Counter-terrorism and Morality of War

I read Elizabeth Dauphinee's The Politics of the Body in Pain and Christian W. Erickson's CounterTerror Culture: Ambiguity, Subversion, and Legitimization?, Alex J. Bellamy's Torture and Ethics in the War on Terror, Anthony Burke's Just War or Ethical Peace? Moral Discourses of Strategic Violence after 9/11 and Andrew Neal's Foucault in Guantanamo: National, Sovereign, Disciplinary Exceptionalism in an attempt to find something new/interesting on the already worn out terror/counterterrorism debate.What follows is my personal response to these articles. (and yes, I got bored)

At the most simplistic level, the debate about the ethics of counter-terrorism seems to be one between the age old concepts of order and justice in international relations. To complicate the issue-and to attempt to gain a more accurate understanding of the stakes at hand- the debate can be framed as one between different types of justice, because the argument for order itself implies a specific understanding of morality and is not empty of ethical substance. The debate between different sets of ethics, or different types of justice, can be related to understandings of power and its distribution, of the realistic possibility of the application of one set of morals rather than another, and the competing discourses which exist when one talks about/visualizes or otherwise represents war, violence or pain.

In the docu-drama"The Road to Guantanamo," the suspected terrorists are the focus of the narrative, and as problematic as their objectification in the film might be, this shifts the focus of the debate from the moral integrity of the interrogator, the self involved ethical standards of the organizations involved in counter-terrorism, to the experience of the terror suspect himself. As problematic as this representation of the terror suspect himself might be, both in relation to the film's narrow perspective on who that terror subject is and in relation to the problems of the representation of pain in the light of Elizabeth Dauphinee's article, it is an important divergence from the all-too-common focus on the counter-terrorism agency as described in Christian W. Erickson's article, which focus on the problematic ethics of counter-terrorism not in relation to those on the receiving end of counter-terrorist policies, but in relation to those enacting the policies themselves.

Notwithstanding any critiques I may have of the film, I believe a certain goal of leaving the viewer genuinely disturbed, was achieved. Whether it achieved Dauphinee's suggested goal of making pain inter-subjective or whether "our ability to engage is relegated to that of observation, which severely limits the possibility of making response," is difficult to gauge. However, had the representation been completely disconnected and distant from both the represented and the observer (me), there could have been no sympathetic engagement and no depressed feelings, not only at the state of things as they are, but also at the reality of my connection with and thus degree of responsibility towards, the state of things as they are.

While often both subversive and ambivalent, as Erickson describes them, the pop culture representations of terrorism and counter-terrorism in American-become global television series, their main defect is the inability to question the ethics and motivations of law enforcement or intelligence agencies from the perspective of the enemy, at least not seriously. All the eight shows or cinematic works Erickson cites are centered and take place inside the decision making counter terrorism agency (except perhaps for The Matrix). This renders it impossible to address the problems of counter terrorism where they are most acutely felt. Even when sympathetic portrayals of terror-suspects (or those wrongly accused of being such) exist, they employ a logic of the counter-terrorism agency as object and the "terrorist" as subject which makes it impossible for the terror suspect( subject to questionable methods of countering terrorism) to actually have a voice that goes beyond the limits of the security discourse.

Alex J. Bellamy in his discussion on torture and ethics in the War on Terror, brings to focus the central theme of the shows and image representations mentioned above: in what circumstances, if any, can torture be used for the purpose of combating terrorism? His conclusion is that "dire and desperate necessity may require the use of torture in the "ticking bomb terrorist" case, but that it may not excuse torture nor be elevated into a universal principle." The inherent paradox in this statement is that torture may be required, but not excused. While this paradox seems to be inescapable, its main point lies in the quotation by Slavoj Zizek who states that " only in this way, in the very inability or prohibition to elevate what we had to do into a universal principle, do we retain the sense of guilt, the awareness of the inadmissibility of what we had done." The retention of a sense of guilt, of unavoidable responsibility no matter what the imposed necessity of the situation is, may just be the safety valve required against the normalization of torture practices which allows them to occur with impunity. However, we face the same problem of object and subject: the guilt belongs to the torturer, and not the tortured, the spotlight is shifted to the morality of the doer rather than the suffering of the done-to.

This is problematic because it presents a lopsided narrative. It is also problematic because it unquestioningly accepts the necessary structure of power which makes this whole process a possibility, it presents a picture which is dichotomous and not complicated, and an understanding of space and time which is discontinuous. It separates the act of torture, both temporally and spatially, from the general context of power relations and perceived threats. While establishing the guilt of the torturer even in the most desperate of circumstances can help prevent the elevation of torture into a universally accepted practice, it obscures a more unified and historicized picture in which responsibility is distributed between "terrorist" and "anti- terrorist," but also, and more fundamentally, between the hierarchies of power within both camps. Thus what are previous policies of war, intervention or terrorism's share of the responsibility for the moment in which torture does or does not happen? And can the sense of guilt, beyond its effect on future situations (as important as that is), at all affect the dynamics of the immediate situation in which a decision has to be made?

Anthony Burke attempts to solve this problem in his piece on moral discourses of strategic violence post 9/11. He contends that "if war is seen as policy, we must do what so many just war thinkers fail to do: treat war as part of a historical continuum, rather than an isolated event limited to the conduct of high intensity military operations whose impact can somehow be limited in time, scope and spatial reach." Of course this is an enormous philosophical undertaking, and the question arises, that in the current structures of policy making and decision taking, as well as the dominant modes of power, can such a discourse as ethical peace have the space to grow? Burke seems idealistic, even utopian in this sense so that : "ethical peace differs from "just war" by rejecting the latter's prima facie acceptance of the legitimacy of strategic violence, and by making peace-however complex, difficult and delayed-its central normative goal." Such a way of thinking is not impossible if war is not understood as a transcendental reality or structural necessity of modernity, but the historical and power conditions necessary for such a discourse to be possible need serious consideration and assessment, beyond stating the desirability of existence of such a discourse. Here I have a made a transition from the discussion on torture to the discussion on war. This is because I believe that, while different and employing different terms of reference, both can be understood within the logic of exceptional situations, necessary measures and the discourse of separation between object and subject as well as an a-historical justification for either instance of violence: torture, or war.

Employing a Foucauldian outlook, Andrew Neal addresses precisely this issue of exceptionalism. In his own words " the politics of esxceptional situations have more to do with discourses and sociopolitical processes than with any fundamental metaphysical problem. [Securitization theory stresses] that security is a discourse what can be deployed and manipulated through strategies of securitization. As such, there are no events that in themselves dictate particular political responses; rather, any events or issues can be turned into security issues by particular discursive strategies…in this way, securitization theory still treats security as a special category: security is still distinguished from politics, and the exception is still distinguished from the norm."

It is, again, this inability to understand the norm and the exception as part and parcel of one and the same thing, and thus the inability to understand the torturer and the tortured, or the counter-terrorist and the terrorist as part of the same system of historical possibilities which enables simplistic and dehumanizing representations of the situation. This tendency and insistence to fragmentize our understanding, to isolate torture and war, to further isolate the moment of torture, and to insist on a one sided guilt which cannot be related to the other side and which in fact makes absolutely no difference to the reality of the other side at the moment of war or torture which makes violence, at the very beginning, even possible. What is needed is a much more complex understanding of relational realities, an understanding of a more shared, historically distributed responsibility, which can transform the approach to such tragic human situations.