Lucye Rafferty/The Hoya Security studies professor Catherine Lotrionte (left) participates in a panel discussion moderated by government professor Anthony Arend (right).

Military tribunals are necessary in the war on terrorism, Georgetown Law Professor Viet Dinh and security studies professor Catherine Lotrionte said during a panel discussion Wednesday night in Copley Formal Lounge.

Government professor Anthony Arend moderated the forum on the prosecution of accused terrorists in the wake of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks.

The panel addressed the fundamental questions of what rights should be afforded to those detainees deemed unlawful combatants and whether military tribunals or civilian courts should be used in deciding these dilemmas.

“The question of detention is very politically sexy, it causes a lot of hyperventilation, but it has only about 1 percent functionality in terms of practical impact,” said Dinh, a leading architect for the Patriot Act who served as Assistant Attorney General in the White House Office.

Dinh also argued that rights of habeas corpus should not be granted to foreign detainees specifically because they are foreign nationals.

“In order to establish a community, you have to be able to establish the right of exclusions. We have to be able to identify boundaries of our communities,” he said. “We simply cannot treat everyone as equals . only those in our community,” he said.

Lotrionte, a member of President Bush’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board, supported military tribunals as a means to try suspected terrorists.

She said basis of the U.S. justice system is the assumption that it is better to let a guilty person go free than to imprison an innocent person, but argued that there is a fundamental difference between criminal acts and terrorist acts.

“This underlying principle of the justice system does not work in counterterrorism,” Lotrionte said. “Greater weight needs to be put on the protection of society than on the protection of the alleged rights of these terrorists.”

Neal Katyal, the John Carroll Research Professor of Law and a former National Security Adviser to the Deputy Attorney General, opposed the broad executive rights granted by the Patriot Act.

“The time of terror is not the time to trifle with bedrock constitutional principles,” he said.

The executive branch should not consider the adjudication of detainees because to do so, he said, would be to fuse executive and legislative powers.

“The moment the president crosses the line and says, `I’m not just detaining enemies on the battle field,’ and starts to adjudicate them, he begins to enforce criminal sanctions, a task given to Congress,” he said.

Lt. Col. Jeffery Walker, a retired U.S. Air Force Judge Advocate General and a former adjunct professor of law, addressed the distinction between a lawful and an unlawful enemy combatant.

“You cannot try people for crimes committed in the name of a sovereign,” he said.

He argued that certain acts that would be considered illegal in peacetime, such as killing, are within the legal parameters of war and thus cannot be prosecuted, while other acts, such as the costuming of soldiers as civilians, are illegal.

Sasha Kinney (SFS ’06), who challenged the panelists by noting that all of their arguments were based on the assumption that the detainees were guilty, was nevertheless impressed by the discussion.

“They were really well-chosen panelists,” she said. “[Dinh] couldn’t really give me a satisfactory answer, because there is none. He gave the best answer available.”

The event was sponsored by the Institute for International Law and Politics in the Georgetown University government department.