When Allies Become Accomplices to Terror

By undermining international law in combating terror, the Bush Administration has handed the terrorists a victory that the masterminds of 9-11 could scarcely have imagined. According to this op-ed article from Germany's Berliner Zeitung, '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.'

By Christian Bommarius, Senior Editor

Translated By Carl Bergquist

December 7, 2005

Berliner Zeitung - Original Article (German)    

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.