Mr Johnson was appointed by President Barack Obama and is tipped as a
potential successor to US Attorney General Eric Holder.
An “open end” to the conflict has been a defining feature of what
then-president George W. Bush called the “War on Terror” that
began after the 9/11 terror attacks in 2001, which killed 3,000 people.
Three days after the attacks, Congress authorised force against all “nations,
organisations or persons” who planned them or who aided the planners.
In the past two years, the US has registered several major blows on al-Qaeda,
most significantly the assassination of its founder and leader Osama
bin Laden in Pakistan in May last year.
In September last year the group’s leading propagandist and senior commander
of Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, Anwar
al-Awlaki, was killed in a drone strike in Yemen.
Mr Obama’s controversial policy of launching over 300 drone strikes, mainly
along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border has resulted in the deaths of hundreds
of innocent civilians, but also killed dozens of lower level al-Qaeda
operatives.
US intelligence and counterterrorism officials believe the terror network, now
led by Ayman al-Zawahiri, is incapable of launching an attack of anything
like the scale of 9/11.
However, US officials, with rare exceptions, speak of a conflict as one with
no obvious end point.
“I think one day they will be defeated, but it’s not going to happen any
time soon,” said Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican, earlier this
week.
US Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said in on Nov 20 that US forces had
decimated al-Qaeda’s core and made progress in Yemen and Somalia but needed
to avert militant gains in Mali and Nigeria.
Mr Johnson proposed that, once the military conflict ends, law enforcement and
intelligence agents would go on pursuing individual militants or groups with
the military in a reserve role.
“‘War’ must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of
affairs,” he said. “We must not accept the current conflict, and
all that it entails, as the ‘new normal’. Peace must be regarded as the norm
toward which the human race continually strives.”
However, the problem of what to do with detainees not charged with crimes –
such as some of those held at the Guantánamo Bay US Naval Base in Cuba –
might still be a slow process, Johnson said.
In one of 25 footnotes to the written remarks, Johnson cited a U.S. Supreme
Court ruling from 1948 that allowed the detention of German nationals for
six years after fighting with Germany ended.
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