A Decade of 9/11 | Joanne Mariner | Verdict | Legal Analysis and Commentary from Justia

A Decade of 9/11 | Joanne Mariner | Verdict | Legal Analysis and Commentary from Justia

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Unchecked Abuses

The years immediately following the September 11 attacks saw the most egregious, widespread, and unchecked human rights violations. Starting from the moment when President Bush declared that the US was engaged in a war on a terror, in a speech to a joint session of Congress a few days after the September 11 attacks, the executive branch carried out an aggressive assault on basic human rights.

Traditional rules on interrogation, detention, surveillance and trial were abandoned. An array of secret programs was launched; executive powers were greatly expanded; and Congress was largely left out of the picture.

The debate in the media was dominated by pundits who justified recourse to torture, using hypothetical “ticking time bomb” scenarios to scare the public. Academics contributed their insights, too, analyzing whether warrants would be necessary for torture to be legal, and whether “torture-lite” was preferable to more savage techniques.

A host of U.S. departments and agencies, from the military to the NSA to Treasury, were urged to go beyond the bounds of lawfulness, but it was the CIA that was unleashed. On September 17, 2001, President Bush signed a secret finding that gave the CIA unprecedented powers to kill, capture, and detain people, and to do so in utter secrecy, with no accountability beyond the weak constraints of political oversight.

These initial post-9/11 years were the period of waterboarding, sexual abuses, purposeful renditions to torture, and ambitious efforts to not just evade international legal constraints, but eliminate them. The “torture memos,” with their disingenuous claim that waterboarding is not torture, were the documentary complement to this parade of horribles.

What brought this initial period to an end was its predictable consequence: the specter of horrific and widespread torture. The Abu Ghraib scandal, breaking in late April 2004, led directly to Supreme Court’s landmark ruling in the Rasul case , which held that Guantanamo is not a legal black hole and that the interests of national security are not an absolute shield against judicial scrutiny.

It was the first and perhaps most important victory for human rights in the post-9/11 decade.

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