The September 11 attacks have been considered a cornerstone in the history of terrorism in terms of the fact that it exhibited how merciless, indiscriminate and frightening terrorism can be. The impact of the attacks on the American society, which can well be called ‘the September 11 paranoia’, has undoubtedly been deeper. And the responsibility that trauma has put on the American Congress, courts, government and media has also been shaped under the shadow of that particular fear.
Prof. William Keller, an American academician, who attended the ‘ 1st International Symposium on Terrorism and Transnational Crime’ convened under the auspices of the Turkish Police Academy in Antalya on November 13-15, demonstrated the mechanisms whereby torture was legitimized as a method of interrogation in a country where liberal democracy is consolidated, rights and freedoms are accorded the utmost value and the rule of law reigns.
How Did Democracy Allow This?
In his presentation Prof. Keller discussed how the United States was kept alert, emergency powers were adopted and national security returned with constant emphases on the United States facing the possibility of a shockwave of terror attacks. Anthrax letters also fed this atmosphere of fear as it was used to prove how imminent and easy the terrorist use of biological and chemical weapons was.
Amidst this atmosphere the American Senate started to pass emergency laws instead of checking on the powers of the executive. While the media assumed a special function to help the government in assuming emergency powers, the Department of Justice gave consent for controversial interrogation techniques to be applied as long as they were kept secret. The fact that in a consolidated democracy like the U.S. torture became the state practice was, according to Keller, due to the fact that “the Pentagon, Intelligence and Presidency triumvirate assumed the emergency powers in addition to the fact that the atmosphere of fear undermined the overall system of checks and balances.”
Another important statement Keller made concerned the conscience-consoling! effect of the argument that not Americans, but anti-Americans living abroad would be tortured. In this argument, people to be tortured were presented purposefully not as ‘honorable’ enemies; they fought inhumanely, they were hiding themselves and violated the laws of war. Therefore, torture to be used against them was legitimate. All the practice was thus presented as liberal torture!
Why Are the CIA planes Flying Over Us?
In response to the question why the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) established interrogation centers abroad and allied itself with ‘torture stooges’, an issue that was discussed extensively in Turkey, Keller put forward two reasons: the FBI, which rejected torture as a legitimate interrogation technique thanks to their training, and the American Constitution, which clearly rejected torture and inhuman treatment via the ‘Bill of Rights’.
With the Obama Administration in power these erstwhile practices are being extensively and heatedly debated in the United States today. The new administration, which believes that the harm these practices inflicted on the U.S. has been greater the good they did to the U.S. interests has released many documents regarding that period and even embarked upon a special investigation. The American case has manifested one point very clearly: The democratic countries that might regard interrogation techniques based on torture as a part of combating terrorism especially in the first stages realize soon that they end up worse off by using torture. The more institutionalized the democracy, more consolidated the rule of law and more digested the belief in the human rights and freedoms are, the more unsustainable the efforts to justify inhumane treatment including torture. We will continue to talk about the American experience with torture and its implications.
*A version of this article in Turkish was first published in HABERTURK newspaper on November 18, 2009.
Ihsan Bal
The Director of Center for International Security, Ethnic Studies and Terrorism, USAK/ISRO
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