Obama Administration Questioning Suspected Terrorists On Ships Rather Than CIA ‘Black’ Sites

This article discusses the Obama Administration’s emerging trend of detaining and questioning suspected terrorists aboard United States vessels at sea. This approach is the current administration’s response to George W. Bush’s reliance on Guantanamo and other “black sites” as locations for prolonged detention.

Bush’s policy engendered a great deal of controversy on political, legal and moral grounds, as United States citizens dealt with the reality that the federal government was detaining individuals far outside the reach of constitutional due process and typical criminal law procedures.

As part of his campaign platform, Obama insisted that Guantanamo Bay would be closed down, and that his administration was committed to prosecuting suspected terrorists within the currently established boundaries of criminal law and procedure.

While this is clearly a laudable goal from a civil liberties perspective, Obama’s administration has run into difficulty because their civil liberties approach is not the most efficient method of waging the War on Terror and protecting national security interests.

The United States population is generally familiar with the concept of Miranda Rights: “You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say can and will be used against you in a court of law. You have the right to an attorney, if you cannot afford an attorney, one will be appointed for you…” and so on. The reality of the situation is that a suspected terrorist who is “Mirandized” is less likely to talk in order to minimize the government’s criminal case. Inevitably, this lack of information hurts the operators in the national security arena because they must protect national interests with less intelligence than if suspected terrorists were forced or encouraged to give up their information.

The administration’s solution to resolving the tension between these two objectives has been to detain suspects on at-sea vessels, classifying them as enemy combatants under the laws of war and the Laws of Armed Conflict while subjecting them to interrogation for valuable intelligence. Once this phase is completed, these suspected terrorists are re-questioned in accordance with constitutional criminal procedure so that the government can build a case against them for civil prosecution; any information given by the suspect before being read their rights is inadmissible in a court of law.

While the Obama Administration’s position is understandable, their solution is not all that distinguishable from the Bush Administration’s approach. Under both approaches, individuals suspected of terrorist activities are detained in an adversarial location and subjected to various “interview” techniques in the hope of gathering national security information.

It is easy to consider that the Obama approach might be more about satisfying the popular conscience than providing meaningful civil liberty protection.

Does the Obama Administration’s approach do a meaningful job of protecting the civil liberties of individuals suspected of terrorist activity? Is the population concerned with the civil rights of non-American citizens accused of suspected terrorist activity? Is there are more effective or efficient way of resolving the tensions between civil rights and the need for the best intelligence for the national security establishment?

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/08/obama-terrorists-ships_n_4063003.html?ir=World&ref=topbar