President Barack Obama, in one of his first moves in office, reversed some of the most controversial detention and interrogation policies of the Bush administration. His three executive orders mandated the closure of the Guantánamo Bay detention facility within a year, and suspended both military commission proceedings and the CIA’s enhanced interrogation program. But the interagency task force established by the executive orders has a difficult task ahead: it must not only determine the future of the remaining detainees at Guantánamo, but also shed light on how to detain and interrogate future terrorist suspects in a manner consistent with American law and American values.

This study finds that even if the United States successfully solves some of the most high-profile counterterrorism issues on the table, it will still lack a comprehensive, coherent, and sustainable framework for dealing with the strategic challenge posed by transnational terrorism. It argues that sharp disagreements over national security and civil liberties, as well as errors and overreach in U.S. counterterrorism practices, have stood in the way of America’s ability to forge a critical and sustainable foreign policy accord on how to address terrorist detention and trials, as well as domestic intelligence policies. The study recommends that the United States reexamine the scope and limits of its war against al-Qaeda, treating national security and the protection of individual liberties as coequal objectives. It calls on Congress and the president to engage these issues in a bipartisan fashion and craft comprehensive long-term counterterrorism policies that reaffirm the U.S. commitment to core values. Only then, it argues, will the United States be able to achieve the kind of foreign policy agreement necessary to prevail against the modern terrorist threat.

Read the Diplomatic Courier review.

Daniel B. Prieto is adjunct senior fellow for counterterrorism and national security at the Council on Foreign Relations. He is also vice president and senior fellow for homeland security and intelligence at IBM’s Global Leadership Initiative. Mr. Prieto is coauthor of several books and monographs, including Global Movement Management: Strengthening Commerce, Security and Resiliency in Today’s Networked World and Neglected Defense: Mobilizing the Private Sector to Support Homeland Security. He has served on the professional staff of the Homeland Security Committee in the U.S. House of Representatives and has testified before the U.S. Senate, and his commentary and analysis have appeared widely, including in the Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Washington Post, and New Republic, and on MSNBC, CNN, and NPR. Mr. Prieto received a BA from Wesleyan University and an MA from the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS). The views, judgments, and recommendations expressed in this report are solely the author’s and do not reflect the opinions or positions of any of the organizations with which he is affiliated.