Tournament: Cedanats | Round: 2 | Opponent: Vermont Brough-Broughton | Judge: Weathers
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 the United States 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 the United States, 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.
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—this is a foundational and constitutive part of American democracy that is founded in internal warfare against black populations in the prison industrial complex.
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
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racial profiling” marks only the tip of the iceberg (Sexton forthcoming).
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. 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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information we can get from our prisoners, and one must take extreme steps
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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the premise that war has been and is presently in our midst.66
Thus, the United States 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.
Voting affirmative recognizes the activation of the “rupture defense”—juxtaposing within a trial the fact of a subject’s inclusive exclusion in a legal system with the fact that that legal institution could never properly include that subject ruptures the legitimacy of that institution’s very existence—it transcends the trial by grounding the defense in facts that cannot be contained in the institution—a not guilty verdict for Mohammed is a recognition of this defense.  
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
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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 present with the incommensurability of the imagined world—affirming the imagination of the impossible world in which Mohammed could exist in the West is the only way to strategically usurp and intervene on the power of the legal fiction that excluded him in the first place.
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
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it is a legal opportunity, in a crucial sense despite itself.
Imagining alternative utopian fictions is key to activating agency within the public sphere—the debate space in particular is a location where students present themselves as academic intellectuals who can present critiques of society through acts of imagination—an act of imagination IN THIS ROOM is key to breaking down the structure of American imperialism.
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).