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CNN Live At Daybreak

Interview with Kendall Coffey

Aired September 09, 2002 - 06:20   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

CAROL COSTELLO, CNN ANCHOR: The year anniversary of September 11 is fast approaching. It's Wednesday. And we know the events of 9/11 have affected the economy. This morning, though, we want to take a look at what it's done to our legal system.
And for that we turn to our regular DAYBREAK feature Legal Grounds with legal analyst Kendall Coffey. He joins us live from New York this morning.

Good morning.

KENDALL COFFEY, LEGAL ANALYST: Hey, good morning.

COSTELLO: So from a legal perspective, what have been the biggest changes resulting from the war on terrorism over the past year?

COFFEY: Well, there's been a fundamental transformation in approach from a philosophy of law enforcement that centered on catching the criminals after the crime occurred and putting the case together in a way that would be bulletproof for purposes of a criminal prosecution and a U.S. jury trial. It shifted, instead, very clearly to preventing crimes, terrorism crimes, before they happen.

That means much greater emphasis on surveillance, much greater emphasis on information sharing and casting a far broader net because at any given point, no one knows for sure where the next threat may come from.

COSTELLO: Exactly. Having said that, have the individual rights of many Americans been diminished?

COFFEY: Well, it's a matter of perspective. If you look at this as a war time context and setting and you look back to WWII, where FDR authorized the detentions of tens of thousands of Japanese-Americans with no possible criminal charges to be brought against them, you compare that to what happened here, 1,200 detained but in almost all cases there was some sort of criminal infraction involved. In a historical context, in a wartime situation, these are not dramatic sacrifices, although they are some.

And, of course, as we all know, Abe Lincoln probably did more to fold and spindle and mutilate the civil rights of many Americans than most, because he was in the midst of the Civil War. But the difference was in that war you had an Appomattox. You had an end. What's not clear is when will this war end and could some of the wartime measures ultimately be carried over to what might seem to be peacetime conditions?

COSTELLO: Exactly. Let's talk about military tribunals specifically, as you mentioned. Will there ever be a military tribunal held?

COFFEY: I think so, but there's no timetable because from the standpoint of the government that got close to 600 people in Guantanamo, the courts have said they can keep them there indefinitely, long as they want to. So I think for now the focus is keeping them there, seeing if there's some additional information that can be gathered, shipping some of them overseas, where we believe they can be charged, tried, imprisoned more effectively by foreign governments.

But at some point some of those detainees are going to face military tribunals, especially the ones that seem to have been the more significant players in the al Qaeda network.

COSTELLO: The Justice Department has made no apologies for the tactics it's using right now. Might those tactics continue to be challenged in court, though?

COFFEY: I think they're going to continue to get an awful lot of deference and respect in the matter of detentions, in the matter of surveillance. Where the courts have begun to dug in is any attempt to keep what's going on secret.

So, for example, an appeals court in Cincinnati ruled that detention hearings have to be open unless a very strong demonstration can be made that secrecy is needed. Meanwhile, another court has ordered, under the Freedom of Information Act, the Justice Department to tell us what's going on with the detentions that began after September 11. Again, a roundup that included as many as 1,200 people.

So while the Justice Department is getting an awful lot of deference with respect to its work of detaining and even, in some instances, detaining U.S. citizens without charges, with respect to keeping things uncover in the darkness, the courts are saying no to that.

COSTELLO: Yes.

Thank you very much, Kendall Coffey, for joining us this Monday morning, as always, with your take on legal grounds.

Have a great day.

COFFEY: Thanks. You, too.

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