White House counterterrorism czar John Brennan just gave a pretty forceful defense of the use of Article III courts and the need to close Gitmo at an event being held by the Brennan Center for Justice, as well as delivering an implicit side-swipe to Rep. Peter King's Muslim radicalization hearings, saying that singling out Americans by their ethnic background, religious beliefs, or political affiliations is "un-American."
Brennan was much more strident in his emphasis on the need to retain the use of Article III courts as a counterterrorism tool, stating that domestic terrorism arrests would always be processed through the criminal justice system, because to do otherwise would be to have the military doing law enforcement work on American soil, a point Congressman Adam Smith made yesterday during the House Armed Services Committee meeting. But Brennan was far more confrontational than Pentagon counsel Jeh Johnson in emphasizing that complete militarizing of counterterrorism policy would make it more difficult for the government to incapacitate terrorists.
It strikes me that the difference here may merely be one of the roles they play -- Brennan, as an intelligence analyst, is perhaps more acutely aware of global perceptions and their impact on counterterrorism. But he drew a very clear line in the sand with regards to House Armed Services Committee Chairman Rep. Buck McKeon's proposal to force all terror suspects into military custody; what remains to be seen is whether the administration itself will stand by it.
Brennan's remarks about the repression in Yemen, on the other hand ("we condemn the violence in the strongest terms") underscored the awkwardness of the U.S. endorsing a military intervention in Libya even as American allies in Yemen and Bahrain engage in brutal crackdowns of their own pro-democracy uprisings.
