New York Times

Noah Feldman

Cambridge, Mass.

Has the Obama administration changed the legal rules for detaining suspects in the war on terrorism, or is it continuing in the footsteps of the Bush administration?

We got a clue last week when the Justice Department filed an important document “refining” the government’s position in lawsuits over those held at Guantánamo Bay. Hailed by supporters as a leap forward, yet criticized by human rights groups as being little different from what came before, the filing reveals a distinctive approach to constitutional law. Cautious and modest where George W. Bush was ambitious and brash, Mr. Obama still claims the authority necessary to sustain almost everything his predecessor did.

Perhaps what’s most important here is what Mr. Obama’s lawyers do not say. The Bush White House long insisted that the president had inherent power as commander in chief to do whatever it took to defend the country — including overriding American and international law. The Obama filing, however, is silent on the topic of inherent executive power. Indeed, the magic words “commander in chief” never even appear.

Technically, the Obama lawyers have not abandoned the argument for broad presidential power, just implied that such authority is unnecessary to get them what they want.

Yet omitting the claim to unfettered executive authority shows respect for Congress and international standards. In effect, the Obama administration is saying to the courts that if the detainees cannot be held as a matter of federal or international law, judges should release them. This approach is brave — so brave it might even prove foolhardy if the courts, sick of nearly a decade of detention, decide to clear the decks.

The filing argues that the authorization for the use of military force passed by Congress after 9/11 — the contemporary equivalent of a declaration of war — gives the president the powers any sovereign would have under the general principles of the international law of war. Relying on international law to make sense of Congress’s grant of power has deep roots in our constitutional tradition.

In the context of America’s present global military posture, however, the rediscovery of this notion is little short of astonishing. The laws of war, mostly designed for old-fashioned struggles between sovereign states, often do not fit today’s circumstances. The Bush administration saw this mismatch as an occasion to treat the Geneva conventions as “quaint” (in the words of Alberto Gonzales, the former White House counsel).

The Obama lawyers, however, seem to believe that the international law of war is flexible enough to serve their interests — and even to expand the president’s power to detain suspects beyond the strict language used by Congress when it gave President Bush authority to carry out his war on terrorism.

Here is where the law gets complicated: In 2001, Congress told the president he could make war on anyone who had “planned, authorized, committed or aided” the Sept. 11 attacks. The Bush administration, though, went further; it claimed the power to detain any “enemy combatant,” defined to include “anyone who is part of or supporting Taliban or Al Qaeda forces or associated forces.” In an unfortunate legal overreach, one administration lawyer said the government could detain a “little old lady in Switzerland” whose donation to an Afghan orphanage ended up in the hands of Al Qaeda.

In place of the “enemy combatant” definition, the Obama administration now claims the right to detain anyone who “substantially supported” terrorists. Thankfully, the Obama standard would free the little old Swiss lady. But the words “substantial support” do not come from international law any more than Bush’s “enemy combatant” did.

The administration lawyers suggest in their brief that “substantial support” of terrorists could be defined by some unspecified analogy to the laws of detention in traditional armed conflict. Yet the details are left to the imagination; and when push comes to shove, this language might well include all the Guantánamo detainees, including those who never belonged to a terrorist group.

The upshot is that the Obama approach is potentially broad enough to continue detaining everyone whom the Bush administration put in Guantánamo in the first place. The legal theories are subtler, and the reliance on international law may prove more attractive to our allies. But President Obama is stuck with the detainees Mr. Bush left him, and some may pose a real danger. Faced with this conundrum, and pressed for answers by judges who are rightfully impatient, the administration is hurrying to reframe existing powers in new legal doctrines.

The true test of whether Mr. Obama has improved on the Bush era lies in how his administration justifies its decisions on the 241 remaining Guantánamo detainees, whose cases will now be evaluated internally and reviewed by the courts. If the new legal arguments actually affect who goes free and who stays in custody, then they will amount to meaningful change. Without real-world effects, though, even the most elegant new legal arguments are nothing but words.

Noah Feldman is a law professor at Harvard, a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing writer to The Times Magazine.

EDITORIAL

New York Times

 In a long series of valedictory speeches and interviews, President Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney have been crowing about Guantánamo Bay, secret prisons and abusive interrogations, claiming they met the highest legal standards and that no prisoner had been tortured. Fortunately, the truth broke through the noise, in the words of some of the very people ordered to carry out the policies.

 In an interview in The Washington Post, Susan Crawford, the retired judge who runs the military tribunals at Guantánamo, said that harsh interrogation methods had endangered the life of Mohammed al-Qahtani, a Saudi national accused of planning to take part in the 9/11 attacks. Authorized by then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, they included sustained isolation, nudity and prolonged exposure to the cold.

 “We tortured Qahtani,” Judge Crawford said, adding that she was therefore unable to prosecute a man who seemed to pose a real threat to the United States.

Judge Crawford was not the only one speaking out. Major David Frakt of the Air Force Reserve, who was assigned to defend another Guantánamo prisoner, told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow that he and all the other defense lawyers in the system consider the tribunals “unfair, rigged” and unconstitutional. He noted that his client’s prosecutor resigned to protest the lack of evidence in the case.

That is the real nature of Mr. Bush’s grotesque legacy: abuse and torture at an outlaw prison where hundreds of men — many of whom did nothing — have been held for years without real evidence or charges. And truly dangerous men were treated so badly that it may be impossible to bring them to justice.

It will be hard enough to close down Guantánamo as Barack Obama has vowed to do, but the legal burdens Mr. Bush is dumping on his successor are much greater.

The appalling Military Commissions Act of 2006, railroaded through Congress, must be repealed. Interrogation rules that respect American values and laws and the Geneva Conventions must be set for all government agencies, including the intelligence agencies.

And there is the profound question of whether the new administration should prosecute those who tortured and abused prisoners — and those who ordered them to do it. Judge Crawford’s legal finding that torture occurred adds a new complication, since a treaty obliges the United States to investigate such allegations.

We have heard a lot of talk about how the country needs to look forward and not backward. We certainly would like to forget the horrors of the last eight years. But you cannot fix something before you know exactly how it is broken. The clandestine system Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney have built will not give up its secrets easily.

To ensure that the abuses stop, Mr. Obama and his administration will have to work hard to find out all that has happened. They will have to locate and override all of the policy memos, directives and executive orders that have redefined and condoned torture and other abuses. Guantánamo is the place to begin.

 The timetable: Mr. Obama is expected to announce as early as Wednesday that he is beginning the process of shutting Guantánamo. We hope he sets a target date. That may make it easier to persuade other governments to agree to accept some prisoners — one of the difficult challenges ahead. But we do not agree with critics who insist that date must fall within his first 100 days.

This page called early and often for closing Guantánamo. But we recognize that this is going to be very hard work.

 Sorting out the inmates: Mr. Obama’s lawyers will have to review every file, most of which the Bush administration has refused to turn over to any authority, including Congress. We know from bitter experience that the Bush administration’s judgment is worthless when it comes to what these prisoners may have done, how they have been treated and what justice they should face.

Just last week, Mr. Cheney claimed that the interrogation of prisoners like Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, believed to be the planner of 9/11, who was tortured by waterboarding, allowed the United States to capture a “very impressive” list of Al Qaeda leaders in 2003. If that is true, Mr. Obama needs to know who they are, where they are, and what was done to them in the last five years.

A blueprint: Senator Dianne Feinstein, the new head of the Intelligence Committee, has a bill for closing Guantánamo that Mr. Obama should embrace. It sets a one-year deadline and requires that every prisoner either be charged and tried in United States federal court; transferred for trial by an international tribunal under United Nations authority; returned to the custody of the government of their homeland, if that government does not abuse and torture prisoners; held as a prisoner of war; or, simply, released.

The separate system of tribunals created by the military commissions act must be abolished. They are a mockery of American justice, and utterly unnecessary.

It was extremely encouraging to hear Eric Holder, Mr. Obama’s choice for attorney general, say at his confirmation hearing on Thursday that the new administration is open to trying prisoners in the United States. It is appalling that an attorney general nominee has to say he respects the law, but such is the Bush legacy.

The real bad guys: After the prisoners are sorted out, Mr. Bush’s egregiously bad judgment leaves all Americans with a huge problem. The abuses authorized by top Bush officials, and so gleefully defended by Mr. Cheney in particular in the last few weeks, create the possibility that men like Mohammed al-Qahtani and Khalid Shaikh Mohammed will never be able to face justice in a real courtroom.

Mr. Obama’s team will have to come up with a solution that does not set such men free. We are not sure what it should be, but there is one unacceptable choice: creating a new detentions law that would allow them held without trial. That would merely compound Mr. Bush’s catastrophically bad choices.

Interrogations: The 2006 military tribunals law bound military interrogators to the Army field manual’s rules, which conform with the Geneva Conventions — unlike Mr. Bush’s policies. But, at Mr. Bush’s insistence, the bill carved out an exemption that allowed intelligence agencies to go on hiring civilian interrogators and to engage in practices that are clearly immoral and illegal. Ms. Feinstein’s bill would eliminate the loophole on how prisoners are treated and ban the use of civilian interrogators.

We were glad to hear Mr. Holder state that the Obama administration considers the Geneva Conventions binding. But we wish he had been more clear on a solution, beyond calling the Army field manual a “good start” for interrogation rules in C.I.A. prisons. We also were unclear from his answers whether Mr. Obama has decided, as he should, to ban civilian interrogators.

Mr. Holder unequivocally declared waterboarding to be torture, which his predecessors would not do. But this is not just about waterboarding. Other practices, like forced nudity, prolonged isolation, and extremes of heat and cold, are abuses under the same laws and treaties that prohibit torture. And Judge Crawford reminded us that torture is not necessarily just one terrible act. In the Qahtani case, she said: “This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive.”

C.I.A. prisons: We have never heard a convincing explanation for why the Central Intelligence Agency needs its own network of prisons beyond the reach of law, in undisclosed locations. If there is a good reason, we hope this administration will explain it. We are skeptical, and we urge Mr. Obama to support Ms. Feinstein’s bill, which would require the C.I.A. to report all detainees to the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We recognize that this is a daunting agenda, and that to succeed, Mr. Obama’s White House, Justice Department and Pentagon will also have to rebuild demoralized legal divisions where professionals were replaced with apparatchiks whose mission was to twist the law to justify their masters’ decisions.

This work is essential to restoring the rule of law. It is essential to restoring this country’s reputation around the world. And it is essential to restoring Americans’ faith in themselves and in their government. That is the only way to move forward.

EDITORIAL

New York Times

Ever since President Bush rammed the Military Commissions Act of 2006 through Congress to lend a pretense of legality to his detention camp at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, we have urged Congress to amend the law to restore basic human rights and judicial process. Rulings by military judges this week suggest that the special detention system is so fundamentally corrupt that the only solution is to tear it down and start again.

 The target of the judges’ rulings were Combatant Status Review Tribunals, panels that determine whether a prisoner is an “unlawful enemy combatant” who can be tried by one of the commissions created by the 2006 law. The tribunals are, in fact, kangaroo courts that give the inmates no chance to defend themselves, allow evidence that was obtained through torture and can be repeated until one produces the answer the Pentagon wants.

 On Monday, two military judges dismissed separate war crimes charges against two Guantánamo inmates because of the status review system. They said the Pentagon managed to get them declared “enemy combatants,” but not “unlawful enemy combatants,” and moved to try them anyway under the 2006 law. That law says only unlawful combatants may be tried by military commissions. Lawful combatants (those who wear uniforms and carry weapons openly) fall under the Geneva Conventions.

 If the administration loses an appeal, which it certainly should, it will no doubt try to tinker with the review tribunals so they produce the desired verdict. Congress cannot allow that. When you can’t win a bet with loaded dice, something is wrong with the game.

 There is only one path likely to lead to a result that would allow Americans to once again hold their heads high when it comes to justice and human rights. First, Congress needs to restore the right of the inmates of Guantánamo Bay to challenge their detentions. By the administration’s own count, only a small minority of the inmates actually deserve a trial. The rest should be sent home or set free.

 Second, Congress should repeal the Military Commissions Act and start anew on a just system for determining whether prisoners are unlawful combatants. Among other things, evidence obtained through coercion and torture should be banned.

 And Congress should shut down Guantánamo Bay, as called for in bills sponsored by two California Democrats, Representative Jane Harman in the House and Senator Dianne Feinstein in the Senate. Both lawmakers are intimately familiar with the camp and have concluded it is beyond salvaging.

 Their bill would close Gitmo in a year and the detainees would be screened by real courts. Those who are truly illegal combatants would be sent to military or civilian jails in the United States, to be tried under time-tested American rules of justice, or sent to an international tribunal. Some would be returned to their native lands for trial, if warranted. The rest would be set free, as they should have been long ago.

 The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place.

 It is time to get rid of it.

The atrocities of September 11, 2001 caused an unprecedented acceleration in the transformation of the corpus of criminal and criminal procedure laws in Western countries. In the months following the outrage, and sometimes within days, governments have enacted measures curtailing public and private liberties. In our opinion, a real break is taking place, because it is the very existence of the rule of law as we know it which is at stake.

These laws fit very much within a tendency that privileges procedure above law and equity in the dispensation of justice. Here, we are particularly concerned about the precedence being taken by emergency procedures. This break is so profound as to cause an upheaval of the norm as it prevailed up to now, causing the exception to become the rule. We conclude that emergency procedures are in the process of replacing the constitution as the ruling paradigm of politics.

A Break in the Tradition of Criminal Law.

Anti-terrorism legislations, whether ancient or modern, always aim to legitimise exceptional criminal procedures at all levels of the judiciary process, from the inquiry itself up to and including the final judgement. We are talking here special methods of investigation such as surveillance, mail interception, telephone tapping and electronic monitoring. These measures can nowadays be implemented even in the absence of an infraction. Suspicion of terrorist activities now also warrants exceptional preventive detention or administrative custody, even of simple witnesses, as in the United States. Anti-terrorism legislation also condones curbing communications between an accused person and her or his attorney, and, on a more general plane, allows for the setting up of specific emergency jurisdictions.

In Spain, a person accused of terrorist activities does not have the right to a lawyer of her/his own choosing. In Germany, various derogations have been enacted to customary rules regarding searches, entering property, identity checks, and arrest and imprisonment. At the level of court procedure, rules have been set to alter the nature of competent jurisdictions and to curtail the rights of the defence. Defence attorneys can for instance been denied access to procedures in the event of ‘circumstances leading to the belief’ that they may act in such a way as to thwart the instruction. The same rule allows for the lawful breach of the confidentiality of the correspondence between attorney and client.

As for its consequences for the criminal process, the new anti-terrorist laws are very much in conformity with more ancient jurisdictional tendencies. They do however vastly extent their scope. Indeed they aim not so much to restrict the fundamental liberties of certain categories of the population, but rather to encompass it as a whole. They establish a permanent and generalised surveillance and control of individuals and will preventively attack and arraign any process of class re-composition by criminalising social movements beforehand.

A Manifestation of Imperial Power.

An important feature of these recent anti-terrorist laws is that, contrary to previous legislation, they no longer stem from relatively autonomous national initiatives, but are being put forward by international bodies such as the G8, the European Council, or the European Union. This results in this type of legislation being implemented in a whole set of countries, including those which have never faced any sort of terrorist menace.

The more recent legal measures against terrorism anticipate rather than answer terrorist actions. They come in fulfilment by national states of their international obligations, and have been more specifically brought about by the demands of the United States of America. The place taken by the United States in the whole process is in fact very characteristic of the current situation, the fight against terrorism being very much constitutive of its Imperial leadership.

Taking lawful interception of (electronic) communication as an example, it is the FBI that has to a very large extent set its specifications. Regarding computer criminality, the FBI also has a lot of leverage in directing the police of most foreign states. The level of influence the United States are able to exert in shaping the anti-terrorist legislation of other governments confirms their forward role in the process of the modernisation of power on the global scale.

But anti-terrorist measures also expose another role played by the United States, viz. that of their direct super-power domination over other states.

The first component of this relationship is the privilege that has ‘de jure’ been granted to American citizenship, by attaching to it rights that are denied to other nationalities. This is particularly evident in the case of the differential legal treatment meted out to US citizens and foreigners. In terrorism cases and those related to organised crime, American courts also claim universal jurisdiction and extra-territorial competence.

The USA Patriot Act as Suspension of Foreigners’ Rights.

The USA Patriot Act of 26 October 2001 empowers the General Attorney of the United States to order the arrest and imprison any foreigner suspected of threatening national security. Such measures were further extended by the ‘Military Order’ of November 31 of the same year, authorizing to charge non-American terrorism suspects before special courts and to keep them in indefinite custody.

These two measures create zones of lawlessness. They suspend or even abolish the fundamental rights of suspects. Suspects are then totally in the hands of the executive, and no judicial control whatsoever applies to them. Thus, prisoners captured during the Afghan conflict are now shepherded in Guantanamo Bay and do not qualify for Prisoners of War status as defined by the Geneva Convention. This suspension of rights not only takes place within US territory, but also abroad, since the capture itself took place in Afghanistan, and, in the absence of a formal declaration of war, was conducted as a police sweep rather than as a military operation.

Aiming at the total abolition of protection under due process of law for arrested foreigners, such measures result in pure lawlessness towards non-American citizens. At the same time, this discriminatory mechanism doubles up with a suspension of international law, where American citizens get a privileged treatment that immunises them against arraignment before the International Penal Tribunal in The Hague when they are engaging in ‘international peace maintenance operations’.

This suspension of the due process of law is emblematic of a pure relation of power. It constitutes the legal manifestation of the application of pure violence. Furthermore it is also paired, through its inclusion in domestic American law, and through its acceptance by the United Nations or through bilateral extradition agreements, with a hegemonic function, and with the recognition by other states of the particular and dominant status that the United States claim for themselves with regard to international law.The USA Patriot Act Two as a Generalised Suspension of the Rule of Law.

Still unsatisfied with the exceptional legislation already in place, the Bush administration has drafted a new anti-terrorism law, the ‘Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003’ (1), which further aggravates the legal deviations of the ‘USA Patriot Act’. This new text is already known as ‘Patriot II’. Building upon the first Patriot Act, it extents existing discriminatory measures against non-citizens and further enhances the powers of the executive at the expense of the judiciary. This project is a big step forward towards the establishment of emergency rule. It generalises the system of suspension of the rights of American citizens suspected of collaboration with entities deemed to be terrorist organisations. Exceptional procedures thus become the norm.

The new act provides for an easier surveillance of American citizens by the government, and for interception and monitoring of their communications, electronic or otherwise, without judicial review. Simply applying to citizens procedures designed to fight a foreign power will suffice. Such actions need only be deemed to take place within a vaguely phrased monitoring and intelligence acquisition drive directed against ’agents of a foreign power’.

The originality of the new project as compared to its predecessor lies of course in the latitude given to the executive to subject American citizens to the kind of exceptional legislation henceforth restricted to foreigners, with the possibility of depriving them of their American citizenship as ultimate element of this emergency procedure.

Indeed, the draft legislation provides for depriving American citizens of their nationality, in case they aid or abet an organisation branded as terrorist by the Attorney General of the United States. This provision represents a clear break with previous legislation which made a sharp distinction between what applies to nationals and to non-citizens. It will result in Americans being henceforth subjected not to the law of the land, however restrictive it has become with respect to individual liberties, but to the sole whim of the executive.

Even if the draft still formally distinguishes between citizens and non-nationals, this has become meaningless in practice, since the legal protection granted to US citizens can be taken away by a mere administrative decision. For those advocating the new legislation, it would be the suspect (herself or himself) who would evidence the wish to lose citizenship by supporting a group deemed to be terrorist. The idea being that ‘one can infer her or his intention by her or his actions’, even if the person has never manifested such an intention, or applied for relinquishing American citizenship.

The State of Emergency, European Union Style.

On December 6, 2001, the European justice and interior ministers convened and adopted a ‘framework declaration’ in order to harmonise existing national legislation concerning terrorist activities. The nature of incriminating evidence in this regard is entirely political: it derives from the intentions of its author.

The crime of terrorism applies when the authors ‘actions‘ are deemed to have the destruction of the political, economic or social structures of a country as its aim’, or when ‘its aim is to gravely destabilise a country’. Concepts as ‘destabilisation or destruction of economic/ social/ political structures of a country’ makes it possible to mount a frontal attack against social movements. Similar arguments were used in the beginning of the 80s by the government of Margaret Thatcher to apply the then existing anti-terrorist legislation to the miners’ strike.

The accusation of terrorism also applies to activities ‘that intend to unduly force public bodies or an international organisation to either act or refrain to act in a particular manner’. Since every social movement tends to frighten some part of the public and to force authorities to act or not to act in a certain way, the interpretative scope of such a legislation is extremely wide indeed. Such qualifiers as ‘unduly’ and ‘gravely’ do not provide for any kind of objective definition of the incriminated actions. It will be up to the authorities to judge whether they were subjected to intolerable pressure. More generally terrorism is defined in such a way as to leave it to governments to decide who and whatever does fall in that category.

Anticipating a New ‘Social War’.

In such a context, it is easy to envisage how rallies, strikes, squatting or ‘hijacking’ public spaces, occupying infrastructure installations, or disrupting mass transit, all with the intention to put pressure to the government to enact social policies or to stop the dismantlement of the same, can easily be assimilated to terrorist acts.

Similar actions, aimed at the policies of international bodies or organisations, could meet the same treatment. The General Agreement on Trade in Services (GATS), whose objective is the complete removal of all rules that impede a total liberalisation of services, is an example of the complete dismantlement of state regulation. A spirited opposition movement fighting for the maintenance of public services, or for the regulation of certain sectors of the economy, could thus easily be branded as terrorist.

The new criminal legislation corresponds with the second phase of the establishment of an integrated structure of power at the global level: Empire. The first phase consisted in the political organisation of the global market, and the liberalisation of the movements of goods and finance capital. Labour force management remained at this stage the resort of the national states. The negotiations about liberalising investments, and about the GATS, are initiating a second phase of the process, that of globalisation of management of the workforce and of its reproduction parameters. The dismantling of the existing political set-up is the precondition for the shift in its organic composition.

The End of the Separation of Powers.

The ‘USA Patriot Act’ is still based on a dual judicial system: on the one side, some legal protection for US citizens, even if increasingly restricted; on the other, abolition of rights for non-nationals. This dual system disappears under the ‘Patriot II’ draft, since it enables the executive to strip American citizens of their nationality and to transfer them from a system of legal protection to an environment where the rule of law does not obtain.

The fight against terrorism thus marks a fundamental break in the Western political structure, which was traditionally based on a dual system: rule of law inside the national territory, and ‘’pure violence’’ abroad.

Patriot II, if adopted, will mean the legal implementation of the state of emergency, i.e. the enshrinement of lawlessness within the law.

In an article in the French daily ‘Le Monde’, Giorgio Agamben argued that the exercise of political power in the Western world was predicated on the articulation of two relatively distinct systems, that of the juridical order and that of pure violence. ‘’The Western political system appears to be a double mechanism, based on the dialectical workings of two heterogeneous and apparently antithetical components: law and pure violence. As long as both components remain separated, this dialectic can function, but as soon as the state of emergency becomes the rule, the political system itself becomes a system of death;’’ (2) That is exactly what is happening right under our eyes, as emergency rule becomes Imperial law.

There is clearly a double phenomenon at work, viz. a suspension of the rule of law, and a shift within the law of criminal procedure. Even if the suspension of the rule of law is more apparent in the United States, a similar development is taking place in European countries, as emergency legislation is being implemented.

At this juncture, the consolidation of Imperial rule demands that the restrictions on public liberties be enshrined in criminal law. Its current transformation shows that we are witnessing the end of the dual system of rule of law and pure violence.

But then, this double structure was closely related to the societal make-up of the nation-state, which applies the rule of law within what it considers to be its border, and abolishes it towards its exterior. Empire, as the new form of exercise of power at the global scale has no exterior, and hence every movement, every political or military action takes place within its borders. The distinction between internal and external, and between rule of law and pure violence, typical of the nation-state, no longer makes any sense.

The Specific Role of the United States of America.

The United States take a specific place within the imperial structure because of their position of dominance also expresses itself in the ability to project their national power on the rest of the world, which even though they may consider it as their back garden, is still an ‘abroad’ for them. The difference in legal status between US citizens and foreigners, and the suspension of the latter’s rights, bear witness to the singular position of the USA within the Imperial constellation.

Just like any nation-state, the United States have implemented a dual judicial system, based on the rule of law for citizens and on a state of non-law for foreigners. Traditionally, as with other nation-states, such a distinction between two legal dispensations articulates itself around the concept of border.

However, to the American government, ‘border’ does not mean a geographical feature. The primacy of American citizenship, the duality in the dispensation of justice is not a matter of a given territory, but concerns the planet as a whole. At stake is not only to enforce the immunity of American citizens with regard to international tribunals, which are supposed to be common jurisdictions, but also to force other states to allow American authorities the right to judge the citizens of these very countries through purpose-created emergency courts.

The most recent agreements signed between the USA and the European Union represent the recognition by the latter of the American privilege to legislate in the matter of suspension of customary law and to build up a new judicial world order based on emergency legislation. These agreements are the conclusive piece of a process whereby European jurisdictions are being materially incorporated in the system of suspension of rights devised by the United States. As a consequence, European countries have accepted, under conditions framed and imposed by the United States, to deliver their own citizens in the hands of American authorities as and when those brand them as terrorists.

The United States take a pioneer role in the institution of this new judicial order, they decide what is a case of emergency, and in its wake, in which way the prevailing norm has to be altered, especially with regard to criminal law and criminal procedure. This undoubtedly marks the reinsertion of pure violence within the international order, and represent a constitutive act of their Imperial leadership.

The State of Emergency.

The fight against terrorism causes a re-structuring of political power by way of a strengthening of the powers of the executive. Through the enactment of framework legislation, which is then being applied by way of decrees and administrative circulars or even simple lists established by the justice ministry (such as lists of purported terrorist organisations), the executive fully functions as legislative power and instrumentalises completely the judicial apparatus.

Such arrangements are typical of a state of emergency. Since the state of emergency is usually considered a political phenomenon, defining the concept in precise legal terms it is not a simple matter. As described by Carl Schmitt, it ‘’wavers in an uncertain and ambiguous fashion at the cross-road between the political and the legal’’(3). Traditionally, declaring a state of emergency answers a necessity, as put forward by the actual power, to maintain public order in the face of extraordinary circumstances, usually within a context of civil strife. The fight against terrorism is routinely described in terms of a world-wide civil strife, a war on the long haul against an enemy in need of being constantly redefined. This situation, however, differs from the habitual state of affairs. The (global) power does not so much face actual disturbances, but strives to neutralise virtual threats.

Here, the discourse bandied by the global power harbours a paradox: judicial reform is motivated by a sudden emergency, but the emergency itself is said to be of long duration. Hence the state of emergency becomes a permanent fixture. It comes to be considered as the new form of the political order, with the aim to defend democracy and human rights. Or to put it differently, citizens must accept for a long time to come the curtailment of their concrete liberties in the defence of a self-proclaimed and entirely abstract democratic order.

The fact that most of these measures are enacted as laws also proves that the global power is going for the long haul. To achieve this, it is seeking a new legitimacy whereby the people must voluntarily abide by the dismantlement of their constitutional safeguards.

The Relevance of Carl Schmitt.

For Carl Schmitt, sovereignty does not lie in the ability to impose a norm, but in a decision-making potential that is free of any normative obligation. Rather than the legal norm, it is in extraordinary legislation, ‘’where the decision making process leaves the juridical norm behind’’ that the authority of the state shines at its best. ‘’The true sovereign is who is able to decide that a given situation is an extraordinary one’’.

Contrary to Max Weber, Schmitt does not locate the state’s sovereignty in its monopoly of domination of violence, but in its monopoly of decision-making. Whereas this definition appears to be somewhat reductive in the case of the nation-state, it does perfectly fit the Imperial structure. Schmitt circumscribes the political process starting from the ‘identify friend or foe’ concept. Such an approach tends to privilege external politics as against internal governance. Such an interpretation fails to account for the organic character of sovereignty in the nation-state, of the interdependency between internal and external sovereignty, and for the interplay obtaining between various institutions and loci of power. But in the wake of the deconstruction of the nation-state and of the re-integration of its structure within a form of imperial power, Schmitt’s analyses are gaining a renewed interest.

For Schmitt, the decision as to declare a state of emergency takes place within a judicial framework. The emergency situation is not one of chaos. When the state abolishes (constitutional) law, it is allegedly in order to safeguard it. Seen in this light, the decision as to declare an emergency is first and foremost, a decision regarding the circumstances in which the norm applies. ‘’A normal situation needs to be postulated, and then, the sovereign is who is able to decide in last resort whether a normal situation obtains or not’’. With Empire, the executive power of the United States of America plays the role of the sovereign as described by Schmitt. There is indeed an embedding of the emergency regulations within a juridical order, but it is an order devoid of concrete rights.

The issues that have been raised by Schmitt are becoming relevant again in the context of the current fight against terrorism. Here too this form of government is predicated on the long haul. These dispositions also generate a new juridical order, where extraordinary procedures occupy the centre stage, and where the exception becomes the norm. Whereas the fight against terrorism leads to a suspension of rights and produces a new juridical order, it also and at the same time produces a new enemy, both in a formal and in a material sense. Unlike martial law, this transformation of the juridical order does not aim to combat something that is external to the system, but something that is inherent to it. Hence we witness an inversion of the relationship between means and aims. The designated enemy; the terrorist organisation, becomes the very instrument of the transformation of the judicial system.

State of Emergency or Dictatorship?

Giorgio Agamben’s enquiry into the Roman ‘justicium’ enabled him to establish a distinction between dictatorship and state of emergency. The Roman dictator was a special magistrate, whose extensive powers were conferred by a specific piece of legislation, in conformity with the prevailing constitutional order. Within the Roman state of emergency, the extension of the powers conferred to magistrates was simply obtained by suspending those laws that limited them. ‘’The state of emergency was therefore not a dictatorship (…) but a space void of laws, a zone of anomia, where all prevailing legal dispensations, and especially those regarding the distinction between what is public and what is private, have been suspended’’.

Agamben considers that the current forms of deviation from the rule of law indeed qualify as a state of emergency, but a closer look suggests that things are less firmly determined.

What we do see is a world-wide instrumentalisation of the judiciary by the executive. The fight against terrorism allows for the prosecution of any person suspected to be member of an organisation listed as terrorist by the ministry of justice or even by a simple officer of police. The most advanced instance of such a conflation of powers happens in the United States, where the executive has claimed for itself the authority to nominate judges to sit in military emergency courts. The concentration of powers within the executive, as it also acquires those of the judiciary, transform the president into a magistrate with very extended competences bestowed to him by all sorts of specific laws, acts, and decrees.

In France, the so-called ‘Perben Act’ has extended the powers of the police and has altered the modalities of the inquiry by augmenting the allowable time of remand custody, and the possibilities of searches and of monitoring/ surveillance in the case of ‘organised crime’. A structure of pro-active investigations has been set up, whereby police is allowed to make use of special techniques, without notification to the person suspected.

The law also provides for guilty pleading, with a procedure dubbed ‘’arraignment under preliminary admittance of guilt’’(4). This system has become extremely common in the United States. Its principle is to achieve a decrease in the indictment through a restatement of the charges brought forward (for instance by re-qualifying murder as manslaughter), this in exchange for an admission of guilt. The method considerably reinforces the supremacy of the procedure above that of the law. It formally enforces a contract of sorts between two highly unequal parties and esablishes a deal-making procedure which is foreign to the principle of justice.

At the same time as ‘guilty pleading’ is being advocated, another form of plea bargaining has been officially sanctioned in France since 1999. Called ‘composition penale’ (‘accomodation in the matter of a criminal procedure’), it makes it possible for an accused to escape indictment. First restricted to offences carrying a prison sentence of less than three years, the limit has recently been pushed to five years. Consequently it is now made to cover a large range of white collar crimes also. Hence, offences connected with financial criminality may be dealt through plea bargaining and their authors can escape indictment.

And so we see the creation of a ‘modular justice’: on the one hand guilt till proof of the contrary for those designed as such by the police apparatus, while on the other, authors of financial and economic crimes can escape scot-free. This privilege has now been formally recognised. It has become the law of the land.

Through this law, the justice ministry also introduces itself into the working of the criminal procedure process by claiming a right to intervene in individual cases, further enshrining the end of the separation of powers. The minister of justice now appears as a magistrate with extraordinary powers conferred by statute law.

The enhancement of the powers of both police and prosecution, institutions which are closely linked to the executive, means a shift of competences which used to be of the exclusive domain of judges. These extraordinary measures clearly lead to an effective suspension of fundamental freedoms and alter the nature of the rule of law. Such dispositions, as put forward in acts and decrees championed by the executive, are part and parcel of a new juridical order, that of the ‘constitution-making dictatorship’.

These dispositions also represent the end-stage of Imperial politics, resulting in a form of governance which guarantees the political and military provisions of a global management of the work force, as set up through the WTO negotiations regarding foreign investments and the privatisation of public services. Seen in this light, the state of emergency appears as a transition phase in which the work force is ‘liberated’ from its social protection. To this end, the abolition of concrete political rights is a prerequisite. Once this process has been achieved, dictatorship will be the expression of a new juridical order, one of abstract rights, and of an universal work force shorn of its historic and political particularities dating from the epoch of the nation-states.

The main objective of the current anti-terrorism legislation is not, as was the case with a previous legal framework, to exclude the social struggle movements from the realm of politics and to subject them to criminal law. Rather, it is the political intention of their authors, viz. the destabilisation of the sitting government, which leads to their criminalisation.

Such laws do not institute an order without laws. On the contrary criminal law itself becomes a constitutive feature, which divides the political in two opposites: ‘ good and evil’. The jumbling together of the domain of politics with that of criminal law enables the executive to exercise a magisterial function, and to punish any opposition it does not wish to recognise.

The setting up of any particular form of government is therefore not dependent upon a formal coherence at the level of law making, but upon the immediate relation of power, and upon the capacity of the people to resist such arrangements. Under the state of emergency there is always a formal reference to the restoration of the rule of law. Such a future, however, is not on the agenda of the powers that be.

Notes

(1)

http://www.publicintegrity.org/dataweb/download/Story_0&_020703_doc_1.pdf

(2) Giorgio Agamben, ‘L’etat d’exception’, article in Le Monde, September 12, 2002. See also his book ‘Homo Sacer, Sovereign Power and Naked Life’ (1st Italian edition: 1994∞

(3) Carl Schmitt ‘Political Theology’

(4) Pascal Biche, ‘guilty pleading’, an American model of justice, article in Liberation, November 27, 2003.

An excerpt from State of Exception

FRANCE

We have already seen how the state of siege had its origin in France during the Revolution. After being established with the Constituent Assembly’s decree of July 8, 1791, it acquired its proper physiognomy as état de siège fictif or état de siège politique with the Directorial law of August 27, 1797, and, finally, with Napoleon’s decree of December 24, 1811. The idea of a suspension of the constitution (of the “rule of the constitution”) had instead been introduced, as we have also seen, by the Constitution of 22 Frimaire Year 8. Article 14 of the Charte of 1814 granted the sovereign the power to “make the regulations and ordinances necessary for the execution of the laws and the security of the State”; because of the vagueness of the formula, Chateaubriand observed “that it is possible that one fine morning the whole Charte will be forfeited for the benefit of Article 14.” The state of siege was expressly mentioned in the Acte additionel to the Constitution of April 22, 1815, which stated that it could only be declared with a law. Since then, moments of constitutional crisis in France over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been marked by legislation on the state of siege. After the fall of the July Monarchy, a decree by the Constituent Assembly on June 24, 1848, put Paris in a state of siege and assigned General Cavaignac the task of restoring order in the city. Consequently, an article was included in the new constitution of November 4, 1848, establishing that the occasions, forms, and effects of the state of siege would be firmly set by a law. From this moment on, the dominant principle in the French tradition (though, as we will see, not without exceptions) has been that the power to suspend the laws can belong only to the same power that produces them, that is, parliament (in contrast to the German tradition, which entrusted this power to the head of state). The law of August 9, 1849 (which was partially restricted later by the law of April 4, 1878), consequently established that a political state of siege could be declared by parliament (or, additionally, by the head of state) in the case of imminent danger to external or internal security. Napoleon III had recourse several times to this law and, once installed in power, he transferred, in the constitution of January 1852, the exclusive power to proclaim a state of siege to the head of state. The Franco-Prussian War and the insurrection of the Commune coincided with an unprecedented generalization of the state of exception, which was proclaimed in forty departments and lasted in some of them until 1876. On the basis of these experiences, and after MacMahon’s failed coup d’état in May 1877, the law of 1849 was modified to establish that a state of siege could be declared only with a law (or, if the Chamber of Deputies was not in session, by the head of state, who was then obligated to convene parliament within two days) in the event of “imminent danger resulting from foreign war or armed insurrection” (law of April 3, 1878, Art. 1).

World War One coincided with a permanent state of exception in the majority of the warring countries. On August 2, 1914, President Poincaré issued a decree that put the entire country in a state of siege, and this decree was converted into law by parliament two days later. The state of siege remained in force until October 12, 1919. Although the activity of parliament, which was suspended during the first six months of the war, recommenced in January 1915, many of the laws passed were, in truth, pure and simple delegations of legislative power to the executive, such as the law of February 10, 1918, which granted the government an all but absolute power to regulate by decree the production and trade of foodstuffs. As Tingsten has observed, in this way the executive power was transformed into a legislative organ in the material sense of the term. In any case, it was during this period that exceptional legislation by executive [governativo] decree (which is now perfectly familiar to us) became a regular practice in the European democracies.

 Predictably, the expansion of the executive’s powers into the legislative sphere continued after the end of hostilities, and it is significant that military emergency now ceded its place to economic emergency (with an implicit assimilation between war and economics). In January 1924, at a time of serious crisis that threatened the stability of the franc, the Poincaré government asked for full powers over financial matters. After a bitter debate, in which the opposition pointed out that this was tantamount to parliament renouncing its own constitutional powers, the law was passed on March 22, with a four-month limit on the government’s special powers. Analogous measures were brought to a vote in 1935 by the Laval government, which issued more than five hundred decrees “having force of law” in order to avoid the devaluation of the franc. The opposition from the left, led by Léon Blum, strongly opposed this “fascist” practice, but it is significant that once the Left took power with the Popular Front, it asked parliament in June 1937 for full powers in order to devalue the franc, establish exchange control, and impose new taxes. As has been observed, this meant that the new practice of legislation by executive [governativo] decree, which had been inaugurated during the war, was by now a practice accepted by all political sides. On June 30, 1937, the powers that had been denied Blum were granted to the Chautemps government, in which several key ministries were entrusted to nonsocialists. And on April 10, 1938, Édouard Daladier requested and obtained from parliament exceptional powers to legislate by decree in order to cope with both the threat of Nazi Germany and the economic crisis. It can therefore be said that until the end of the Third Republic “the normal procedures of parliamentary democracy were in a state of suspension.” When we study the birth of the so-called dictatorial regimes in Italy and Germany, it is important not to forget this concurrent process that transformed the democratic constitutions between the two world wars. Under the pressure of the paradigm of the state of exception, the entire politico-constitutional life of Western societies began gradually to assume a new form, which has perhaps only today reached its full development. In December 1939, after the outbreak of the war, the Daladier government obtained the power to take by decree all measures necessary to ensure the defense of the nation. Parliament remained in session (except when it was suspended for a month in order to deprive the communist parliamentarians of their immunity), but all legislative activity lay firmly in the hands of the executive. By the time Marshal Pétain assumed power, the French parliament was a shadow of itself. Nevertheless, the Constitutional Act of July 11, 1940, granted the head of state the power to proclaim a state of siege throughout the entire national territory (which by then was partially occupied by the German army).

 In the present constitution, the state of exception is regulated by Article 16, which De Gaulle had proposed. The article establishes that the president of the Republic may take all necessary measures “when the institutions of the Republic, the independence of the Nation, the integrity of its territory, or the execution of its international commitments are seriously and immediately threatened and the regular functioning of the constitutional public powers is interrupted.” In April 1961, during the Algerian crisis, De Gaulle had recourse to Article 16 even though the functioning of the public powers had not been interrupted. Since that time, Article 16 has never again been invoked, but, in conformity with a continuing tendency in all of the Western democracies, the declaration of the state of exception has gradually been replaced by an unprecedented generalization of the paradigm of security as the normal technique of government.

 GERMANY

 The history of Article 48 of the Weimar Constitution is so tightly woven into the history of Germany between the wars that it is impossible to understand Hitler’s rise to power without first analyzing the uses and abuses of this article in the years between 1919 and 1933. Its immediate precedent was Article 68 of the Bismarckian Constitution, which, in cases where “public security was threatened in the territory of the Reich,” granted the emperor the power to declare a part of the Reich to be in a state of war (Kriegszustand), whose conditions and limitations followed those set forth in the Prussian law of June 4, 1851, concerning the state of siege. Amid the disorder and rioting that followed the end of the war, the deputies of the National Assembly that was to vote on the new constitution (assisted by jurists among whom the name of Hugo Preuss stands out) included an article that granted the president of the Reich extremely broad emergency [eccezionali] powers. The text of Article 48 reads, “If security and public order are seriously [erheblich] disturbed or threatened in the German Reich, the president of the Reich may take the measures necessary to reestablish security and public order, with the help of the armed forces if required. To this end he may wholly or partially suspend the fundamental rights [Grundrechte] established in Articles 114, 115, 117, 118, 123, 124, and 153.” The article added that a law would specify in detail the conditions and limitations under which this presidential power was to be exercised. Since that law was never passed, the president’s emergency [eccezionali] powers remained so indeterminate that not only did theorists regularly use the phrase “presidential dictatorship” in reference to Article 48, but in 1925 Schmitt could write that “no constitution on earth had so easily legalized a coup d’état as did the Weimar Constitution.”

 Save for a relative pause between 1925 and 1929, the governments of the Republic, beginning with Brüning’s, made continual use of Article 48, proclaiming a state of exception and issuing emergency decrees on more than two hundred and fifty occasions; among other things, they employed it to imprison thousands of communist militants and to set up special tribunals authorized to pronounce capital sentences. On several occasions, particularly in October 1923, the government had recourse to Article 4 to cope with the fall of the mark, thus confirming the modern tendency to conflate politico-military and economic crises.

 It is well known that the last years of the Weimar Republic passed entirely under a regime of the state of exception; it is less obvious to note that Hitler could probably not have taken power had the country not been under a regime of presidential dictatorship for nearly three years and had parliament been functioning. In July 1930, the Brüning government was put in the minority, but Brüning did not resign. Instead, President Hindenburg granted him recourse to Article 48 and dissolved the Reichstag. From that moment on, Germany in fact ceased to be a parliamentary republic. Parliament met only seven times for no longer than twelve months in all, while a fluctuating coalition of Social Democrats and centrists stood by and watched a government that by then answered only to the president of the Reich. In 1932, Hindenburg—reelected president over Hitler and Thälmann—forced Brüning to resign and named the centrist von Papen to his post. On June 4, the Reichstag was dissolved and never reconvened until the advent of Nazism. On July 20, a state of exception was proclaimed in the Prussian territory, and von Papen was named Reich Commissioner for Prussia—ousting Otto Braun’s Social Democratic government.

 The state of exception in which Germany found itself during the Hindenburg presidency was justified by Schmitt on a constitutional level by the idea that the president acted as the “guardian of the constitution;” but the end of the Weimar Republic clearly demonstrates that, on the contrary, a “protected democracy” is not a democracy at all, and that the paradigm of constitutional dictatorship functions instead as a transitional phase that leads inevitably to the establishment of a totalitarian regime.

 Given these precedents, it is understandable that the constitution of the Federal Republic did not mention the state of exception. Nevertheless, on June 24, 1968, the “great coalition” of Christian Democrats and Social Democrats passed a law for the amendment of the constitution (Gesetz zur Ergänzung des Grundgesetzes) that reintroduced the state of exception (defined as the “state of internal necessity,” innere Notstand). However, with an unintended irony, for the first time in the history of the institution, the proclamation of the state of exception was provided for not simply to safeguard public order and security, but to defend the “liberal-democratic constitution.” By this point, protected democracy had become the rule.

 SWITZERLAND

 On August 3, 1914, the Swiss Federal Assembly granted the Federal Council “the unlimited power to take all measures necessary to guarantee the security, integrity, and neutrality of Switzerland.” This unusual act—by virtue of which a non-warring state granted powers to the executive that were even vaster and vaguer than those received by the governments of countries directly involved in the war—is of interest because of the debates it provoked both in the assembly itself and in the Swiss Federal Court when the citizens objected that the act was unconstitutional. The tenacity with which on this occasion the Swiss jurists (nearly thirty years ahead of the theorists of constitutional dictatorship) sought (like Waldkirch and Burckhardt) to derive the legitimacy of the state of exception from the text of the constitution itself (specifically, Article 2, which read, “the aim of the Confederation is to ensure the independence of the fatherland against the foreigner [and] to maintain internal tranquility and order”), or (like Hoerni and Fleiner) to ground the state of exception in a law of necessity “inherent in the very existence of the State,” or (like His) in a juridical lacuna that the exceptional provisions must fill, shows that the theory of the state of exception is by no means the exclusive legacy of the antidemocratic tradition.

 ITALY

 In Italy the history and legal situation of the state of exception are of particular interest with regard to legislation by emergency executive [governativi] decrees (the so-called law-decrees). Indeed, from this viewpoint one could say that Italy functioned as a true and proper juridico-political laboratory for organizing the process (which was also occurring to differing degrees in other European states) by which the law-decree “changed from a derogatory and exceptional instrument for normative production to an ordinary source for the production of law”. But this also means that one of the essential paradigms through which democracy is transformed from parliamentary to executive [governamentale] was elaborated precisely by a state whose governments were often unstable. In any case, it is in this context that the emergency decree’s pertinence to the problematic sphere of the state of exception comes clearly into view. The Albertine Statute (like the current Republican Constitution) made no mention of the state of exception. Nevertheless, the governments of the kingdom resorted to proclaiming a state of siege many times: in Palermo and the Sicilian provinces in 1862 and 1866, in Naples in 1862, in Sicily and Lunigiana in 1894, and in Naples and Milan in 1898, where the repression of the disturbances was particularly bloody and provoked bitter debates in parliament. The declaration of a state of siege on the occasion of the earthquake of Messina and Reggio Calabria on December 28, 1908 is only apparently a different situation. Not only was the state of siege ultimately proclaimed for reasons of public order—that is, to suppress the robberies and looting provoked by the disaster—but from a theoretical standpoint, it is also significant that these acts furnished the occasion that allowed Santi Romano and other Italian jurists to elaborate the thesis (which we examine in some detail later) that necessity is the primary source of law.

 In each of these cases, the state of siege was proclaimed by a royal decree that, while not requiring parliamentary ratification, was nevertheless always approved by parliament, as were other emergency decrees not related to the state of siege (in 1923 and 1924 several thousand outstanding law-decrees issued in the preceding years were thus converted into law). In 1926 the Fascist regime had a law issued that expressly regulated the matter of the law-decrees. Article 3 of this law established that, upon deliberation of the council of ministers, “norms having force of law” could be issued by royal decree “(1) when the government is delegated to do so by a law within the limits of the delegation, and (2) in extraordinary situations, in which it is required for reasons of urgent and absolute necessity. The judgment concerning necessity and urgency is not subject to any oversight other than parliament’s political oversight.” The decrees provided for in the second clause had to be presented to parliament for conversion into law; but parliament’s total loss of autonomy during the Fascist regime rendered this condition superfluous.

 Although the Fascist governments’ abuse of emergency decrees was so great that in 1939 the regime itself felt it necessary to limit their reach, Article 77 of the Republican Constitution established with singular continuity that “in extraordinary situations of necessity and emergency” the government could adopt “provisional measures having force of law,” which had to be presented the same day to parliament and which went out of effect if not converted into law within sixty days of their issuance.

 It is well known that since then the practice of executive [governamentale] legislation by law-decrees has become the rule in Italy. Not only have emergency decrees been issued in moments of political crisis, thus circumventing the constitutional principle that the rights of the citizens can be limited only by law (see, for example, the decrees issued for the repression of terrorism: the law-decree of March 28, 1978, n. 59, converted into the law of May 21 1978, n. 191 [the so-called Moro Law], and the law-decree of December 15, 1979, n. 625, converted into the law of February 6, 1980, n. 15), but law-decrees now constitute the normal form of legislation to such a degree that they have been described as “bills strengthened by guaranteed emergency.” This means that the democratic principle of the separation of powers has today collapsed and that the executive power has in fact, at least partially, absorbed the legislative power. Parliament is no longer the sovereign legislative body that holds the exclusive power to bind the citizens by means of the law: it is limited to ratifying the decrees issued by the executive power. In a technical sense, the Italian Republic is no longer parliamentary, but executive [governamentale]. And it is significant that though this transformation of the constitutional order (which is today underway to varying degrees in all the Western democracies) is perfectly well known to jurists and politicians, it has remained entirely unnoticed by the citizens. At the very moment when it would like to give lessons in democracy to different traditions and cultures, the political culture of the West does not realize that it has entirely lost its canon.

 ENGLAND

 The only legal apparatus in England that is comparable to the French état de siège goes by the term martial law; but this concept is so vague that it has been rightly described as an “unlucky name for the justification by the common law of acts done by necessity for the defence of the Commonwealth when there is war within the realm.” This, however, does not mean that something like a state of exception could not exist. In the Mutiny Acts, the Crown’s power to declare martial law was generally confined to times of war; nevertheless, it necessarily entailed sometimes serious consequences for the civilians who found themselves factually involved in the armed repression. Thus Schmitt sought to distinguish martial law from the military tribunals and summary proceedings that at first applied only to soldiers, in order to conceive of it as a purely factual proceeding and draw it closer to the state of exception: “Despite the name it bears, martial law is neither a right nor a law in this sense, but rather a proceeding guided essentially by the necessity of achieving a certain end.”

World War One played a decisive role in the generalization of exceptional executive [governamentali] apparatuses in England as well. Indeed, immediately after war was declared, the government asked parliament to approve a series of emergency measures that had been prepared by the relevant ministers, and they were passed virtually without discussion. The most important of these acts was the Defence of the Realm Act of August 4, 1914, known as DORA, which not only granted the government quite vast powers to regulate the wartime economy, but also provided for serious limitations on the fundamental rights of the citizens (in particular, granting military tribunals jurisdiction over civilians). The activity of parliament saw a significant eclipse for the entire duration of the war, just as in France. And in England too this process went beyond the emergency of the war, as is shown by the approval—on October 29, 1920, in a time of strikes and social tensions—of the Emergency Powers Act. Indeed, Article 1 of the act stated that

if at any time it appears to His Majesty that any action has been taken or is immediately threatened by any persons or body of persons of such a nature and on so extensive a scale as to be calculated, by interfering with the supply and distribution of food, water, fuel, or light, or with the means of locomotion, to deprive the community, or any substantial portion of the community, of the essentials of life, His Majesty may, by proclamation (hereinafter referred to as a proclamation of emergency), declare that a state of emergency exists.

Article 2 of the law gave His Majesty in Council the power to issue regulations and to grant the executive the “powers and duties…necessary for the preservation of the peace,” and it introduced special courts (“courts of summary jurisdiction”) for offenders. Even though the penalties imposed by these courts could not exceed three months in jail (“with or without hard labor”), the principle of the state of exception had been firmly introduced into English law.

 UNITED STATES

 The place—both logical and pragmatic—of a theory of the state of exception in the American constitution is in the dialectic between the powers of the president and those of Congress. This dialectic has taken shape historically (and in an exemplary way already beginning with the Civil War) as a conflict over supreme authority in an emergency situation; or, in Schmittian terms (and this is surely significant in a country considered to be the cradle of democracy), as a conflict over sovereign decision.

 The textual basis of the conflict lies first of all in Article 1 of the constitution, which establishes that “the Privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it” but does not specify which authority has the jurisdiction to decide on the suspension (even though prevailing opinion and the context of the passage itself lead one to assume that the clause is directed at Congress and not the president). The second point of conflict lies in the relation between another passage of Article 1 (which declares that the power to declare war and to raise and support the army and navy rests with Congress) and Article 2, which states that “the President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”

 Both of these problems reach their critical threshold with the Civil War (1861–1865). Acting counter to the text of Article 1, on April 15, 1861, Lincoln decreed that an army of seventy-five thousand men was to be raised and convened a special session of Congress for July 4. In the ten weeks that passed between April 15 and July 4, Lincoln in fact acted as an absolute dictator (for this reason, in his book Dictatorship, Schmitt can refer to it as a perfect example of commissarial dictatorship. On April 27, with a technically even more significant decision, he authorized the General in Chief of the Army to suspend the writ of habeas corpus whenever he deemed it necessary along the military line between Washington and Philadelphia, where there had been disturbances. Furthermore, the president’s autonomy in deciding on extraordinary measures continued even after Congress was convened (thus, on February 14, 1862, Lincoln imposed censorship of the mail and authorized the arrest and detention in military prisons of persons suspected of “disloyal and treasonable practices”).

 In the speech he delivered to Congress when it was finally convened on July 4, the president openly justified his actions as the holder of a supreme power to violate the constitution in a situation of necessity. “Whether strictly legal or not,” he declared, the measures he had adopted had been taken “under what appeared to be a popular demand and a public necessity” in the certainty that Congress would ratify them. They were based on the conviction that even fundamental law could be violated if the very existence of the union and the juridical order were at stake (“Are all the laws but one to go unexecuted, and the Government itself go to pieces lest that one be violated?”

 It is obvious that in a wartime situation the conflict between the president and Congress is essentially theoretical. The fact is that although Congress was perfectly aware that the constitutional jurisdictions had been transgressed, it could do nothing but ratify the actions of the president, as it did on August 6, 1861. Strengthened by this approval, on September 22, 1862, the president proclaimed the emancipation of the slaves on his authority alone and, two days later, generalized the state of exception throughout the entire territory of the United States, authorizing the arrest and trial before courts martial of “all Rebels and Insurgents, their aiders and abettors within the United States, and all persons discouraging volunteer enlistments, resisting militia drafts, or guilty of any disloyal practice, affording aid and comfort to Rebels against the authority of the United States.” By this point, the president of the United States was the holder of the sovereign decision on the state of exception.

 According to American historians, during World War One President Woodrow Wilson personally assumed even broader powers than those Abraham Lincoln had claimed. It is, however, necessary to specify that instead of ignoring Congress, as Lincoln had done, Wilson preferred each time to have the powers in question delegated to him by Congress. In this regard, his practice of government is closer to the one that would prevail in Europe in the same years, or to the current one, which instead of declaring the state of exception prefers to have exceptional laws issued. In any case, from 1917 to 1918, Congress approved a series of acts (from the Espionage Act of June 1917 to the Overman Act of May 1918) that granted the president complete control over the administration of the country and not only prohibited disloyal activities (such as collaboration with the enemy and the diffusion of false reports), but even made it a crime to “willfully utter, print, write, or publish any disloyal, profane, scurrilous, or abusive language about the form of government of the United States.”

 Because the sovereign power of the president is essentially grounded in the emergency linked to a state of war, over the course of the twentieth century the metaphor of war becomes an integral part of the presidential political vocabulary whenever decisions considered to be of vital importance are being imposed. Thus, in 1933, Franklin D. Roosevelt was able to assume extraordinary powers to cope with the Great Depression by presenting his actions as those of a commander during a military campaign:

 I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.…I am prepared under my constitutional duty to recommend the measures that a stricken Nation in the midst of a stricken world may require.…But in the event that the Congress shall fail to take [the necessary measures] and in the event that the national emergency is still critical, I shall not evade the clear course of duty that will then confront me. I shall ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe.

 It is well not to forget that, from the constitutional standpoint, the New Deal was realized by delegating to the president (through a series of statutes culminating in the National Recovery Act of June 16, 1933) an unlimited power to regulate and control every aspect of the economic life of the country—a fact that is in perfect conformity with the already mentioned parallelism between military and economic emergencies that characterizes the politics of the twentieth century.

 The outbreak of World War Two extended these powers with the proclamation of a “limited” national emergency on September 8, 1939, which became unlimited on May 27, 1941. On September 7, 1942, while requesting that Congress repeal a law concerning economic matters, the president renewed his claim to sovereign powers during the emergency: “In the event that the Congress should fail to act, and act adequately, I shall accept the responsibility, and I will act.…The American people can…be sure that I shall not hesitate to use every power vested in me to accomplish the defeat of our enemies in any part of the world where our own safety demands such defeat.” The most spectacular violation of civil rights (all the more serious because of its solely racial motivation) occurred on February 19, 1942, with the internment of seventy thousand American citizens of Japanese descent who resided on the West Coast (along with forty thousand Japanese citizens who lived and worked there).

 President Bush’s decision to refer to himself constantly as the “Commander in Chief of the Army” after September 11, 2001, must be considered in the context of this presidential claim to sovereign powers in emergency situations. If, as we have seen, the assumption of this title entails a direct reference to the state of exception, then Bush is attempting to produce a situation in which the emergency becomes the rule, and the very distinction between peace and war (and between foreign and civil war) becomes impossible.

 [from the April 1, 2002 issue of the Nation]

 Although the Bush Administration conceded on February 7 that the Taliban detainees at Guantánamo Bay deserve to be covered by the Geneva Conventions, the Administration refused to allow them, or any of the 186 detainees at that time (the number now stands at about 300), prisoner-of-war status. One might reasonably expect that the Geneva Conventions and the protocols of international law would offer a promising legal avenue for contesting the US government’s detention and treatment of these prisoners, and indeed they provide some useful resources for this purpose. But the 1949 Geneva Convention accord on the treatment of prisoners of war, based on an outmoded notion of war and soaked in bias toward the nation-state, makes it difficult for POWs who do not belong to recognized states with conventional armies to lay claim to protection under international law.

The Administration claims that these prisoners do not merit POW status under the Geneva Conventions, which stipulate that POWs must belong to a “High Contracting Party” and have operated in the service of “regular armed forces” in a conventional war. But the United States, understood as the “Detaining Power” under the conventions, is required to treat these prisoners as POWs until a “competent tribunal” is set up to decide the question. At the same time, the paradoxical fact is that the Geneva Convention accord on POWs, which seeks to protect prisoners of war from hostile governments that may well be unwilling to recognize their rights to fair treatment, also functions as a civilizational discourse that favors prisoners who belong to established nation-states. So while it is important to insist that international law ought to be followed in this case, we also need a critique and expansion of this law. And the law must be changed not only in light of the new character of war but to insure that those engaged in military action on behalf of stateless organizations receive the same protections as those who fight for established states.

 On January 22 Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld explained why these prisoners should not be called “prisoners of war,” and why he prefers to call them “battlefield detainees” or “unlawful combatants.” For the United States, these are not POWs, because this is no ordinary war; it is not primarily a battle between recognizable nation-states or, in the parlance of the Geneva Conventions, “High Contracting Parties.” The term they have come up with, “battlefield detainees,” designates a place not yet under the law or, indeed, outside the law in a more or less permanent way. It is unclear whether some of these prisoners will ever be tried, and Rumsfeld at the end of February indicated (and recently reaffirmed) that they might be held “indefinitely” without trial. In this context, the hunger strikes in which many prisoners have engaged might be understood as another version of a suicide tactic, practiced by those who stand little chance of achieving the status of legal subjects in an appropriate trial. If they are tried, it is not ruled out that they could be sentenced to death, without any rights of appeal, by a military tribunal. The Geneva Conventions rule out the possibility of a secret military tribunal for POWs and guarantee trials that follow the laws governing civilians or, minimally, the same kinds of courts to which US POWs are subject. But the United States has allowed no legal counsel for these prisoners and no guarantee of a trial that would follow the stipulated rules, and it clearly has no intention of doing so, even though it seems willing in some instances to allow repatriation to nations such as Britain.

 The Geneva Conventions and the United States both engage in the questionable practice of distributing rights of protection differentially, depending on a prisoner’s affiliation with a state-based military operation. Instead of asserting an entitlement to protection against degradation and violence and rights to a fair trial as a universal right, the Geneva accord on POWs applies a selective criterion to the question of who merits protection and who does not, and it clearly privileges those prisoners in wars between recognizable states. The Conventions accept conventional war, but have not been articulated well enough to have a clear application in the present circumstance.

 To its credit, on the other hand, the Geneva accord on POWs is explicit that the term “POWs” includes those who belong to “regular armed forces who profess allegiance to a government or an authority not recognized by the Detaining Power.” In other words, the detaining power, in this case the United States, may not recognize the authority to which these prisoners profess allegiance, but that should have no bearing on their status. Any doubts about that status are to be settled by a competent tribunal convened under the terms of the accord. Given that the Guantánamo prisoners’ status is obviously open to debate, the Bush Administration’s claim that there is “no doubt” about their standing appears to be a cynical manipulation of the Conventions. The United States purports to be acting consistently with the Geneva Conventions, but it clearly ignores their stipulations, allocating to Rumsfeld’s Department of Defense the right to determine the status of the prisoners and refusing to yield to the authority of a competent tribunal.

 Although the United States announced that it would recognize the Taliban, the representative government of Afghanistan at the time of war, as an entitled state under the Geneva Conventions, it nonetheless depleted the Conventions of their binding force by continuing to deny the Taliban “prisoner of war” status. Indeed, the United States says only that its actions are “consistent” with the Geneva Conventions in treating the prisoners humanely, but it ignores the definition of humane treatment that the accord supplies (access to legal counsel, fair trials, limited time in detention, etc.). Given this flagrant violation, it makes sense to call for the Geneva Conventions to have binding force. Unfortunately, however, the Conventions are only of limited help here, since they are pervasively biased toward the nation-state and unprepared to furnish dictates for the present and future forms that armed conflict might take. The Conventions aid and abet the United States by guaranteeing prisoners not affiliated with state-centered military actions fewer rights than those who are. Only those combatants who operate in conventional ways qualify as “regular armed forces” under Article Four of the accord on POWs: For instance, members of militias have to belong to a “Party” to the conflict, whether directly or indirectly, and to belong to a “Party” means, effectively, to belong to a nation-state or to have an established relationship to one (ironically, the United States assumed this connection of Al Qaeda to the Taliban when it began its war, identifying the one with the other when the United States targeted nations that “harbor” terrorists, but now backs off from that connection when it would entitle captured Al Qaeda members to prisoner-of-war status). Those militias must be organized by a clear chain of command with “a person” commanding his subordinates; they have to wear “a fixed distinctive sign recognizable at a distance”; they have to carry arms openly; they have to conduct their operations according to the “laws and customs of war.”

 Thus the Geneva Conventions not only presuppose a conventional sense of war (where the model appears to be based on wars prior to its drafting in 1949) and of what a “legal combatant” is, but they enforce that sense, operating as an instrument not only of the nation-state but of the geopolitical distribution of legitimate and illegitimate violence. Legitimate violence is waged by nation-states; groups of armed resisters who are directly representing no nation-state in particular, or several in tangential ways, are, de facto, illegal combatants. Only “High Parties” can legally go to war and deserve the human rights protections guaranteed by the Geneva Conventions. The notion of the legitimate warrior is in part drawn from World War I, it seems, when everyone could be “seen” on the battlefield. Of course, this requirement is untenable, since it implies that there are no undercover actions in legitimate war, no stealth bombers, no camouflage. And the fact that the Al Qaeda network has defined itself as a group whose chain of command (if it can even be called that) is systematically effaced from public detection would seem to be anathema to the Conventions’ conception of war.

 Hence, we can make sense of Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s remarks to the press about the prisoners in Guantánamo: “These aren’t military people. They don’t belong to a country, they don’t wear a uniform, they’re not part of an army. It’s a unique situation and we’ll have to deal with it in a unique way.” “Unique” thus becomes the word that suggests that the law has limited applicability here, that we are not in a situation in which rules regarding humane treatment can be extended universally, since there are exceptions to the universal, and we are dealing with the exception here. Moreover, we can see that the claim to humane treatment is not exactly universal in the Geneva Conventions–in fact, the word “universal” is never used. Where the term is implied, it seems that the discourse of universality is limited to those individuals understood to represent state-centered conflict taking place in already established and recognizable forms, where the norms of something called “civilization” apply. Article Three of the accord on POWs makes this clear, for instance, when it states that POWs will be protected from “the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgement pronounced by a regularly constituted court affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized people.” Implicitly, the accord concedes that there are “uncivilized people”; it remains unclear who they are and whether, in the eyes of the “civilized,” they are entitled to rights otherwise conceived as having universal applicability.

The accord assumes the perspective of the civilized, and it extends the discourse of civilization in letting us know what is and is not a civilized war. The very conceit of a civilized war betrays the hegemonic action of the accord itself, a document and a contract that seeks to define civilization in its modes of war and in its procedures of accountability over and against a barbaric other, thereby occluding its own barbarism or, rather, encoding its own in an elaborate proceduralism that it arbitrarily applies and suspends.

Yet given the extralegal solutions that the Bush government is now proposing–including permanent detention without trials for many–it nonetheless makes sense to return to that document, to see what might be wrought from what good resources it does provide. The Geneva Convention accord on POWs can be read in at least two ways, and it will be important to produce and insist upon one public reading rather than another. The Geneva Convention principles, written in August 1949, make clear that POWs do not have to be members of regular armies, considered as armies of a state, as long as they belong to a “Party”–understood as “High” and “Contracting”–to the conflict. So it is possible to read Al Qaeda’s relation to Afghanistan as precisely such a relation to a party. Moreover, the Conventions warrant a competent court or tribunal to intervene and decide the question of the prisoners’ standing as POWs; prior to such a determination, their POW status is supposed to be assumed. Further, the detaining power is strictly obligated to treat detainees humanely–as the accord defines that, including access to legal counsel–while their standing is being determined.

In the end, however, even more important than insisting on a reading of the Conventions that protects the Guantánamo Bay detainees is producing a document with international standing that radically extends the applicability of their protections and tries to make good on a promise of universal rights to humane treatment. It also seems crucial that we consider how to apply the Geneva Conventions to new forms of conflict, ones that do not conform to those conventions of war established in 1949. After all, this is a war that is no war. As a shorter-term operation, it is waged against a military network composed of people who are conceived as illegal combatants. But the war is not over; it appears that it will now be continued in such places as Indonesia, Iraq, North Korea, Iran, Pakistan and the Philippines. And military action continues in Afghanistan. As a war against terrorism on many fronts (and not necessarily on nation-states), it is already a war without end, and without a geographic boundary or a state-defined enemy in the sense that the Geneva Conventions imagine wars to have–that is, wars declared and concluded between established (not even emergent) nation-states.

 Since we are already outside the parameters of conventional war, we are apparently outside the parameters of international legal jurisdiction as well. Guantánamo Bay makes this explicit: It is a land leased by the United States, but not “US soil,” which would, constitutionally, give rights of legal appeal to the prisoners detained there. When Rumsfeld says that this is no regular situation, since the United States is fighting a terrorist organization, and not a country, he implies that the extraordinary character of terror justifies the suspension of law in the very act of responding to terror. The detention of violent soldiers is justified, since they are still and always fighting in his view and they represent no country–unstoppable vessels of uncivilized violence. They are outside the law, outside the framework of countries at war imagined by the law, and so outside the protocols governing civilized conflict.

 Just as a distinction is drawn between legitimate violence and illegitimate violence according to whether the combatants are affiliated with states, various forms of political violence are now commonly called “terrorism,” not because there are distinguishable valences of violence, but as a way of delegitimizing violence waged by, or in the name of, authorities deemed illegitimate by established states or, indeed, those that threaten the hegemony of the nation-state itself. As a result, we have the sweeping dismissal of the Palestinian intifada as “terrorism” by Ariel Sharon, whose use of state violence to destroy homes and lives is surely extreme. The use of the term “terrorism” thus works to delegitimize certain forms of violence committed by non-state-centered political entities at the same time that it sanctions a violent response by established states. Obviously, this has been a tactic for a long time, as colonial states have dealt with the Palestinians and with the Irish, and it was as well a case made against the African National Congress. But the new form that this kind of argument is taking, and the naturalized status it assumes, will only intensify the enormously damaging consequences of the struggle for Palestinian self-determination. Israel takes advantage of this formulation by justifying state violence against the Palestinians in the name of an infinitely expansive conception of self-defense. So “terrorism” becomes the name to describe the violence waged by the illegitimate, whereas “legal war” becomes the prerogative of those who can assume international recognition as legitimate states. In the current war, US soldiers would be covered by the Geneva Conventions and US POWs would be guaranteed POW status, but those they fight, deemed illegitimate, would have no legal recourse to those same protections. (Indeed, the very fact that Bush subjected this policy to review appeared to stem from a fear that US soldiers might also be summarily deprived of the same protections on foreign soil.)

 Although the Geneva Conventions might be more openly interpreted if they were reconvened to consider these questions (and why shouldn’t they be?), they currently serve to reinforce the distinction between legitimate state violence and illegitimate violence waged by the stateless. One surely needs to feel no sympathy with Al Qaeda to worry about the long-term international consequences of this distinction. In turn, the distinction between state-sanctioned violence and illegitimate violence or “unlawful combat” becomes the basis for the distinction between state violence and terrorism or, in the case of states whose legitimacy is in question, state terrorism (as the Russians have tried to impute to Chechnya). In this regard, it could be said that the stateless are terrorized by the distinction between state violence and “terrorism.”

 The “terrorists” are considered to be outside the law, to sanction treatment that is outside the law because of the character of their violence. The fact that these prisoners are seen as pure vessels of violence, as Rumsfeld claimed, suggests that they do not become violent for the same kinds of reasons that other politicized beings do, that their turn to violence can make no sense historically, or cannot make sense in the way that conventional wars make sense, and that their violence is somehow groundless and infinite, if not innate or constitutive. If this is “terrorism” rather than violence, it is action that has no political goal, or cannot be understood politically. It emerges, as they say, from fanatics, extremists who do not espouse a point of view and do not have a part in the human community. But even as Rumsfeld characterizes the prisoners in Guantánamo as individuals who will kill again if they are not detained, imagining them as capable of an infinite violence, the US war has also established its own relation to infinity, since it is unclear how a generalized “war on terrorism”–with all the vagueness that implies–can ever properly end. That the violence of the prisoners is associated with Islamic extremism or terrorism suggests that these prisoners are already cast outside the bounds of civilization, and that the dehumanization that Orientalism already performs is heightened now to an extreme, so that the uniqueness of this kind of war makes the humane treatment of prisoners, as stipulated by international convention, exempt from the presumptions and protections of universality and civilization alike.

 The question of who will be treated humanely presupposes that we have first settled the question of who does and does not count as a human. And this is where the debate about Western civilization and Islam is not merely an academic debate, a misbegotten pursuit of Orientalism by the likes of Bernard Lewis and Samuel Huntington, although they do exemplify how notions of civilization produce the human differentially. To what extent does the nation-state operate as the basis for our notions of what is “human”? And does the Geneva Convention encode this expectation that humans, as we know and honor them under the law, belong primarily to nation-states? It is not just that some humans are treated as humans, and others are dehumanized; it is rather that dehumanization–treating some humans as outside the scope of the law–becomes one tactic by which a putatively distinct “Western” civilization seeks to define itself over and against a population understood as, by definition, illegitimate?