Justice and the Enemy: Nuremberg, 9/11, and the Trial of Khalid
Sheikh Mohammed
By William
Shawcross
(PublicAffairs, 256 pages,
$26.99)
STRANGE, how little real discussion there has been of foreign
policy in the current presidential campaign. Four years ago, with
George W. Bush still in office, it was, until the economy began its
swoon, the only issue. Obama and his vociferous supporters loudly
opposed every aspect of the Bush policies, whether support for
established allies in the Middle East, treatment of prisoners
captured on the battlefield, Guantanamo, civil court trials, or
military tribunals. The expectation, certainly among the most
dedicated Obama supporters, was that the new administration would
sweep away the old policies, programs, and involvements, and
establish an era of new initiatives and international good
feelings. But after a full term, the Obama administration until
recently was in most respects carrying out the policies of the Bush
administration.
However, faced with an economy unresponsive to presidential
rhetoric, plunging poll numbers, and growing alienation among his
base, the president made a snap election-year decision to pull all
American troops out of Iraq immediately, and damn the consequences.
And if things don’t improve politically well before next November,
expect a similar snap decision to be made about troops in
Afghanistan.
In the meantime, there have been other foreign policy
developments. Thanks to the president’s apparent sympathy for
rebellion for its own sake in the Arab world, combined with an
unprecedented coolness toward Israel, the region has become
seriously destabilized, as we wait to see which of our erstwhile
friends is next to go. His rear-guard gamble on Libya has paid off
with the assassination of Gaddafi, the unstated objective of the
war, although it would have been much cheaper and more efficient to
send the SEALs. And just for the record, there’s another small new
policy wrinkle—the president, for no discernible policy reason, is
sending a small group of military advisers into central Africa, the
Heart of Darkness, much as President Kennedy sent a small group of
military advisers into Vietnam. No direct combat role, of course.
Just advice.
But no matter. William Shawcross, a distinguished British
journalist, author of a number of well-received books on
international conflicts and conflict resolution, champion of human
rights throughout the world, and son of a lead prosecutor at
Nuremberg, obviously didn’t intend Justice
and the Enemy to be a colloquy on policy inconsistency
among professional politicians. But inconsistencies and vacillation
at the top of the current administration do bear directly on
Shawcross’s central concern—how best, within a coherent legal
framework, to deal effectively with combatants and terrorists,
among them the repulsive Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, planner of the
9/11 attacks.
One such instance of political vacillation, writes Shawcross,
occurred on March 7, 2011, when “President Obama signed an
executive order lifting the freeze on military trials that he
himself had imposed… and acknowledging that Guantanamo would remain
open for the foreseeable future. Thus he had abandoned two of the
signature policies on which he had campaigned… and promulgated with
great fanfare in January 2009.”
Obama, he continues, “was bowing to the political realities that
he had created. He and many of his supporters…. had treated George
Bush as an idiot and his policies in the War on Terror as more or
less evil.” But since 2008, when he claimed that Bush’s military
courts “undermined ‘our Constitution and our freedom,’ Obama had
traced their history back to George Washington and declared, ‘They
are an appropriate venue for trying detainees for violations of the
laws of war.’”
Thus, it appears that Bush may have been right all along. Then,
a month later, on April 15, 2011, Obama added “to the anguish of
many of his old supporters and new critics on the left by
performing another painful somersault. He announced the start of
his campaign for reelection…and on the same day [had] his Attorney
General, Eric Holder, reverse himself on the trial of Khalid Sheikh
Mohammed and his co-conspirators.”
Previously, “Holder had promised ‘the trial of the century’ in
federal court on Manhattan, but now he announced that the
trial….would take place before a military commission in Guantanamo,
after all.” In his announcement, Holder had blamed a partisan
Congress for preventing the administration from transferring
prisoners to federal courts around the country. That was true
enough, writes Shawcross, but “in fact many Democrats, like Senator
Charles Schumer of New York, had taken the lead, insisting that the
terrorists should not enjoy all the constitutional protections of
American citizens.”
Shawcross is rightly critical of the administration’s
indecisiveness, brought on for the most part by political
expediency. But he also gives credit to Obama where due, especially
in the operation targeting Osama bin Laden, which demonstrated the
president’s “courage in authorizing a dangerous mission that had no
guarantee of success.”
He also pays tribute to the SEALs who carried out the mission,
and “were lauded across the political spectrum. It was about time
they had such impartial recognition—in another example of the
disproportionate abuse which the Bush administration had endured,
on the wilder shores of the left the SEAL Team 6 has sometimes been
described as ‘Cheney’s Death Squad.’”
But approval of the execution wasn’t universal. Among the
jihadist sympathizers, Shawcross writes, was “Noam Chomsky—one of
the Americans, along with Jimmy Carter, whom bin Laden liked to
quote with approval….Chomsky demanded to know ‘how we would be
reacting if Iraqi commandos landed at George W. Bush’s compound,
assassinated him, and dumped his body in the Atlantic.
Uncontroversially, his crimes vastly exceed bin Laden’s.’”
As Shawcross puts it, “Chomsky’s pronouncements can be treated
with contumely, but he has a following far larger than he
deserves….He gives an academic and intellectual justification for
hatred of the United States, however spurious, even dishonest, his
arguments may be. The fact that he is so celebrated is a sad
testament to the wide and shallow nature of anti-Americanism.”
In another age, Chomsky would have been a candidate for tar and
feathers and a free ride out of town on a rail. But no matter.
There will always be semi-deranged turncoats, delusional tenured
academics with too much time on their hands, and, as Lenin put it,
“useful idiots.”
SHAWCROSS MAKES telling points on a variety of issues and
sub-issues, from waterboarding and the hard intelligence it has
provided, to the ramifications of warfare by drone, to the reasons
for the kid-glove treatment afforded by the West to Islamic
fanatics, who worship, as he puts it, in “a cult of death,” while
many among us insist on pretending it’s really “a religion of
peace.”
Why? As Shawcross points out, “We still make fun of
Christianity, mock (or malign) the Jews, laugh at the Dalai Lama,
but we maintain a respectful silence about Islam. Why is one
religion being accorded so much more deference than all the others?
Because we’re afraid of it, that’s why.”
And for good reason, as witness the murder of Daniel Pearl and
similar atrocities throughout the world. Shawcross quotes from a
speech by the Ayatollah Khomeini, patron saint of all jihadists,
whose “surge to power in 1979 was an astonishing victory for all
proponents of political Islam…” As Khomeini put it: “‘Those who
follow the rules of the Koran are aware that we have to apply the
laws of qissas (retribution) and that we have to kill….War is a
blessing for the world and for every nation. It is Allah himself
who commands men to wage war and kill.’”
“The Islamist reach for power is almost always bloody,” writes
Shawcross, “and where Islamists achieve power…they practice mass
murder on a scale not equaled in the world except by Nazi and
Communist rulers….No two eras are the same, [but] evil is eternal
and reinvents itself in every age….Like the fascist ideology that
the democratic world fought in the 1940s, the dogma of Al Qaeda and
its network of associates is despotic, ruthless, anti-Semitic,
anti-Christian, and totalitarian. It cannot be appeased any more
than Hitler was appeased.”
Once again we are at war, with a new enemy and a complex set of
legal, moral, and political issues making it difficult to deal
comprehensively with such problems as how to prosecute prisoners
taken in that war. But Nuremberg, Shawcross believes, provides a
model, “a vehicle to anathematize men imbued with evil. Nuremberg
is a precedent on which the United States can build with
pride.”
Thanks in no small part to political considerations, Shawcross
writes, “The United States has made mistakes since the brutal,
unprovoked attack of the 11th of September 2001. But America is the
world’s most vital democracy; its mistakes are constantly being
corrected.
“On the wise use of American power the free world still depends
and there is every reason to suppose that the nation and its courts
will deliver justice in an exemplary fashion.”
And in an earlier work, Allies: The
U.S., Britain, Europe, and the War in Iraq, from which
Bob Tyrrell quoted in the September TAS after a visit to London, Shawcross put
it this way: “For all its faults, American commitment and American
sacrifice are essential to the world. As in the twentieth century,
so in the twenty-first, only America has the power and the optimism
to defend the international community against what really are the
forces of darkness.”
Good to know that among good men, that special relationship
remains alive and well.
