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When Allies Become Accomplices to Terror
By Christian Bommarius, Senior Editor
Translated By Carl Bergquist
12/07/05 "Berliner
Zeitun" -- Bush and Company: Shooting Western
World in the Foot?The terrorism against Western societies cannot
result in victory for the perpetrators, but the so-called war on
terror can be lost offhandedly by the West itself. To no small
degree, this prospect has been helped by U.S. President George W.
Bush's decision to declare war on Islamist terror on the one hand
and the decision to makes the laws of war inapplicable to terrorists
on the other.
Never before has an American administration cut such a swathe in the
field of international law – an unlawful war of aggression was
legitimized and confessions extracted through torture were deemed
admissible in courts of law. And never before has an American
administration fought a no-holds-barred battle, one without any
rules - for democracy - that has turned so many democracies into
accomplices.
But instead of openly declaring their complicity, European
governments have silently aided and abetted. This does not refer to
tolerating secret CIA-agent flights in European airspace - though it
is good to know that CIA agents are still unbridled in their
movements. Rather, the complicity began with the knowledge that
these agents were accompanying suspected terrorists on their way to
European and non-European torture chambers. The justifiable
suspicion exists that European governments not only knew of the
torture, but that they also benefited from the coerced testimony so
gathered.
From this point of view, and in the realm of complicity, the
activities of the recently dethroned [Schroeder] Government in the
Khaled el-Masri case merit scrutiny. If it is true that el-Masri, a
German national of Lebanese origins, was kidnapped by CIA agents in
late 2003, who then brought him to Afghanistan and kept there until
the end of May 2004; if it is true that the then U.S. Ambassador to
Germany [Daniel Coats] asked the then German Federal Interior
Minister Otto Schily to keep quiet about the matter; and if it is
true that this silence was acquiesced to, then the secret practice
of torture was not only tolerated but also supported by the German
government. This would, alas, not only be a scandal, representing a
catastrophic negation of the Red-Green (Social Democrat, Green
Party) human rights policy, but it would be a successful attempt by
American foreign policy to make complicity synonymous with
democracy.
Does a State become a rogue State because it uses roguish methods?
Or does it use roguish methods because it is a rogue state? An old
French proverb assists in finding the solution: "Whether a drunkard
is sick because he drinks or drinks because he is sick is of no
consequence to his children." It makes no difference if a State
tortures (or outsources torture) in the name of human rights, in the
name of a religion or in the name of a dictator. For it then
tortures not as a society based on the rule of law but as its
antithesis.
It makes no difference whether terrorists employ terror tactics or
whether the U.S. military does so in the war on terror. What then
unites them is this usage of terror, and the only thing that
separates them is the American administration's claim that
super-positive international law permits the demolition of positive
international law. In comparison, the terrorists' pretense to banish
Western culture to hell in the name of Allah seems almost modest.
Above all, however, it is relatively close to becoming a reality.
For in pursuing its so-called War on Terror, the U.S. administration
is not merely turning European democracies into its accomplices, the
administration itself has long since – naturally unsuspectingly, but
naiveté in this case not a convincing justification - become the
most important accomplice to the Islamist terrorists. An ever so
fanatical terrorist could never have undermined American civil
liberties as effectively as the administration under George W. Bush.
And the termination of the much-vaunted community of Western values,
as it is now represented by the U.S. administration's desire,
approval or toleration of torture, was likely a fantasy never
entertained by the top terrorists themselves.
The War on Terror cannot be waged with terrorism. Not until European
governments have grasped this, not until the next President of the
United States of America also understands this, can accomplices once
more become allies.
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