Counterterrorism, Dignity, and the Rule of Law

Abstract

How we interrogate “post-9/11” detainees is the fundamental question in balancing the inherent tension of national security considerations against individual civil and political rights. More significantly, the interrogation measures we adopt define who we are as a society.—amos guiora, 2008Americans, believing themselves to stand proudly for the rule of law and human rights, have become for the rest of the world a symbol of something quite opposite: a society in which lawbreaking, approved by its highest elected officials, goes unpunished.—mark danner, 2011Two items in the news in the spring of 2012 suggest why both Amos Guiora and Mark Danner are right to be concerned about the United States' counterterrorism practices in a post-9/11 world. The first is a book, Hard Measures, by Jose Rodriquez (2012), the former director of the National Clandestine Service of the Central Intelligence Agency. In the book and in various interviews during the promotional tour for the volume, Rodriquez vigorously defends counterterrorism measures used by the CIA in the war on terror, including rendition and enhanced interrogation techniques. He argues that the enhanced techniques used on Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheikh Mohammed resulted in intelligence that was key in the prevention of specific terrorist plots.1The second news item is the conviction of Adis Medunjanin on federal charges of conspiring to use weapons of mass destruction and other terrorist-related activities, as part of a plot to engage in suicide bomb attacks on the subway system in New York City. Medunjanin was brought to trial after authorities discovered the plot and after his accomplices, Najibullah Zazi and Zarein Ahmedzay, agreed to testify against Medunjanin as part of a plea agreement. At trial, Zazi and Ahmedzay testified that they had traveled with Medunjanin to Pakistan in 2008 to train with al Qaeda. They returned to the United States with the intent of targeting the New York Stock Exchange, Times Square, or Grand Central Station, before settling on the subway system as the desired target. At the conclusion of the trial, Assistant Attorney General for National Security Lisa Monaco described Medunjanin as “an active and willing participant in one of the most serious terrorist plots against the homeland since 9/11. Were it not for the combined efforts of the law enforcement and intelligence communities, the suicide bomb attacks that he and others planned would have been devastating” (Rockwell 2012).These two stories—one lauding the success of enhanced interrogation techniques, the other noting a terrorist attack narrowly averted—provide a useful frame for discussing counterterrorism and the rule of law, because they highlight the ongoing threat of terrorism and the need for intelligence about potential threats in order to prevent them. Those who work in the field of counterterrorism know all too well that a successful terrorist attack is almost inevitable and that the effort to prevent terrorist attacks will require an ongoing calibration of the appropriate moral and legal measures to combat that threat. This essay seeks to address how we might best calibrate moral and legal responses to terrorism by focusing on the enhanced interrogation techniques that were adopted after 9/11 by the Bush administration. I will argue that the category of “dignity” suggests a moral framework for morally evaluating enhanced interrogation techniques and other counterterrorism practices.We can begin by noting that when suspected terrorists are in custody, at least two values may be deeply at odds. We have a moral responsibility to safeguard the lives of innocent civilians by maintaining national security, and we have an obligation not to reduce fellow human beings to nonhuman status, even if we would describe what they have done as “inhuman.” Consider the issue of enhanced interrogation policy. What policy appropriately balances these potentially conflicting values?In answering this question, it is useful to be concrete. What techniques should be used to interrogate suspected terrorists? Suppose we turn to the techniques set out in Army Field Manual 34–52, the 1992 army document that spells out guidelines for “intelligence interrogation,” and compare these to the ten enhanced interrogation techniques that were authorized in the so-called “torture memos” issued by the Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) in the Justice Department in August 2002 (Bybee 2002). How should these various techniques be evaluated morally?We can begin with FM 34–52. The manual covers interrogation in great detail, with chapters on everything from the general mission of military intelligence units and the structure of such units to the handling of documents produced through intelligence operations, including interrogation. Chapter 3 of the manual covers the actual techniques of interrogation. It identifies roughly a dozen general interrogation strategies, with some variations within each category. The categories are listed as direct, incentive, emotional, fear, pride and ego, futility, we know all, file and dossier, establish your identity, repetition, rapid fire, silence, and change of scene.The coercive nature of all interrogation can be seen in the fact that even in the most innocuous of these techniques—namely, a direct approach in which the interrogator simply asks for the information he wants—the subject being interrogated is powerless and vulnerable. The detainee does not necessarily know where he is; he does not know what will happen if he refuses to answer; and even if he answers questions truthfully, he may not be believed. Nevertheless, not all techniques are the same. Asking a detainee a direct question is very different from what the manual refers to as a “Fear-Up (Harsh)” approach. According to the manual, “in this approach, the interrogator behaves in an overpowering manner with a loud and threatening voice. The interrogator may even feel the need to throw objects across the room to heighten the source's implanted feelings of fear…. This technique is to convince the source he does indeed have something to fear; that he has no option but to cooperate” (Dept. of the Army 1992, §3–16).The fact that questioning a detainee is coercive and may be harsh, however, does not mean it is morally or legally prohibited. Indeed, all the techniques set out in FM 34–52 are approved by the military, in part because they do not violate Geneva Conventions or the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The preface to the manual is clear about the necessity of restraint: These principles and techniques of interrogation are to be used within the constraints established by the following: The Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ).Geneva Convention for the Amelioration of the Wounded and Sick in Armed Forces in the Field of August 12, 1949, hereinafter referred to as GWS.Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War of August 12, 1949, hereinafter referred to as GPW.Geneva Convention Relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War of August 12, 1949, hereinafter referred to as GC. (Dept. of the Army 1992, preface)Article 3, which is common to all three of the conventions in this list, provides an indication of the basis upon which interrogations are to be judged. It reads: (1) Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed “hors de combat” by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely, without any adverse distinction founded on race, colour, religion or faith, sex, birth or wealth, or any other similar criteria. To this end, the following acts are and shall remain prohibited at any time and in any place whatsoever with respect to the above-mentioned persons: (a) violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds, mutilation, cruel treatment and torture; (b) taking of hostages; (c) outrages upon personal dignity, in particular humiliating and degrading treatment; (d) the passing of sentences and the carrying out of executions without previous judgment pronounced by a regularly constituted court, affording all the judicial guarantees which are recognized as indispensable by civilized peoples. (Geneva Convention 1949)From this and other articles in the conventions, it is clear that the standard that is to guide the treatment of prisoners is one that safeguards the dignity and humanity of prisoners. Prisoners should not be degraded; they should not be treated cruelly; and they should not be physically or emotionally abused.If we return to the techniques approved for use by FM 34–52, we see why they are acceptable. They do not fundamentally compromise the humanity of the prisoners interrogated with these techniques. Prisoners may be manipulated; their emotional vulnerabilities may be exploited; they may even be generally intimidated. Nevertheless, their dignity as persons remains intact.2If respecting the basic dignity of persons is to be a useful standard, we need at least briefly to explore the idea of dignity. This idea is of course notoriously difficult to define, but we can begin by distinguishing between comparative and noncomparative conceptions of dignity (Meilaender 2008). The former is generally what is meant when advocates of the right to die speak of wanting a dignified death. The idea behind the notion of a dignified death is that one can lose the very capabilities that give life meaning. In such a case, the argument goes, the quality of one's life has been so compromised compared to a life of optimal quality that one might reasonably conclude that life is not worth living. Unbearable pain, dementia, and a permanent vegetative state are all conditions that have been said to be dehumanizing and thus undignified.Although there are various ways to understand this comparative account of dignity, it is most typically understood in relation to the value of autonomy, at least in an American context. The ability to make one's own decisions, to be able to set goals and then work toward those goals, is so prized that when illness or injury strips us of the ability to make autonomous choices, many conclude that some fundamental human characteristic has been lost. The problem with an account of dignity that rests on the importance of autonomy is that dignity is not always correlated with autonomy. Young children have dignity without having (full) autonomy. The elderly have dignity despite diminished autonomy. We even believe that corpses should be treated with dignity, when the possibility of autonomy is completely gone. A comparative account of autonomy is thus often supplemented by a noncomparative account.A noncomparative account of dignity embraces the idea that humans have an intrinsic dignity that cannot be lost because it does not rest on any set of capabilities or functions that might themselves be lost. Noncomparative accounts are often religiously rooted, and at least some writers argue that a religious account is the only plausible basis for a noncomparative account of dignity. Gilbert Meilaender, for example, has made this point explicitly. He writes, It may be that we cannot make good sense of an egalitarian and non-comparative understanding of human dignity, to which our civilization has in many ways been committed, if we abstract it entirely from the context of the religious beliefs that formed it….I doubt, in fact, that there is any way to derive a belief in the equal worth of every human being from the ordinary distinctions in merit and excellence that we all use in some spheres of life; it is grounded, rather, not in our relation to each other but in our relation to God, from whom—to use a mathematical metaphor—we are equidistant. (2008, 262–63)I do not wish to explore the foundations of a noncomparative account of dignity, because even those who insist on the irreducible dignity of humanity acknowledge that we can violate the dignity of a person, despite the fact that the inherent dignity of the person is never lost. In other words, it is the comparative conception of dignity that is relevant to an assessment of interrogation and other counterterrorism practices. The idea that is key here is that there is a threshold of respectful treatment of a human being below which we may not go, if we are to respect the dignity of the person being interrogated.Let us acknowledge that an account of comparative dignity that grounds dignity in autonomy does not exhaust everything we might wish to say about human dignity. Nevertheless, does it provide material for a useful standard by which to evaluate interrogation techniques? I believe it does. If we understand human dignity to reside at least partly in the cognitive capacities associated with the ability to make informed choices and to reason prudentially in relation to those choices, then actions that intentionally strip humans of those capacities can be said to violate basic human dignity. The classical locus for this notion of dignity is found in Kant's conception of human beings as end-setters. Kant's famous statement that we must never treat rational agents as mere means to an end, but always as beings who have their own ends or goals, nicely captures this view of dignity.Notice that this conception of dignity is in some ways counterintuitive, at least when applied to interrogation techniques. We are inclined, for example, to treat techniques that cause pain more seriously than those that are relatively painless. This is probably why many writers appear to have little concern about the use of a “truth serum” during interrogations. However, in an autonomy-based account of dignity, it is a mistake to equate pain with mistreatment, and the use of truth serum is deeply problematic. Indeed, the use of drugs to elicit information may be a prime example of abusive interrogation, precisely because such drugs are designed to overcome or bypass the will of the detainee completely.Perhaps I can now be more precise. If we wish to say that prisoners should not be degraded, treated cruelly, or physically or emotionally abused, the reason has to do with the fact that such actions tend to reduce a person to a mere means. Similarly, the reason that the techniques set out in Army Field Manual 34–52 are acceptable is that they do not reduce a detainee to a mere means or strip the detainee of rational choice.Can we say the same thing about the enhanced interrogation techniques authorized by the classified Bybee memorandum of August 2002? Ten techniques were considered in that document: (1) attention grasp, (2) walling, (3) facial hold, (4) facial slap (insult slap), (5) cramped confinement, (6) wall standing, (7) stress positions, (8) sleep deprivation, (9) insects placed in a confinement box, and (10) the waterboard. Once again, we see a spectrum. All are coercive, most are harsh, but are any abusive or effectively torture? If the standard were respecting an autonomy-based account of the dignity and humanity of the detainee, I would argue that, with reasonable oversight, (1)–(6) could be used in ways consistent with this standard. The use of stress positions or a confinement box with insects will frequently, if not always, be abusive; extensive sleep deprivation will be abusive and can rise to the level of torture. Waterboarding falls into the category of torture. Effectively, the test suggested by the Geneva norms can be formulated in terms of a question: Does the technique strip the person of the basic dignity accorded to persons as rational agents? Or with a more specific focus: does the technique target the physical or psychological integrity of the detainee in a way intended to break his or her will?The reason that techniques (1)–(6) are arguably acceptable is that none of them fundamentally threatens a person's basic dignity. No one desires to be shoved against a wall, slapped, confined, or forced to stand against a wall, but none of these things is intrinsically degrading or humiliating, nor do they threaten physical or psychological integrity. By contrast, the remaining techniques are all designed to compromise the individuality and lucidity of a rational agent. They represent a potential assault on personal identity that is intended to reduce the detainee to raw animality.Consider the role of sleep deprivation at Guantánamo Bay. Sleep deprivation was used so frequently with detainees at Guantánamo that it was jokingly referred to as the “frequent flier” program. It was used, for instance, on Mohamadou Walid Slahi. The Senate Armed Services Committee report on the treatment of detainees describes the interrogation plan for Slahi. It involved ridiculing Slahi by making him “bark” and perform dog tricks (Armed Services Committee 2008, 135–36). It included performing strip searches “to reduce [his] ego by assaulting his modesty.” It included manipulating his environment by using strobe lights and white noise to isolate and disorient Slahi in order to increase his sense of futility (136). And all of these techniques were combined with sleep deprivation in an effort to compromise Slahi's sense of identity through a systematic attack on his connection with reality. That this regime succeeded in its goal is evidenced by the fact that many who underwent this kind of interrogation became psychotic.In suggesting that sleep deprivation is abusive and not just coercive, I part company with others who have called for moral and legal constraints on any counterterrorism regime. Amos Guiora, for example, has provided a closely argued rationale for striking a balance between the need for information that might protect national security and the protection of human rights.3 He thus defends a regime of coercive interrogation that is subject to strict oversight. Under Guiora's system, the director of national intelligence would have the power to approve specific interrogation plans, but the director would be “subject to legislative oversight, active judicial review, and strict scrutiny by authorized members of the executive branch” (2008, 85).While such a system of oversight would have been decidedly preferable to the system at Guantánamo Bay, I disagree with Guiora about the kinds of coercive techniques that may be used. For example, Guiora would allow sleep deprivation, modulation of room temperature, stress positions, the use of hooding, and the playing of loud, cacophonous music.4 Any of these might possibly be justified as a one-time technique designed to persuade a recalcitrant detainee to cooperate. The problem is that, used as part of an interrogation regime, they are likely to be used in combination (and more than once), and they target physical and psychological integrity. Like solitary confinement, sensory deprivation and sensory bombardment threaten personal integrity by breaking a person's will.5Although the morality of enhanced interrogation has been extensively debated, Jose Rodriquez raises an important issue that has not been sufficiently discussed. He notes that President Obama's repudiation of enhanced interrogation techniques and the use of rendition and black sites severely limits his options with suspected terrorists. According to Rodriquez, the Obama administration has adopted a “take-no-prisoners” approach. Because there are limited options for where to imprison captured terrorists and only the techniques of the Army Field Manual available for interrogating prisoners once they are detained, the administration has apparently adopted a policy that it is better to kill suspected terrorists than to capture them.6 “An administration that thinks it was ‘torture’ to interfere with the sleep cycle of a handful of the worst terrorists on the planet,” Rodriquez writes, “has no problem with authorizing the firing of Hellfire missiles into a group of thirty or forty suspects gathered around a campfire” (2012, 252). While I disagree with Rodriquez's casual dismissal of the significance of sleep deprivation, he raises an important issue. As he trenchantly points out, “there is no opportunity to interrogate or learn anything from a suspect who is vaporized by a missile” (252). Rodriquez's concern here appears to be exclusively about the possible loss of actionable intelligence, but we might also ask about the morality of “vaporizing” suspected but untried and unconvicted terrorists.Might the norm of dignity set out above help us to think morally about targeted killing? I think it does, but before we turn to consider how, it is worth acknowledging with Rodriquez that targeted killing may be the Obama administration's version of coercive interrogation. It is authorized by a secret memorandum issued by the Office of Legal Council at the Justice Department; it is likely to be enormously controversial when the full details of the program are finally revealed; and it departs dramatically from traditional norms of law and morality. Consider, for example, the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki.Awlaki was an American-born Muslim cleric killed in September 2011 by a Hellfire missile fired from a drone operated by the CIA. By all accounts, Awlaki was extremely successful in recruiting jihadists for violent attacks against the United States. For example, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, the army psychiatrist who shot thirteen people in Fort Hood, Texas, had communicated with Awlaki. Those convicted of the plot to target the New York City subway system were influenced by Awlaki's sermons. Nevertheless, Awlaki was an American citizen, and he was executed without a trial, without legal representation, and without any form of judicial review of which we are aware. Moreover, Samir Khan, who edited an al Qaeda online magazine with Awlaki, was killed in the drone strike. Like Awlaki, Khan was an American citizen who was neither tried nor convicted before being executed.The Obama administration ruled out the use of enhanced interrogation techniques, presumably because it deemed them to be contrary to fundamental American values. But is targeted killing morally preferable? Arguably, the rule of law was threatened by the efforts to justify and use enhanced interrogation techniques that violate norms of human dignity. So, too, did the lack of accountability, excessive executive branch power, and the lack of procedural safeguards ensuring fair and just treatment of detainees threaten the rule of law. Yet secrecy, lack of accountability, and the absence of due process all characterize the current policy and practice of targeted killing.To see more clearly why both torture and targeted killing may violate the rule of law, consider Jeremy Waldron's analysis of the law's relation to dignity. Dignity is relevant to an analysis of both torture and targeted killing, but the analysis is somewhat different in the two cases. In developing this argument against torture, Waldron articulates and defends the concept of legal archetypes. According to Waldron, a legal archetype is a rule or positive law that transcends an individual law or statute in that it captures the spirit of an area of law. As Waldron puts it, an archetype “expresses or epitomizes the spirit of a whole structural area of doctrine and does so vividly, effectively, and publicly, establishing the significance of that area for the entire legal enterprise”; “for example, habeas corpus statutes serve as legal archetypes because they express our laws' profound respect for an individual's freedom from physical confinement” (2005, 1724).In the case of rules against torture, the archetype is “expressive of an important underlying policy of the law, which we might try to capture in the following way: Law is not brutal in its operation. Law is not savage. Law does not rule through abject fear and terror, or by breaking the will of those whom it confronts” (2005, 1726). To be sure, law is coercive. However, the prohibition against torture is emblematic of a commitment not to coerce by dehumanizing those against whom the force of law must be brought. As Waldron states, there is “an enduring connection between the spirit of law and respect for human dignity” that is severed when torture is legalized (1727). While force and coercion are intrinsic to the nature of law, a prohibition against torture symbolizes the recognition that law should not compel compliance by reducing a human being to “a quivering mass of ‘bestial, desperate terror’” (1727).There is perhaps irony in the fact that temporarily breaking an agent's will may seem more clearly violative of human dignity than extinguishing that will by killing the agent, but the threat to dignity is certainly as real with targeted killing as it is with abusive interrogation. Indeed, the centrality of due process to human rights and human dignity is evident in the fact that two articles of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights explicitly address this issue: Article 10:Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.Article 11: (1)Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.(2)No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed. (Universal Declaration, 1948) Targeted killing violates human rights and basic dignity not simply because it is an execution but because it is an extrajudicial killing.Once again, Waldron has articulated the relationship between dignity and law in a way that captures why targeted killing threatens dignity. Waldron offers the following account of dignity: Dignity is the status of a person predicated on the fact that she is recognized as having the ability to regulate and control her actions in accordance with her own apprehension of norms and reasons that apply to her; it assumes she is capable of giving and entitled to give an account of herself (and of the way in which she is regulating her actions and organizing her life), an account that others are to pay attention to; and it means finally that she has the wherewithal to demand that her agency and her presence among us as human being be taken seriously and accommodated in the lives of others, in others' attitudes and actions towards her, and in her social life generally. (2012, 2–3) The fact that a suspected terrorist is not allowed to give an account of himself and his actions means that his agency as a human being is eliminated. When we target and kill a suspected terrorist without having to present evidence, without review, without accountability, we treat the person we kill as nothing.7 As Waldron memorably points out, “applying a norm to a human individual is not like deciding what to do about a rabid animal or dilapidated house” (2012, 11).In worrying about the possibility of long-term erosion of America's commitment to human rights, Mark Danner notes that in the aftermath of 9/11 there emerged what might be described as a “constitutional dictatorship” (see Rossiter 1948). Even better, he says, is the idea that what emerged after September 11, 2001, was a “state of exception.” As an umbrella term, state of exception gathers beneath it those emergency categories [“Constitutional dictatorship,” “9/11 Constitution,” “Emergency Constitution”] while emphasizing that this state has as its defining characteristic that it transcend the borders of the strictly legal—that it occupies, in the words of the philosopher Giorgio Agamben, “a position at the limit between politics and law … an ambiguous, uncertain, borderline fringe, at the intersection of the legal and the political.” (Danner 2011) The notion of a state of exception, or perhaps better, a State of exception, includes the idea that we live in a fundamentally different reality than we did before terrorists targeted the United States. There is a pre-9/11 reality and a post-9/11 reality, and the post-9/11 reality does not include all the rights and freedoms once taken for granted in the United States. The problem, says Danner, is that the state of exception has continued for ten years and shows no signs of abating. Where torturing would once have been unthinkable, it is now a policy choice. President Obama repudiated torture, but it is no longer unimaginable. More troubling is the fact that there is little apparent regret among Americans that the United States chose torture as a policy option for counterterrorism in the war on terror. Nor is there any enthusiasm for accepting responsibility for the mistreatment of prisoners in U.S. custody. While the Bush administration was in office, there was no possibility of accountability, for as Scott Horton noted at the time, “the criminal investigative and prosecutorial functions are currently controlled by individuals who are involved in the conspiracy to commit war crimes” (2005). Yet little changed when Barack Obama came into office, at least in terms of accountability. President Obama's attorney general, Eric Holder, began an investigation of possible violations of U.S. law, but ultimately he chose not to file any charges.The upshot of the failure to hold policy makers accountable is that opposition to abusive interrogation or targeted killing is precarious and fragile. As Mark Danner indicates, we are left in a state of moral limbo. Danner writes: As we look back today at these ghostly figures [of the detainees], at the policymakers sitting in their offices who ordered these techniques, and the lawyers who deemed them legal, and the interrogators who practiced them on men chained naked in cold sunless rooms, we can have the sense, haunting as it is, that they are all looking forward at us, as we stand here today judging what they did. If we know anything, it is that they knew this moment would come. They were determined to prepare for it, and in a sense they succeeded brilliantly. The legal memos, however grotesque in their reasoning and however widely denounced, have in effect held sway, and imposed a painful unremitting moral limbo on all of us. (2011)It is often said that the Constitution is not a suicide pact. Although the basic idea behind this saying can be traced back to Thomas Jefferson, its provenance in constitutional law is a dissent by Justice Robert Jackson in the Supreme Court case Terminiello v. City of Chicago (1949). The case involved a Chicago city ordinance under which Arthur Terminiello was convicted of a “breach of the peace” for what today might be called hate speech. The majority opinion held that the Chicago ordinance was a violation of Terminiello's First Amendment free speech rights. However, Justice Jackson believed that the threat to public order justified a limitation of liberty. “This Court has gone far,” he wrote, “toward accepting the doctrine that civil liberty means the removal of all restraints from these crowds and that all local attempts to maintain order are impairments of the liberty of the citizen.”Arguably, Justice Jackson captured the core issue at stake in the ethics of counterterrorism, namely the tension between security and rights. His claim about an existential threat to the Constitution of allowing hatemongers like Terminiello to use inflammatory rhetoric to stoke the passions of their followers is overblown, but the logic of his position is sound. Jackson wrote that “the choice is not between order and liberty. It is between liberty with order and anarchy without either.” In the context of the ethical issues raised by the practices and policies adopted by the United States in the war on terror, I would recast Justice Jackson's insight as follows: In the fight against terrorism, the choice is not between national security and human rights. It is between national security with an appropriate respect for human rights and tyranny without either.Jackson's worry, of course, was that a rigid and doctrinaire adherence to liberty rights threatened the order necessary to the meaningful exercise of freedom. The same might be said today. A blind and absolutist adherence to human rights in the face of existential threats to national security may well be suicidal. Yet, it seems to me that the greater threat comes from too quickly jettisoning concerns about human rights in the face of the dangers of terrorism. Jackson was right to argue that we do not want to “convert the constitutional Bill of Rights into a suicide pact,” and that the protection of liberty without any regard to consequences is to enter such a pact. But there is more than one way for a democracy to commit suicide. A commitment to security no matter the cost may also be a kind of death wish.This may be the real tragedy of living in the state of exception that Mark Danner so eloquently describes. As long as we exempt our leaders from the norms of international law and from a commitment to human rights and the inviolable dignity of the human person, we remain morally compromised. We can no longer serve a leadership role in the promotion of human rights and the rule of law around the world, because we have placed ourselves above the law and have not honored the norms of dignity embedded in the human rights regime that we helped forge.