Tournament: Navy | Round: 1 | Opponent: George Washington Stasaski-Arsht | Judge: Patrice
Prologue: 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 (
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was responsible for the 9/11 Operation, from A to Z.

But before passing judgment, let the defense stand:
Chapter 1: 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
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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
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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 in the name of preserving the United States of America. He must legally die for democracy to survive.
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
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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 understood as constitutively unable of existing 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
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obscuring the reflection on the concrete meaning of antagonism in contemporary political life.
And Mohammed is one point where the external has been posited as the internal, interiorized via the exception. The United States has positioned itself as sovereign over the world in the name of democracy and civilization. We are the enforcers of the law of the virtuous empire that must wage perpetual war of expansion and colonization 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
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encompasses the entire globe: a move from garrison state to garrison planet.

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 "! conquer" helps to clarify the constitutive
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war, with which this book opened.¶ --------F¶ I I¶
Thus, the judiciary should find Khalid Sheikh Mohammed not guilty.
Chapter 2: 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
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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
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Scott, Tom Paine, Thomas¶ Wentworth, Martin Luther, Socrates ....

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 02Gaonkar, 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,
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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
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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
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-government ¶ constraint and thus within the reviewing power of the courts.
And now let the prosecution take the stand.