are not effective global terrorist networks functioning that these people would be likely to return to and begin again their terrorist activities.” Similarly, many administration officials, including the president, have publicly voiced the opinion that all Guantanamo Bay detainees are “killers” and “terrorists” rather than or in addition to being combatants. The implication is that the administration is holding the detainees for acts other than legitimate acts of hostility during the war in Afghanistan. Although the Geneva Conventions provide for prosecution and punishment of crimes, to date not a single detainee has been charged with, not to mention convicted of, any criminal acts.
B. A separate habeas court will ensure rights for enemy combatants.
Chrisman, Christopher A. (Writer, Journal of Law and Politics) “Article III Goes to War: A Case for a Separate Federal Circuit for Enemy Combatant Habeas Cases” Journal of Law and Politics, Winter 2005. pg. 31-82.
In this Section, I propose that the best solution available to the Government is to create a separate Article III: federal district court and court of appeals to receive and review petitions for writs of habeas corpus filed by persons detained as enemy combatants. Part A of this Section outlines the composition of a federal district court. and court of appeals. Part B explains the advantages and disadvantages of a separate federal circuit, relying on the experiences of similar federal courts that are constituted to handle certain claims. Part B also will explain how a separate federal circuit not only comports with constitutional requirements for “meaningful review” before a “neutral decisionmaker,” but it also consolidates the habeas review process into one system, where a limited number of trial and appellate judges will participate in the process. This better ensures a uniform system guided by judges with specialized knowledge in the process and joined by federal prosecutors and public defenders who can specialize in the intricacies of habeas law and the application of that law to the unique issues that arise in the course of detaining alleged enemy combatants (and challenging or defending that detention). With uniformity and specialization comes reliability for both the detainee and the Executive, which is the principal goal in redressing the shortcomings of Hamdi and Rasul.
C. Full transparency for conditions at Guantanamo would ensure that standards are upheld and convince the world that US policy has changed.
Roth, Kenneth (Executive Director, Human Rights Watch) “Letter to President Bush Regarding Access to Guantanamo” Human Rights Watch, July 29, 2005. Online http://hrw.org/english/ docs/2005/07/29/usdom11519.htm. Accessed 18 November 2005.
As your remarks suggest, transparency at Guantanamo is important to ensure that detainees are treated humanely and in accordance with international standards. Increased transparency will help improve detainee operations at Guantanamo and prevent future abuses. By contrast, lack of transparency suggests that the United States has something to hide.
I draw sometimes. 