Echoes
    By Patrick Sabatier
    Lib ration

    Tuesday 04 April 2006

    The debate is as old as liberal democracies themselves. Can they use all weapons and methods to fight their enemies, particularly when they are confronted with a totalitarian or terrorist threat? The revelations of the British media about the methods used a half-century ago against democracies' enemies (Nazis, then Communists) interned in camps would have a historic interest only, did they not find an echo in today's news. The same evil is at large, from 1946 Bad Nenndorf to 2006 Guant a1namo.

    The United States' president believed he had to free his men from the shadow of moral rules and international law, justifying his decision to authorize forms of torture by the imperative of national - and international - security in the face of Islamic Terrorism. The same logic pushed Churchill's government to authorize its agents to use torture and abuse to extirpate the Nazi cancer, then the "Red Peril." France was not spared the same result, as we saw during the Algerian war.

    The debate over the effectiveness of torture for obtaining vital intelligence is nowhere near closed. But that debate to all intents and purposes fails to take into account the true question, which is political. Fear is a bad counselor. Societies and states founded on law, which profess to embody and defend universal principles of humanity and civilization, endanger their very legitimacy - and their battle - by giving in to the temptation of torture, by dehumanizing their enemies, and by suspending democratic legality. That's why they try to hide these realities and why it's important to set the record straight about them.