Terrorism on Trial: Political Violence and Abolitionist Futures

While the vehemence and shock of the debates triggered by the post-9/11 measures taken by the George W. Bush administration may have faded, they never fully accounted for all the devastating changes to the law that the war on terror wrought.The measures have centered on two prongs: 1) holding "enemy combatants" in indefinite detention at Guantanamo Bay; and 2) using torture against those same detainees, or what was referred to as "enhanced interrogation" techniques.In parallel, liberal critics of indefinite detention and torture were quick to argue that criminal prosecution in federal court was the panacea to the Bush administration's irregular and dubious methods, particularly because it held those convicted of terrorism-related offenses for many years in federal prison.This was always a nave and blinkered view for having produced hapless defendants, who were convicted of dubious charges like material support and faced many years in prison, often cajoled and pressured by informants targeting Muslims willy-nilly.The most cursory look at what terrorism prosecutions produced reveals a system more concerned with projecting an image of ensuring security, usually where the threat was, at best, highly exaggerated and, at worst, completely made up.Outside the realm of the nation's law reviews, very few publications have grappled with the phenomenon of terrorism prosecution at greater length.In 2014, Human Rights Watch published a report that was limited to the human rights implications of criminal prosecutions of terrorists post-9/11.Also in that year, the investigative journalist Trevor Aaronson released The Terror Factory: Inside the FBI's Manufactured War on Terrorism, which narrated the stories of several prosecutions in great detail.A pattern emerged in which the FBI unleashed a wave of informants into Muslim communities all over the country, with little to no preexisting suspicion that anything dangerous was afoot, entrapping guileless individuals who were more of a danger to themselves than anyone else.Rather than revealing that real danger was afoot, the book exposed the FBI's belief that