Tournament: Navy | Round: 2 | Opponent: CUNY Ayaz-Singh | Judge: Wash

The Trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Welcome to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of 9/11 and the admitted murderer of 2, 978 innocent people. This is the man who’s proverbial gunshot started a war, a war that America is still fighting today against the forces of evil that threaten the democracy that we hold so dear, a war that we are dedicated to fighting forever more. In America, we assume people are innocent until proven guilty. Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stands guilty before proven guilty. He confesses:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 2007."Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024." (2007). Web. 26 Oct. 2013.
I was Emir (i.e., commander) of Beit Al Shuhada (
AND
was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.

But before passing judgment, let the defense stand:

The Defense

We would like to enter into the record that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was tortured.

Bradbury 05(Steven G. Bradbury, Former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, "Memorandum for John A Rizzo Senior Deputy General Counsel", Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel May 30, 2005)
The CIA used thewaterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Let Mohammed bear witness the contradictory fictions that animate and sustain the narrative of American democracy.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 2007."Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024." (2007). Web. 26 Oct. 2013.
DETAINEE: What I wrote here, is not I’m making myself hero, when
AND
finish statement. I’m asking you to be fair¶with other people.

Democracies do not torture—democracies and their elevated citizens are above such barbaric behavior, in theory—of course in practice they DO torture but we cannot understand their acts of sovereign violence as torture, lest democracy collapse. Instead, the violence is legitimated by its visitation on barbaric terrorist bodies unfit for our way of life.

Rejali 2009. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2009. p 45-46. Professor of political science at Reed College.
As a matter of historical record, torture has characterized democratic as well as authoritarian
AND
the streets whatever the cost. Each process generates powerful demands for torture.

The torture and detention of the body of Mohammed is a result of the our democracy’s denial of Mohammed’s right to exist and request redress as a subject before the law—we tell ourselves that he must be tortured and die a legal death to preserve American democracy

Zizek 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. "Knight of the Living Dead." The New York Times 24 Mar. 2007 ~London~ , opinion ed. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.
SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent
AND
arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

The refusal to understand Mohammed as the subject of torture indexes his status as barbaric life constitutively excluded from life in the West

Prozorov06 (Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International Relations at Petrozavodsk State University and Collegium Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Vol.35 No. 1, pp75-99) NAR
Secondly and consequently, the ’war on terror’ is of particular interest, insofar
AND
obscuring the reflection on the concrete meaning of antagonism in contemporary political life.

This interiorization renders bodies marked by risk as disposable and thus subject to the full force of the violence of the law while being excluded from the polity as a natural expression of colonial thought. The racialized body is experiences the bare fangs of the imperial wolf, which results in the worst forms of structural violence and perpetual war.

Maldonado-Torres 2008 (Nelson, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC-Berkeley, Against War p. 216-223
For Dussel, the phenomenology of the "21 conquer" helps to clarify the constitutive
AND
war, with which this book opened.¶ ————F¶ I I¶

This impact is sustained by our complicity in the moral myth of the United States. American mistreatment of detainees is an appropriate synecdoche for the state terror apparatus that subjugates all threatening bodies to create a new garrison planet

Mcculloch 10 (Jude, Professor of Criminology at Monash University, Melbourne, From garrison state to garrison planet: state terror, the War on Terror and the rise of a global carceral complex, Contemporary State Terrorism Theory and practice, 196-213)
In the same way that neoliberalism and punitive penal policy have marched hand-in
AND
encompasses the entire globe: a move from garrison state to garrison planet.

Thus, the judiciary should find Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not guilty.

The Verdict

Imagining a verdict of innocence for Mohammed translates his life from "bare" into "political"—the affirmative gives Mohammed a legal status that produces the possibility of his inclusion into political space by signaling that his torture was a crime rather than a necessity—when the judge affirms his innocence it interrupts the state of exception by repudiating the implicit definition of life that fuels the engine of destruction.

Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
So, the state of exception, as it might be understood in the context
AND
the ¶ Sovereign, through the machinery of government, keep us safe.

The law is a performative event—the judge performs the law by voting affirmative, generating a social practice that does not conserve the sovereign violence of the state of exception but instead produces a politics distinct from the vampiric public sphere of the status quo.

Hariman 1990. Hariman, Robert. Popular Trials. Tuscaloosa And London: The Univerrsity of Alabama Press, 1990. 17-18. Print.
In the seventh book of the Laws Plato justifies censorship of the¶ theatrical companies
AND
Scott, Tom Paine, Thomas¶ Wentworth, Martin Luther, Socrates ....

The true threat to law is an oppositional violence that could claim legitimacy, however this revolutionary violence recreates the violent foundations of law—voting affirmative produces a world that does not answer to the violent law in the state of exception.

Derrida, 1990 (Jacques, "Force of Law: The ’Mystical Foundation of Authority’", 11 Cardozo L. Rev. Issue 5-6. Pg. 987-995, ellipses omit French Translation)
The telling example would here be that of the right to strike. In class
AND
could be carried by metonymy back toward the conceptual generality of the essence.

The act of the imagining contained in the decision to vote affirmative breaks down the conservative conception of the law in the state of exception.

Gaonkar 02 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar¶ Toward New Imaginaries: An IntroductionPublic Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v014/14.1gaonkar02.html
Within the traditional ontology of determinacy, the imaginary dimension is seen as derivative,
AND
instituting and self-understanding and becoming willing to take responsibility for it. 

====Imagining alternative fictions is key to activating agency within the public sphere and intercollegiate policy debate. The alternative utopian counter factual serves a pre-requisite to actual change.====
McGee and Romanelli 2 POLICY DEBATE AS FICTION: IN DEFENSE OF UTOPIAN FIAT Brian McGee, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University and David Romanelli, PERSPECTIVES IN CONTROVERSY: Selected Essays from Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, KENNETH BRODA-BAHM, EDITOR
Few scholars would object to the mundane contention that one should compare the merits of
AND
be able to travel intelligently at all" (Mumford 24-25).

Activation of the law second guesses the presumption of innocence accorded to the state of exception. Our advocacy reverses the deference of the judiciary to the securitized colonial state.

Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
The suspension of the criminal-justice process, and the expansion of¶ sovereign
AND
-government ¶ constraint and thus within the reviewing power of the courts.

Voting affirmative politicizes the state of exception by enacting a restriction on permanent American militarism.

Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
What is troublesome with this picture—and what will herein be a¶ continuation
AND
so dubious to situate Hamdi in a storyline of¶ democracy in action.

And now let the prosecution take the stand.

Tournament: D7qualifier | Round: 2 | Opponent: Clarion Camloh-Delaney | Judge: Awsare

Introduction

Welcome to the trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the planner of 9/11 and the admitted murderer of 2, 978 innocent people. This is the man who’s proverbial gunshot started a war, a war that the United States is still fighting today against the forces of evil that threaten our democracy Khalid Sheikh Mohammed stands guilty before proven guilty. He confesses:

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 2007."Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024." (2007). Web. 26 Oct. 2013.
I was Emir (i.e., commander) of Beit Al Shuhada (
AND
was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.

We advocate that the judiciary should find Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not guilty of the crimes of which he has been charged by the United Stated Federal Government on the grounds that he was tortured and indefinitely detained.

Contention 1: Grounds

We would like to enter into the record that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was tortured.

Bradbury 05(Steven G. Bradbury, Former Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General, "Memorandum for John A Rizzo Senior Deputy General Counsel", Central Intelligence Agency, U.S. Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel May 30, 2005)
The CIA used thewaterboard "at least 83 times during August 2002" in the interrogation of Zubaydah. IG Report at 90, and 183 times during March 2003 in the interrogation of KSM, see id. at 91.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed bears witness to the contradictions which animate American democracy.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed 2007."Verbatim Transcript of Combatant Status Review Tribunal Hearing for ISN 10024." (2007). Web. 26 Oct. 2013.
DETAINEE: What I wrote here, is not I’m making myself hero, when
AND
finish statement. I’m asking you to be fair¶with other people.

====What Khalid Sheikh Mohammed bears witness to is the legalization of torture which we justify by our concern for our security giving our imprimatur to violence visited in our name upon people "not like us" in places that "are not here."====
Rejali 2009. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2009. p 45-46. Professor of political science at Reed College.
As a matter of historical record, torture has characterized democratic as well as authoritarian
AND
the streets whatever the cost. Each process generates powerful demands for torture.

AND with the example of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—this legalization of torture has become normalized—the exception has become the rule and he have come to accept it.

Zizek 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. "Knight of the Living Dead." The New York Times 24 Mar. 2007 ~London~ , opinion ed. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.
SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent
AND
arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

This contradiction goes back to the very root of the American Demos. We were always already a colonial society visiting war, enslavement, and genocide on racialized bodies. To declare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not guilty on the grounds of torture and indefinite detention means to bear witness to our own guilt.

Sexton and Lee  6 Jarod, Elizabeth, Chair of the African American Studies department at UCI and, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia "Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib 2006
Even if we can agree that Abu Ghraib is more than a symptom of the
AND
racial profiling" marks only the tip of the iceberg (Sexton forthcoming).

Within the context of presidential war powers the always already colonialist USFG takes the form of the virtuous empire, constituting itself through opposition to the "barbaric terrorist" and in so doing posits itself as the liberator of the world from the threat of the monstrous brown and black bodies of the "unjust other."

Prozorov06 (Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International Relations at Petrozavodsk State University and Collegium Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Vol.35 No. 1, pp75-99) NAR
Secondly and consequently, the ’war on terror’ is of particular interest, insofar
AND
obscuring the reflection on the concrete meaning of antagonism in contemporary political life.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is just another episode in the never ending story of the imperial USFG rendering violence against racialized bodies. He is the modern synecdoche that signifies how racialized and colonized bodies are always already rendered disposable.

Maldonado-Torres 2008 (Nelson, Professor of Ethnic Studies at UC-Berkeley, Against War p. 216-223
For Dussel, the phenomenology of the "21 conquer" helps to clarify the constitutive
AND
war, with which this book opened.¶ ————F¶ I I¶

You declare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not guilty on the grounds the collective guilt of the USFG outweighs and subsumes his own. While Mohammed may have been responsible for the deaths of thousands, the USFG is responsible for the deaths of milliions, and it is our insistence on our innocence which insures the violence of the status quo.

Mcculloch 10 (Jude, Professor of Criminology at Monash University, Melbourne, From garrison state to garrison planet: state terror, the War on Terror and the rise of a global carceral complex, Contemporary State Terrorism Theory and practice, 196-213)
In the same way that neoliberalism and punitive penal policy have marched hand-in
AND
encompasses the entire globe: a move from garrison state to garrison planet.

Contention 2: The Verdict

====All debate arguments are acts of imagination. This isn’t a question of fiat, merely a recognition that plans don’t ACTUALLY happen via the instantiation of the ballot. Debate arguments are either a) about the productivity about particular acts of imagination or b) about the desirability of a particular world imagined by the aff. This understanding of debate key to agency.====
McGee and Romanelli 2 POLICY DEBATE AS FICTION: IN DEFENSE OF UTOPIAN FIAT Brian McGee, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Texas Tech University and David Romanelli, PERSPECTIVES IN CONTROVERSY: Selected Essays from Contemporary Argumentation and Debate, KENNETH BRODA-BAHM, EDITOR
Few scholars would object to the mundane contention that one should compare the merits of
AND
be able to travel intelligently at all" (Mumford 24-25).

The not guilty verdict is important. The state of exception activates at the point where legal status is denied—a lack of status translates the body of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed into something able to be both tortured and indefinitely detained.

Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
So, the state of exception, as it might be understood in the context
AND
the ¶ Sovereign, through the machinery of government, keep us safe.

AND the trial is a space in which we can challenge the system. Though denouncing the use of torture, we cause an open confrontation with the colonial nature of the system. Disrupting the circulation of the empty signifier of the law.

Christodoulidis 09 Christodoulidis, Emilios. "Strategies of rupture." Law and Critique 20.1 (2009): 3-26.
I borrow the term ’rupture’ from the controversial French defence lawyer Jacques Vergès and
AND
and came to be seen instead as political intervention and acts of resistance.

The state of exception and its impacts—colonial violence, genocide, and slavery—are something the American people will on themselves. The justification circulates within the realm of national identity where the public grants legitimacy to the system. Disrupting the national identity of the squo is key to solve.

Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
What is troublesome with this picture—and what will herein be a¶ continuation
AND
so dubious to situate Hamdi in a storyline of¶ democracy in action.

AND the specific performance of the affirmative mechanism is to use of the "rupture defense" which contests the system by having the system call into question its own legitimacy.  This is key to revealing and deactivating the violence of the system.

Rosales 14. Rosales, Jose. Jose Rosales is a doc¬toral stu¬dent in philo¬sophy at SUNY, Stony Brook. His re¬search in¬terests in¬clude Spinoza, Nietzsche, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, de¬co¬lo¬nial theory, and philo¬sophies of the Event. "Badiou’s Jurisprudence: The Event of Law and The Law of The Event."Critical Legal Thinking. N.p., 14 Jan. 2014. Web. 12 Feb. 2014.
Thus, for Badiou, the Event which is most ef¬fective in dis¬rupting the con¬ven¬tions
AND
an¬imal,’ a ’ter¬rorist,’ and a ’criminal.’

The utopian imagination of the plan text is key to the strategy of the rupture—the affirmative captures the legal opportunity to disrupt the world to strategically usurp and intervene on the power of the legal fictions that construct the state of exception.

Christodoulidis 09 Christodoulidis, Emilios  Emilios Christodoulidis has been Professor of Legal Theory at the Law School since 2006. Prior to that he taught at the University of Edinburgh. He holds degrees from the Universities of Athens (LLB) and Edinburgh (LLM, PhD). His interests lie mainly in the area of the philosophy and sociology of law and in constitutional theory.
. "Strategies of rupture." Law and Critique 20.1 (2009): 3-26.
There is an important point to be made about utopia in all this, in
AND
level and meta-level, that I have called strategies of rupture.

This mechanism targets law and the violence of the sovereign at its weakest point. Triggering the suicide of the system and the deactivation of the state of exception.

Garrison 2009. Garrison, Alysia E. "Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law." Law Critique 20 (2009): 281-97. Print. ~Corrected for gender~
"The ’secret’ of sovereignty then, in the form of inscrutable law,
AND
the divine, all human reason shatters’ (1995, p. 78)."

The United State Federal government has historically visited untold violence and destruction upon colonized and racialized bodies. In the context of that history, and in the context of the continuation of the violence rooted in the history, exemplified by the torture and indefinite detention of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the judiciary must declare the Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not guilty; for his guilt could never compare to our own. Before we do anything else, we must publicly acknowledge that guilt and symbolically rupture the status quo. We do this by setting free a man responsible for planning the deaths of thousands of our citizens. Only and end to "the now" can open up space for the "to come." The defense rests. Let the prosecution take the stand.

Cut Cards

The national identity which constructs the impacts of the affirmative gains its meaning from the collective imaginary that animates the public sphere. Disrupting the national identity means changing how we imagine ourselves in the political space.

Gaonkar 02 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar¶ Toward New Imaginaries: An IntroductionPublic Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v014/14.1gaonkar02.html
Within the traditional ontology of determinacy, the imaginary dimension is seen as derivative,
AND
instituting and self-understanding and becoming willing to take responsibility for it. 

The law is performative—we access law through the dramatization and performances of narratives. This aff’s mechanism is a performative invocation of the law which challenges the narratives which construct the identity of citizens through the social imagination.

Hariman 1990. Hariman, Robert. Popular Trials. Tuscaloosa And London: The Univerrsity of Alabama Press, 1990. 17-18. Print.
In the seventh book of the Laws Plato justifies censorship of the¶ theatrical companies
AND
Scott, Tom Paine, Thomas¶ Wentworth, Martin Luther, Socrates ....

Tournament: Texas | Round: 5 | Opponent: West Virginia Dorsey-Ejimofor | Judge: Haynal

AT Zizek Cap K

No link—our analysis does not preclude materialist analysis; the instance of our aff doesn’t distract any focus from materialist critique, but rather supplements the strength of its analysis AND the aff performs a materialist critique of the global carceral system with the McCulloch evidence

Link turn- biopower root cause of capitalism.

Agamben 1998.Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
According to Foucault, a society’s "threshold of biological modernity" is situated at
AND
, so to speak created the "docile bodies" that it needed.

Capitalism is not the root cause of sexism, racism, inequality, environmental destruction, or conflict; maintaining such a myth makes the alternative results in worse forms of violence

Levin 98
Richard Levin, president of Yale, 1998, The Minnesota Review, 48-49, http://www.theminnesotareview.org/journal/ns48/levin.htm
As a result of this view of the world, many people on the far
AND
employ this tactic against moderates and liberals, although with less lethal results. 

Psychoanalysis is wrong-Studies disprove your alternative.

Fraser, political theorist at the New School, 1990 p. JStor
(Nancy, "The Uses and Abuses.." boundary 2)
This discussion shows, I think, that there are many things wrong with Lacan
AND
but, rather, active participants in the interactions that construct their experience.

Perm do the plan and withdraw from all other forms of capital- Double bind: either the alternative is strong enough to overcome the instance of the plan or it doesn’t solve.

Alt fails-they do nothing to disrupt the cultural narrative of capitalism, historical materialism is just a method of analysis

AND the alt without the affirmative specifically fails as they cannot account for how race and colonized bodies are treated in a state; even communist states are capable of biopolitical sovereign violence that harm certain populations like Stalin’s actions with the Ukrainians, the perm is the only way to account for that

Zizek refusal to act collapses into a passive obsessional form incapable of actualizing change

Critchley No Date Given
/Simon, Professor of Continental Philosophy @ The New School, http://www.hks.harvard.edu/cchrp/hrsm/programs/study_group_PDF/Critchley_Zizek.pdf/
In the conclusion to The Parallax View (pp.375-85), although
AND
cruelty and force. I hope that one day his dreams come true.

Turn - The kritik is the ultimate act of black mail because it engages in blatant militarism and destruction of the other

Robinson, PhD, School of Politics, and Tormey, Prof Politics and Critical Theory at U of Nottingham, 2003
(Andrew and Simon, What is Not to be Done21 Everything you wanted to know about Lenin, and (sadly)
weren’t afraid to ask Zizek, http://homepage.ntlworld.com/simon.tormey/articles/Zizeklenin.pdf )
Zizek’s Lenin takes his place amongst the various elements in Zizek’s theory ...subordination we would argue is implicit to any Zizekian schema.

Their revolution cannot produce utopia because it replaces one system of violence for another – this makes it difficult for them to produce a reason to risk the violence they endorse

Robbinson, PhD, School of Politics U of Nottingham, 2004 Andrew, ’The Politics of Lack’, British Journal of Politics and International Relations, May
The centrality of the idea of betrayal and of the revolution which ’commits suicide’ reveals
AND
political preferences (for instance, to keep Lenin in and Hitler out).

Alt. Fails

Simply thinking about the problem won’t generate change – only action will solve

Kliman ’04 (Andrew, PhD, Professor of Economics at Pace University Andrew Kliman’s Writings, "Alternatives to Capitalism: What Happens After the Revolution?" http://akliman.squarespace.com/writings/)
Thus the reason of the masses is posing a new challenge to the movement from
AND
meantime, the challenges from below require us to proceed on its basis.

Tournament: D7qualifier | Round: 2 | Opponent: Clarion Camloh-Delaney | Judge: Awsare

Topicality

Framing

Framing—the lens through which you view this debate and evaluate arguments is competing acts of imagination. Policy debate is always already imagination—that’s McGee and Romanelli 2 from the 1AC. Topicality argues that our imagination should be limited and tied to the state centric text of the resolution.

Shapiro 1994 (Michael, Professor of Political Science at the University of Hawaii, Public Culture 6:3 "Moral Geographies and the Ethics of Post-Sovereignty")
Global geographies are in flux. As political boundaries become increasingly ambiguous, academic discourses
AND
discursive hegemonies attached to spatial configurations associated with the system of state sovereignty.

This links them to our K of sovereignty in the 1AC—they attempt to arbitrarily constrain imagination in a way that props up the existing state-centric system—this kills any revolutionary potential of the debate community.

AND DA’s to imagination come BEFORE questions of topicality because it is our acts of imagination which construct the meaning by which politics unfolds. Being autonomous political agents means both challenging the definitions handed down by the system and taking responsibility for our acts of imagination.

Gaonkar 02 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar¶ Toward New Imaginaries: An IntroductionPublic Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v014/14.1gaonkar02.html
Within the traditional ontology of determinacy, the imaginary dimension is seen as derivative,
AND
instituting and self-understanding and becoming willing to take responsibility for it. 

We are ahead of them on this question because we have a warrant as to why utopian imagination rather than policy imagination is key to debate—it’s a prerequisite to policy change and key for agency.

They need to justify their metaphor for the topic, absent such analysis you default aff on this question.

Definition/Standard

AND Counter Interpretation: in the context of war powers authority—authority and power are united in that the ability to do something is the legal basis for the right to do something. Thus, a topical affirmative is one which prevents the executive from doing something "in the area" of: indefinite detention, targeted killing, entering into hostilities, or offensive cyber operations.

Agamben 2005. Agamben 2005. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Pg. 86-88: The University of Chicago Press, 2005. Print.
The normative element needs the anomie element in order to be applied,¶ but,
AND
law¶ and myth had sought to capture in the state of exception.

We meet CI: By having the judiciary declare KSM not guilty, we prevent the executive from indefinitely detaining him.

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. Pg. 5.  Giorgio Agamben - Italian Continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception.
The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridico-¶ institutional
AND
life presents itself as what is included by means of ¶ an exclusion?

Reasons to Prefer:

Legal Precision fails:

The executive is a law unto itself.

Griffin 2013 (Stephen, Professor of Law at Tulane University, Long Wars and the Constitution, p. 243-244)
The phenomenon of inadequate advice is symptomatic of a larger difficulty. The presidency is
AND
the United States, presidents resist being tied down by institutions and reorganizations.

War Powers Authority is Extra-Textual.

Dyzenhaus, 2006. (David, Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency (Paper Book), p. 8-9.)
But while I accept Dworkin’s interpretive approach to understanding legal texts, it does not
AND
any purchase within law’s texts for the principle of equal concern for respect.

Grounds/Limits—circumvention and nebulous justification for authority means their interpretation limits out any solvent or substantial affs. This is a problem for Fairness.

Dodds 12¶ Graham G. Dodds, Department of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal. http://www.lpbr.net/2012/02/executive-unbound-after-madisonian.html ETB¶ *Eric Andrew Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School
In Chapter Three, Posner and Vermeule argue that legislative attempts to reign in executive
AND

periodically, the shackles slip off altogether" (p.10).

Education—education regarding the law must take into account the extra-textual nature of it.

Hasian et al 96Hasian, Marouf, Jr., Celeste M. Condit, and John L. Lucaites. (Professor of Communications, University of Utah) "The Rhetorical Boundaries of ’the Law’: A Consideration of the Rhetorical Culture of Legal Practice and the Case of the ’Separate But Equal’ Doctrine." Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 323-42. Web.
Finally, an understanding of the rhetorical boundaries of the law has serious implications¶
AND
," may be taken as competent contributions to the crafting of that law.

Only the aff defines the root of War Powers Authority—this gives us a contextual advantage because we control the underlying definition of every word in the resolution in relation to the core topic.

T is not a voter—don’t’ punish Affs for an unclear topic.

Reasonability—our definition is a reaonsable interpretation.  We don’t steal any of their ground—they still links to their DA’s and to their Counter Plans. The only thing they don’t get is enforcement/circumvention solvency take out arguments—that ground not key because it would make debating aff impossible. Have a high threshold for abuse—don’t vote on potential abuse.

AT Effects T—

1. Not effects T—that was _. The affirmative in and of itself restricts the war powers authority of the president.
   2. No offence—every aff is effects T because of the legal process. Under their interpretation affs like drone courts wouldn’t be topical—kills aff ground.
   3. Reasonability checks their offence.
   4. Effects T in the context of our aff is good—c/a Hasian. 

Soldier

The affirmative naturalizes hegemonic masculinity as natural—this reifies traditional gender binaries

Appelrouth and Edles 11 (Scott Appelrouth and Laura Desfor Edles, Editors: Sociological Theory in the Contemporary Era", ch.7: Feminist and Gender Theories, "Connell’s Theoretical Orientation", DA: 17 October 2013, mjb)
As illustrated in Figure 7.5, in terms of the theoretical model used
AND
, for instance, with young children" (Connell 2005:1809). 

This perpetuates Heteronormativity.

Heteronormativity manifests in unending violence against the other

Yep 3 (Gust A. Yep PhD—Gust A. Yep (Ph.D., University of Southern California) is Professor of Communication Studies, Core Graduate Faculty of Sexuality Studies, and Faculty of the Ed. D. Program in Educational Leadership at San Francisco State University. Although firmly grounded in communication, his teaching and research is interdisciplinary. As such, his work has ties with ethnic studies, sexuality studies, and women and gender studies. In 2006-08, he served as the Editor of the National Communication Association (NCA) Non-Serial Publications (NSP) Program, a book series published by NCA—(2003) The Violence of Heteronormativity in Communication Studies, Journal of Homosexuality, 45:2-4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/J082v45n02_02, DA: 22 October 2013, mjb)
These are injuries inflicted on others. Fuelled by heteronormativity, ex- ternalized homophobia
AND
, and at times deadly, mode of enforcement of the heteronormative order.

Tournament: Clarion | Round: 6 | Opponent: United States Military Lipksy-Stevens | Judge: Lowry

Framework

We meet—the aff is a topical action with advantages based off of hypothetical implementation—the only potential violation would be the argument about social imagination, but fiat IS imagination—every time a judge has ever voted affirmative for a plan that is different than the status quo, the imagination impacts of our aff was activated, that’s the McGee and Romanelli evidence—if we violate anything, every aff plan is always already extra topical—CASE IS A DISAD TO THEIR INTERPRETATION

AND CX – Harriman 90, the law is performative. Our act of imagining the judiciary frees KSM constitutes a performative event of the law, accessing our unique mechanism of using the violence of the law against itself to deactivate the state of exception. Their interpretation of what the law is not only misunderstands the violence of the law, but precludes this mechanism of resistance.

====Education regarding the law must take the rhetorical culture that constructs the law; we control the best internal link to legal education by taking the rhetorical and performative nature of the law into account.====
Hasian et al 96Hasian, Marouf, Jr., Celeste M. Condit, and John L. Lucaites. (Professor of Communications, University of Utah) "The Rhetorical Boundaries of ’the Law’: A Consideration of the Rhetorical Culture of Legal Practice and the Case of the ’Separate But Equal’ Doctrine." Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 323-42. Web.
Finally, an understanding of the rhetorical boundaries of the law has serious implications¶
AND
," may be taken as competent contributions to the crafting of that law.

They conceive of law as a dead thing sputtering text meant only to be understood by elites, this vision of law ultimately fails or craft anything meaningful.

Hasian et al 96 Hasian, Marouf, Jr., Celeste M. Condit, and John L. Lucaites. (Professor of Communications, University of Utah) "The Rhetorical Boundaries of ’the Law’: A Consideration of the Rhetorical Culture of Legal Practice and the Case of the ’Separate But Equal’ Doctrine." Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 323-42. Web.
Although the point we are driving at would seem to be obvious, it bears
AND
they seek to reify contingent and negotiable relationships¶ as permanent and unavoidable.

AT - T/Extra T

Counter Interpretation: We are the best example of a solvent aff that actually restricts the power of the executive branch. We isolate three reasons.

Executive circumvention is inevitable for most legislative and judicial restrictions.

Dodds 12¶ Graham G. Dodds, Department of Political Science, Concordia University, Montreal. http://www.lpbr.net/2012/02/executive-unbound-after-madisonian.html ETB¶ *Eric Andrew Posner is Kirkland and Ellis Professor of Law at the University of Chicago Law School
In Chapter Three, Posner and Vermeule argue that legislative attempts to reign in executive
AND

periodically, the shackles slip off altogether" (p.10).

Grey zones of the law allow for the proliferation of executive power, thus a judicial restriction must AT LEAST involve closing these grey areas.

Dyzenhaus, 2006. (David, Professor of Law and Philosophy at the University of Toronto.  The Constitution of Law: Legality in a Time of Emergency (Paper Book), p. 3.)
A substantive conception of the rule of law has to find a way of coordinating
AND
rule of law and thus garner the legitimacy that attaches to that claim.

The sovereign constitutes its power through acting upon the body. Remove the body, and the power has no subject upon which to act—restricting its exercise.

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print. Pg. 5.  Giorgio Agamben - Italian Continental philosopher best known for his work investigating the concepts of the state of exception.
The present inquiry concerns precisely this hidden point of intersection between the juridico-¶ institutional
AND
life presents itself as what is included by means of ¶ an exclusion?

These mean, that not only are we topical but we’re also the only solvent. Any aff that does not frustrate the sovereign power of the executive can’t solve because the executive will just circumvent the restriction. Frustrating the sovereign power requires getting rid of grey zones of the law and removing the bodies upon which sovereign power acts, which means in the context of indefinite detention, only affs like ours that advocate the freeing of detainees are topical AND solvent because we remove the body from the authority of the executive and do so by applying a strict interpretation of the law through judicial restriction.

They only perceive us as extra-T because they think we must comply with the dominant interpretation of what law is—the law means more than they think it does. Harriman 90 tells you law is performative—we must invoke this separate conception of the law, otherwise we will never be able to resist sovereign power.

The methodology of "imagination" as solvency is not extra topical, see McGee and Romanelli—debate is about imagination, so its not beyond the realm of reasonability to analyze how the acts of imagination function in debate.

Even if there is a risk of Extra-T, wiggle room is justified because we need solvent affs without which every debate goes to the NEG. Their strict interpretation of what is Extra-T would limit us to aff plans the executive would just circumvent. This would doom us to repetitive, unfair debate. As long as we are within the standards of reasonability, there is no abuse and the need for solvent affs outweighs a risk of abuse coming from extra-T methodologies.

Schmidt K

No link—our affirmative doesn’t destroy the political, if anything we restore it; the universalism of American democracy constructs mohammed as a somebody who cannot entire into a political relationship, our aff reverses that

Alt fails—the sovereign in the context of American democracy is Obama, and his rhetoric is drenched in the poison of liberalism that leads to the universalism that triggers their impacts. The alt gives power to Obama to wreck the friend-enemy dichotomy. This is a uniquenss argument for our turn.

Pan 10 Pan, David. "Carl Schmitt and Barack Obama on Political Identity in a Multi-polar World."Telos Press. Telos, 10 Aug. 2010. Web. 09 Sept. 2013. http://www.telospress.com/carl-schmitt-and-barack-obama-on-political-identity-in-a-multi-polar-world/.
BarackObama, continuing this long-standing policy, affirms in his Nobel Prize acceptance
AND
it must be considered a specific ideology and not an absence of ideology. 

Alt. Fails + Link turn

 the perpetual desire to identify friends and enemies is a result of sovereign power. Making a list always already results in the "black list" or people not listed but in the black bag of history. We clarify and make visible the bodies hidden behind the curtain.====

Schmittian friend-enemy categories collapse into one another because there is no structural differentiation that disallows being agonistic to your friends and loving your enemy. This collapses Schmittian politics and disallows appropriate categorization in international relations.

Derrida, 1997 (Jacques, The Politics of Friendship, pg. 85-88)

Is the person levelling this warning at us too much the sage or too much
AND
, what it must have designated. No, what it should have designated

Perm to the plan and then the alt in all other instances. Double bind: either the alternative is strong enough to overcome the instance of the plan or it doesn’t solve.

AT Heg

On balance U.S. led world order is net worse for stability and results in an incredible body count along with mass global suffering

Boggs 2005 (Carl, Professor of Social Science at National University, Imperial Delusions p. x-xiii)
As, the United States moves to reshape the geopolitical terrain of the world,
AND
already contributed to destabilization of the same global system it aspires to dominate.

Hegemony only exists in your authors’ minds – applying hegemonic mythology to policy causes blowback, error replication, and a destruction of cooperation.

Doran 9 (Charles F., Andrew W. Mellon Prof. of International Relations, Director of the Global Theory and History Program, Director of the Center for Canadian Studies @ Johns Hopkins U., "Fooling Oneself: The Mythology of Hegemony" International Studies Review, Vol. 11.1)
More than a catalogue of techniques other governments use to resist U.S.
AND
self-financing, self-enforcing, and¶ self-sufficient.

This imperial overstretch kills the economy, ensures continuing threats to hegemony – the alternative solves structural inequalities, environmental crises, and interstate conflict
Muzaffar 12 (Chandra- President of the International Movement for a Just World. PhD. From the National University of Singapore "The Decline of U.S. Helmed Global Hegemony: the Emergence of a More Equitable Pattern of International Relations"

http://wpfdc.org/politics/999-the-decline-of-us-helmed-global-hegemony-the-emergence-of-a-more-equitable-pattern-of-international-relations )
Once again, both the colossal loss of human lives and the exorbitant financial costs
AND
hegemony distorts our humanity, a non-hegemonic world celebrates our humanity.

AND 1AC impacts are a reason why US heg is bad.

Hegemony furthers the liberal peace project – constructing a world police to hunt down the ’enemies of humanity.’ The only solution is violence and annihilation.

Prozorov 6 (Sergei Prozorov, Professor of International Relations at Petrozavodsk State University and Collegium Research Fellow at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies, Liberal Enmity: The Figure of the Foe in the Political Ontology of Liberalism, Millennium - Journal of International Studies, Vol.35 No. 1, pp75-99) NAR
Schmitt’s objectionto the liberal monism of the ’homeland of humanity’ is therefore two-
AND
own opposite or perhaps reveals its own essence in the guise of its antithesis

AND you have a moral obligation to reject the moral myth of the US – any risk of mitigation means you vote aff – that’s McCullagh.

No potential conflicts for hotspots to escalate
Fettweis ’11 (Christopher J. Fettweis, Department of Political Science, Tulane University, Free Riding or Restraint? Examining European Grand Strategy, Comparative Strategy, 30:316–332, EBSCO, September 26, 2011)

Assertions that without the combination of U.S. capabilities, presence and commitments
AND
their security is all but assured, with or without the United States.

Idea of U.S. as a benign hegemon is a neutral narrative used to justify continue dominance and violence

Wu 2001 (Xinbo, Professor at Center For American Studies at Fudan University, "A Response to Thomas. G. Moore" in Asian Affairs 21.3)
Moore suggests that American officials generally see themselves as working with, rather than striving
AND
States will pay a high price both morally and militarily for such a decision

Fugitive CP

Perm do both – you can imagine both, they are not mutually exclusive.

The NB is not actually a NB because it just supercharges our solvency, perm solves even better—CX Harriman the plan generate the popular trial as a popular controversy.

Fiat solves the link to the NB—privilege of the aff to imagine the effects of their plan, esp. when we have a mechanism to affect that change.

Fiat solves: the result of the trial will be that if he went free, it would occur only in world in which we understood him as human. For their arg to be true, it would mean there would already have had to have been a legal finding of KSM as not guilty and then the public thirsty calling for his head. We’re encouraging you to imagine a democracy where they’re not, also the cultural shift of the 1AC solves.

There is an incredible solvency deficit to the counterplan—the PERFORMANCE OF THE LAW of the 1AC is what is key to solve—that’s the Hariman evidence—stealing away KSM is just another ineffectual act of protest and sustains the myth of moral virtue of the military—ONLY IMAGINING A WORLD IN WHICH HE CAN SIGNIFY IN THE CONTEXT OF THE WESTERN JUDICIAL SYSTEM CAN ACTUALLY SOLVE ANY OF THE AFFIRMATIVE BECAUSE ABSENT THE IMAGINATION OF A WORLD THAT REAPPRORIATES THE SIGNS OF THE DOMINANT NATURE, YOU CAN’T SOLVE—THAT’S GAONKAR—AND THE WILLIAMS EVIDENCE IDENTIFIES THAT THE SYSTEM THAT ALLOWS US TO CODE BODIES AS NOT WORTH LIVING IS THE JUDICIARY—

The idea that you can do the aff better because you’re in the military is militarism and just perpetuates the harms of the aff—sorry

Preble 13 (Christopher A. Preble—director of foreign policy studies at the Cato Institute—"Resisting the Charms of War", http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/resisting-charms-war, DA: 10 November 2013, mjb)
The new American militarism is manifested first and foremost by "the scope, cost
AND
of politicians as one could imagine, from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.

Our Hariman evidence says that the affirmative would cause a controversial popular trial because we could not deny that Mohammed was tortured—this would force a confrontration with the underside of American democracy—this controversy would unsettle the public’c assumptions about the war on terror—that’s Rejali as well.

Phillips 1999 (Kendall, Professor of Rhetoric at Syracuse)
In controversies nodal points of fixed meaning are destabilized by alterantive antagonistic articulations. These
AND
momentary disruptions are the key to cunning intelligence of tactics, as de Certeau 

AT Killed Daniel Perm

1. Affirmative solvency is grounded in this contradiction—declaring KSM innocent despite his guilt divorces torture from the idea of necessity.

2. The right to a trial despite evidence of guilt is a constitutional right—affording KSM constitutional rights is key to politicizing his body.

3. Their logic reproduces the logic that justifies indefinite detention in the first place—independent voter.

Declare Guilty Torturers

Perm do both.

Solvency Deficit: the CP just creates another Abu Graib where the acts of torture our swept under the law and the sovereign distances itself by acting as if only the ones who tortured KSM were guilty instead of also the institution and decisions makers who ordered them to do the torturing.

Doesn’t access our mechanism of imagination. The point of releasing KSM is that declaring him not guilty is a powerful symbolic act because we release someone who planned the largest terrorist attack on U.S. soil in decades. This act is key because it acknowledges that we accept our own moral complicity in the torture of KSM.

The counterplan shifts focus to the stage of violence causing us to ignore our own complicity in sovereign violence

Kappeler, 1995 Susanne Kappeler, Freelance Writer, A History of Violence, 1995, pg 10-11
’We are the war’ does not mean that the responsibility for a war is shared
AND
our values’ according to the structures and the values of war and violence.

Tournament: Texas | Round: 2 | Opponent: Rutgers-Newark Haughton-Stafford | Judge: Kuswa

2AC/1AR Shell

Link turn: the Aff. destroys civil society by rendering the law inoperable—their link arguments are reductionist

Garrison 2009. Garrison, Alysia E. "Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law." Law Critique 20 (2009): 281-97. Print.
"The ’secret’ of sovereignty then, in the form of inscrutable law,
AND
the divine, all human reason shatters’ (1995, p. 78)."

No link: our discourse on torture and colonialism is another side to the same coin that discusses structures of anti-blackness. And our 1AC MacCullough evidence solves any link of omission

Sexton and Lee  6 Jarod, Elizabeth, Chair of the African American Studies department at UCI and, Department of Geography, University of British Columbia "Figuring the Prison: Prerequisites of Torture at Abu Ghraib 2006
Even if we can agree that Abu Ghraib is more than a symptom of the
AND
racial profiling" marks only the tip of the iceberg (Sexton forthcoming).

The alternative can never move beyond the death of the existing system, it puts nothing new into play. The 1AC offers an alternative political strategy.

Snoek 10. Snoek, Anke. "Agamben’s Foucault: An overview." Foucault Studies 10 (2010): 44-67. Print.
The Foucauldian concept of non-authorship is central to Agamben’s idea of freedom and
AND
trace of the author is only found in the singularity of his absence.

Only the aff produces a gesture which reverses the logic of sovereignty, retooling the law to move us to a more ideal community once civil society has been dismantled.

Garrison 2009. Garrison, Alysia E. "Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law." Law Critique 20 (2009): 281-97. Print.
Like Bartleby’s disremembrance of God from a deeply embedded sphere of law in his hermitage
AND
the immemorial, from the of?ce of the Dead Letter, and beyond.

Ontologization of blackness through afro-pessimist—the performance of the 1AC is not determined by the anti-blackness that they say infests everything—the aff works at the ontic level which disproves their ontology argument

Hudson 2013 (Peter, Political Science Professor at the University of Witwatersand "The State and the Colonial Unconscious" in Social Dynamics)
"Whiteness" as whiteness – the meaning of whiteness and that of "blackness
AND
of colonialism, of its constitutive axis, its "ontological" differential.

Perm do the plan and then the alt. in all other instances.

Tournament: Clarion | Round: 2 | Opponent: Liberty CE | Judge: Imes, Josh
==1AC==

The Figure of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Torture is present within our democracy – the enigma that’s not supposed to be but almost always is.

Rejali 2009. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2009. p 45-46. Professor of political science at Reed College.
As a matter of historical record, torture has characterized democratic as well as authoritarian
AND
the streets whatever the cost. Each process generates powerful demands for torture.
Mohammed’s body is suspended in a grey zone of legal illegality—his body receives violent treatment at the hand of the sovereign even as his inhuman status denies Mohammed the right to signify, to exist, and to request redress under the law—his torture and detention performatively produces his status as a subject unsuited to stand before the law even as his is manipulated, objectified, and punished by the "real" law of the sovereign’s exercise of force
Zizek 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. "Knight of the Living Dead." The New York Times 24 Mar. 2007 ~London~ , opinion ed. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.
SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent
AND
arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

Mohammed’s body is banned from the public even as it is subjected to the force of the law. The effective force of sovereignty produces its own internal rational through the exercise of force and the withdrawal of the law. This is the structure of the state of exception.

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
1.7. If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty
AND
understand here, ¶ so that we can eventually call it into question.
All life is now politicized—the human and non-human are defined implicitly through the exercise of the law in the name of political life and the suspension of the law in the administration of violence against bare life—the objective truths of human permanence that warrant our claims for political decisionmaking treat bodies as natural expressions of capacities in ways that define some lives as capable of signifying and others as capable only of dying meaninglessly—the smooth contours of politics as betray flowing biopolitical power that warps a vision of democratic peace into permanent totalitarianism cloaked in empty promises of freedom and liberty
Agamben 1998 ~Giorgio: Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 120-123.
1.2 Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental charac¬ter of totalitarian
AND
rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion
AND
modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.

Mohammed’s body does not signify—his management by the sovereign reproduces the paradigmatic totalitarianism which collapses politics and life itself

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of
AND
the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity.

State of Exceptionalism

Democracy manifests itself via exceptionalism. Awareness of this aspect is key.

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern
¶ democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zo?,
AND
the perfect ¶ senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.

Exceptionalism of the American is especially sovereign and is at the root of the global imperial order.

Hardt and Negri 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Page 7-9
The "state of exception" is a concept in the German legal tradition that
AND
deeply the changing¶ relationships among war, politics, and global order.
This causes a permanent and ontological war which exercise direct violence over life.
Hard and Negri 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Page 18-19
At this point we need to go back once again and try to understand this
AND
maintain the threat of genocide and nuclear destruction as their¶ ultimate foundation.

This causes a reinvigoration of permanent colonial violence.

Gordon 2006. Gordon, Avery F. "Abu Ghraib: imprisonment and the war on terror." Race 26 Class 48.42 (2010): 42-59. Web. 23 Aug. 2013.
In the early history of warfare, there was no recognition of a status of
AND
participating nation states facilitating the fastest growing business sector in the world.36

The impact is the invisible genocidal of America’s enemies..

Spanos 2011. Spanos, William V. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Rethinking Theory). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011. 148-50. Print. Spanos is a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York
In calling his reluctant American readers’ attention to the unlikely analogy¶ between late-
AND
the political space of modernity" becomes a black "visionary" possibility.

Advocacy Statement

We ask that you affirm the decidable in face of undecidability—the debate space is structured as a space between potentiality and impotentiality, twixt and tween sovereign and divine violence—the judge’s role in the debate is to act as a member of a civilian jury who restricts the sovereign power to detain by exercising their judgment of action to declare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed innocent.

Everyday expressions of constituent power like the affirmative are the best strategy for acting against the constituted power of sovereignty.

Frank 2K Jason A. Frank "The Abyss of Democracy": Antonio Negri’s Democratic Theory¶ Theory 26 Event-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event Volume 4, Issue 1, 2000-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae4.1.html | 10.1353/tae.2000.0007
At the center of both works stands Negri’s distinction between constituent power and constituted power
AND
ontology, which has openness to difference and innovation at its very heart.

The interruption of the law that is the affirmative’s action of divine violence is a form of constituent power; such interruptions of sovereignty are the only way out.

Frank 2K Jason A. Frank "The Abyss of Democracy": Antonio Negri’s Democratic Theory¶ Theory 26 Event-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event Volume 4, Issue 1, 2000-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae4.1.html | 10.1353/tae.2000.0007
When Negri emphasizes these moments of thoroughgoing democratization of the social and the political his
AND
of democratic politics, but also the radically democratic limits of democratic theory.

The law is not a dusty and distant archive—the judge performs the law by voting affirmative, generating a social practice that does not conserve the sovereign violence of the state of exception but instead produces a politics distinct from the vampiric public sphere of the status quo

Hariman 1990. Hariman, Robert. Popular Trials. Tuscaloosa And London: The Univerrsity of Alabama Press, 1990. 17-18. Print.
In the seventh book of the Laws Plato justifies censorship of the¶ theatrical companies
AND
Scott, Tom Paine, Thomas¶ Wentworth, Martin Luther, Socrates ....
The judge performs as the troublemaker who affirms a restriction upon the authority of the law in terms of its capacity to actualize its power over bodies—the negative team, forced into action, unwittingly reproduces the law’s own failure in their attempt to domesticate and control the debate space in defense of sovereignty—you may glimpse in the tautology of the negative’s arguments about framework and the law the intuitive WEAKNESS, not strength, of sovereignty
Garrison 2009. Garrison, Alysia E. "Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law." Law Critique 20 (2009): 281-97. Print.
"The ’secret’ of sovereignty then, in the form of inscrutable law,
AND
the divine, all human reason shatters’ (1995, p. 78)."
The state of exception advances a perverse vision of a Congress and Judiciary whose distinction from the Executive covers over the general complicity in the total authorship of the violence of the law—debating about various calibrations between the branches only reinstitutes the natural status of the state of exception by asserting that tinkering at the margins is more meaningful that the absolute question of sovereignty authority
Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
The suspension of the criminal-justice process, and the expansion of¶ sovereign
AND
-government ¶ constraint and thus within the reviewing power of the courts.

Praising modest tinkering within the state of exception instantiates the worst violence of governmentality located at the level of rationality instead of politics—voting affirmative politicizes the state of exception by enacting a restricted on permanent American militarism
Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
What is troublesome with this picture—and what will herein be a¶ continuation
AND
so dubious to situate Hamdi in a storyline of¶ democracy in action.
The true threat to law is an oppositional violence that could claim legitimacy, however this revolutionary violence recreates the violent foundations of law—the only truly libratory action is to present oneself before the law and performatively resist the law
Derrida, 1990 (Jacques, "Force of Law: The ’Mystical Foundation of Authority’", 11 Cardozo L. Rev. Issue 5-6. Pg. 987-995, ellipses omit French Translation)
The telling example would here be that of the right to strike. In class
AND
could be carried by metonymy back toward the conceptual generality of the essence.

Imagining a verdict of innocence for Mohammed translates his life from "bare" into "political"—the 1AC is an organ of signification that produces the possibility of Mohammed’s inclusion into political space by signaling that his torture was a crime rather than a necessity—when the judge affirms his life is not bare it interrupts the state of exception by repudiating the implicit definition of life that fuels the engine of destruction
Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
So, the state of exception, as it might be understood in the context
AND
the ¶ Sovereign, through the machinery of government, keep us safe.

Social imaginaries can be utilized by revolutionary politics in order to break down dominant discursive constructions.

Gaonkar 02 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar¶ Toward New Imaginaries: An IntroductionPublic Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v014/14.1gaonkar02.html-C:\Users\Nate Woodford\Dropbox\WPDU Debate Server\aa WAR POWERS 2013-14\AFF FILES\Terror Trials\1AC\Public Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http:\muse.jhu.edu\journals\public_culture\v014\14.1gaonkar02.html
Within the traditional ontology of determinacy, the imaginary dimension is seen as derivative,
AND
instituting and self-understanding and becoming willing to take responsibility for it. 

The judge enacts the performative contradiction of democracy by declaring Mohammed innocent—exercise freedom by demanding a liberty that cancels itself in order to oppose the state of exception that permanently and unreflectively insists on its total reason

Butler and Spivak 2010. Butler and Spivak, 2010. (Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Page 66-69)
I don’t think it would be very easy to imagine Arendt singing and I’m not
AND
so that that gap is seen, so that that gap can mobilize.

Tournament: Clarion | Round: 6 | Opponent: United States Military Lipksy-Stevens | Judge: Lowry
==1AC==

The Figure of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed

Torture is present within our democracy – the enigma that’s not supposed to be but almost always is.

Rejali 2009. Rejali, Darius. Torture and Democracy. Princeton, NJ, USA: Princeton University Press, 2009. p 45-46. Professor of political science at Reed College.
As a matter of historical record, torture has characterized democratic as well as authoritarian
AND
the streets whatever the cost. Each process generates powerful demands for torture.
Mohammed’s body is suspended in a grey zone of legal illegality—his body receives violent treatment at the hand of the sovereign even as his inhuman status denies Mohammed the right to signify, to exist, and to request redress under the law—his torture and detention performatively produces his status as a subject unsuited to stand before the law even as his is manipulated, objectified, and punished by the "real" law of the sovereign’s exercise of force
Zizek 2007. Zizek, Slavoj. "Knight of the Living Dead." The New York Times 24 Mar. 2007 ~London~ , opinion ed. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.
SINCE the release of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed’s dramatic confessions, moral outrage at the extent
AND
arguably our civilization’s greatest achievement, the growth of our spontaneous moral sensitivity.

Mohammed’s body is banned from the public even as it is subjected to the force of the law. The effective force of sovereignty produces its own internal rational through the exercise of force and the withdrawal of the law. This is the structure of the state of exception.

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
1.7. If the exception is the structure of sovereignty, then sovereignty
AND
understand here, ¶ so that we can eventually call it into question.
All life is now politicized—the human and non-human are defined implicitly through the exercise of the law in the name of political life and the suspension of the law in the administration of violence against bare life—the objective truths of human permanence that warrant our claims for political decisionmaking treat bodies as natural expressions of capacities in ways that define some lives as capable of signifying and others as capable only of dying meaninglessly—the smooth contours of politics as betray flowing biopolitical power that warps a vision of democratic peace into permanent totalitarianism cloaked in empty promises of freedom and liberty
Agamben 1998 ~Giorgio: Professor of Philosophy and Aesthetics at the University of Verona Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen. P. 120-123.
1.2 Karl Lowith was the first to define the fundamental charac¬ter of totalitarian
AND
rebirth of new forms of fascism in Europe also have their roots here.
Along with the emergence of biopolitics, we can observe a displacement and gradual expansion
AND
modernity, whose metamorphoses and disguises we will have to learn to recognize.

Mohammed’s body does not signify—his management by the sovereign reproduces the paradigmatic totalitarianism which collapses politics and life itself

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
The protagonist of this book is bare life, that is, the life of
AND
the bare life of the citizen, the new biopolitical body of humanity.

State of Exceptionalism

Democracy manifests itself via exceptionalism. Awareness of this aspect is key.

Agamben 1998. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Sacer. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998. Print.
If anything characterizes modern democracy as opposed to classical democracy, then, it is that modern
¶ democracy presents itself from the beginning as a vindication and liberation of zo?,
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the perfect ¶ senselessness to which the society of the spectacle condemns it.

Exceptionalism of the American is especially sovereign and is at the root of the global imperial order.

Hardt and Negri 2004. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: The Penguin Press, 2004. Print. Page 7-9
The "state of exception" is a concept in the German legal tradition that
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deeply the changing¶ relationships among war, politics, and global order.

The impact is the invisible genocidal of America’s enemies..

Spanos 2011. Spanos, William V. The Exceptionalist State and the State of Exception: Herman Melville’s Billy Budd, Sailor (Rethinking Theory). Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press, 2011. 148-50. Print. Spanos is a Distinguished Professor of English and comparative literature at Binghamton University, Binghamton, New York
In calling his reluctant American readers’ attention to the unlikely analogy¶ between late-
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the political space of modernity" becomes a black "visionary" possibility.

Advocacy Statement

We ask that you affirm the decidable in face of undecidability—the debate space is structured as a space between potentiality and impotentiality, twixt and tween sovereign and divine violence—the judge’s role in the debate is to act as a member of a civilian jury who restricts the sovereign power to detain by exercising their judgment of action to declare Khalid Sheikh Mohammed innocent.

Everyday expressions of constituent power like the affirmative are the best strategy for acting against the constituted power of sovereignty.

Frank 2K Jason A. Frank "The Abyss of Democracy": Antonio Negri’s Democratic Theory¶ Theory 26 Event-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event Volume 4, Issue 1, 2000-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae4.1.html | 10.1353/tae.2000.0007
At the center of both works stands Negri’s distinction between constituent power and constituted power
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ontology, which has openness to difference and innovation at its very heart.

The interruption of the law that is the affirmative’s action of divine violence is a form of constituent power; such interruptions of sovereignty are the only way out.

Frank 2K Jason A. Frank "The Abyss of Democracy": Antonio Negri’s Democratic Theory¶ Theory 26 Event-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event Volume 4, Issue 1, 2000-http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/toc/tae4.1.html | 10.1353/tae.2000.0007
When Negri emphasizes these moments of thoroughgoing democratization of the social and the political his
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of democratic politics, but also the radically democratic limits of democratic theory.

The law is not a dusty and distant archive—the judge performs the law by voting affirmative, generating a social practice that does not conserve the sovereign violence of the state of exception but instead produces a politics distinct from the vampiric public sphere of the status quo

Hariman 1990. Hariman, Robert. Popular Trials. Tuscaloosa And London: The Univerrsity of Alabama Press, 1990. 17-18. Print.
In the seventh book of the Laws Plato justifies censorship of the¶ theatrical companies
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Scott, Tom Paine, Thomas¶ Wentworth, Martin Luther, Socrates ....
The judge performs as the troublemaker who affirms a restriction upon the authority of the law in terms of its capacity to actualize its power over bodies—the negative team, forced into action, unwittingly reproduces the law’s own failure in their attempt to domesticate and control the debate space in defense of sovereignty—you may glimpse in the tautology of the negative’s arguments about framework and the law the intuitive WEAKNESS, not strength, of sovereignty
Garrison 2009. Garrison, Alysia E. "Agamben’s Grammar of the Secret Under the Sign of the Law." Law Critique 20 (2009): 281-97. Print.
"The ’secret’ of sovereignty then, in the form of inscrutable law,
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the divine, all human reason shatters’ (1995, p. 78)."
Praising modest tinkering within the state of exception instantiates the worst violence of governmentality located at the level of rationality instead of politics—voting affirmative politicizes the state of exception by enacting a restricted on permanent American militarism
Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
What is troublesome with this picture—and what will herein be a¶ continuation
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so dubious to situate Hamdi in a storyline of¶ democracy in action.

Social imaginaries can be utilized by revolutionary politics in order to break down dominant discursive constructions.

Gaonkar 02 Gaonkar, Dilip Parameshwar¶ Toward New Imaginaries: An IntroductionPublic Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v014/14.1gaonkar02.html-C:\Users\Nate Woodford\Dropbox\WPDU Debate Server\aa WAR POWERS 2013-14\AFF FILES\Terror Trials\1AC\Public Culture 14.1, Winter 2002 http:\muse.jhu.edu\journals\public_culture\v014\14.1gaonkar02.html
Within the traditional ontology of determinacy, the imaginary dimension is seen as derivative,
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instituting and self-understanding and becoming willing to take responsibility for it.
The true threat to law is an oppositional violence that could claim legitimacy, however this revolutionary violence recreates the violent foundations of law—the only truly libratory action is to present oneself before the law and performatively resist the law
Derrida, 1990 (Jacques, "Force of Law: The ’Mystical Foundation of Authority’", 11 Cardozo L. Rev. Issue 5-6. Pg. 987-995, ellipses omit French Translation)
The telling example would here be that of the right to strike. In class
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could be carried by metonymy back toward the conceptual generality of the essence.
The state of exception advances a perverse vision of a Congress and Judiciary whose distinction from the Executive covers over the general complicity in the total authorship of the violence of the law—debating about various calibrations between the branches only reinstitutes the natural status of the state of exception by asserting that tinkering at the margins is more meaningful that the absolute question of sovereignty authority
Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
The suspension of the criminal-justice process, and the expansion of¶ sovereign
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-government ¶ constraint and thus within the reviewing power of the courts.
Imagining a verdict of innocence for Mohammed translates his life from "bare" into "political"—the 1AC is an organ of signification that produces the possibility of Mohammed’s inclusion into political space by signaling that his torture was a crime rather than a necessity—when the judge affirms his life is not bare it interrupts the state of exception by repudiating the implicit definition of life that fuels the engine of destruction
Williams 08 Williams, Daniel R. "After the Gold Rush - Part 2 Hamdi, the Jury Trial, and Our Degraded Public Sphere." Penn State Law Review 113 (11/13/2008): n. pag. Print.
So, the state of exception, as it might be understood in the context
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the ¶ Sovereign, through the machinery of government, keep us safe.

The judge enacts the performative contradiction of democracy by declaring Mohammed innocent—exercise freedom by demanding a liberty that cancels itself in order to oppose the state of exception that permanently and unreflectively insists on its total reason

Butler and Spivak 2010. Butler and Spivak, 2010. (Judith Butler and Gayatri Spivak, Who Sings the Nation-State? Page 66-69)
I don’t think it would be very easy to imagine Arendt singing and I’m not
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so that that gap is seen, so that that gap can mobilize.