HUMAN RIGHTS AND TERRORISM - Netherlands Helsinki Committee

PART IV: HUMAN RIGHTS VERSUS SECURITY, A CRUCIAL DIALOGUE
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professor viet dinh (georgetown university center, usa):
“We have to rethink privacy protection”

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Professor of Law Viet Dinh (Georgetown University Center) considers terrorism a serious threat to the fundaments of constitutional democracies. In response to this threat, a balance should be found between the human-rights-risks of action and the security-risks of inaction. Professor Dinh thinks such balance has been found in the prevention strategy the U.S. adopted after ‘9/11’. The cornerstone of this strategy is removing restrictions on information-sharing between intelligence and law-enforcement agencies across jurisdictions.
Although Professor Dinh recognizes the jurisdiction of the U.S. military to detain terrorists as being enemy combatants, he criticizes the executive for not actually putting military tribunals in place.
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Professor Viet Dinh (Georgetown University Center, USA): “Order and liberty, as complementary values, are both necessary for stability and legitimacy of a constitutional democracy.”

“It is a special honour for me to share the podium with Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch. From my former position as U.S. Assistant Attorney-General for Legal Policy, I am well acquainted with Tom—because he and his colleagues criticized almost everything we did. But it is nice to appear with him not as opposing players in the domestic political stage but rather as unaffiliated and hopefully disinterested participants in a global conversation. I thank the organizers for facilitating this crucial debate.
Speaking before this audience of distinguished diplomats and experts in international relations and law, I must start with an apology and a reservation. I apologize that I am unable to speak to broader questions of military intervention and foreign policy. Those matters, which were addressed earlier by the representative of the United States, are outside my area of expertise and well above my pay grade. Rather, I will speak to the domestic policies of governments to prevent terrorism within their borders—the area of my academic specialty and of my responsibility while serving in government.
The relationship between human rights and terrorism is more commonly described as the conflict or balance between liberty and security. But this perceived trade-off between security and liberty is a false choice. That is so because security should not be (and under our constitutional democracy, is not) an end in itself, but rather simply a means to the greater end of liberty.
However, that does not settle the debate but only begins the conversation.
The essential question is: what do we mean by liberty? Here, I think the British statesman Edmund Burke (?) puts it best: ‘The only liberty I mean is a liberty connected with order; that not only exists along with order and virtue, but that cannot exist at all without them.’

Order and liberty, under this conception, are symbiotic; each is necessary to the stability and legitimacy that is essential for a government under law. To illustrate this symbiotic relationship, consider liberty without order. Absent order, liberty is simply unbridled license: men can do whatever they choose. It is easy enough to recognize that such a world of liberty without order is unstable, but I would argue that it is also illegitimate. The essence of liberty is the freedom from subjugation or the will of another. In a world of unbridled license, the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must. One man’s expression of his desires will deprive another of his freedom. Liberty without order is illegitimate because one man may infringe, by force as necessary, another’s freedom. True liberty only exists in an ordered society with rules and laws that govern and limit the behaviour of men.

Just as liberty cannot exist without order, order without liberty is not only illegitimate but also unstable. The first of these propositions is widely accepted, so I will not dwell on it here. But it is important to recognize that where there is only order but not liberty, force must be exerted by men over men in an attempt to compel obedience and create a mirage of stability. Most people are familiar with Rousseau’s (?) dictum: ‘Man was born free, yet everywhere he is in chains.’ But often neglected is the sentence that immediately follows in his book ‘On the Social Contract’ (?: ‘He who believes himself the master of others is nonetheless a greater slave than they. . . . For in recovering its freedom by means of the same right used to steal it, either the people is justified in taking it back, or those who took it away were not justified in doing so.’
Order without liberty is unstable, precisely because it is illegitimate. In an apparent order maintained by brute strength, the ruler has no greater claim to the use of force than his subject, and master and slave are in a constant state of war—one trying to maintain the mirage of stability created by his use of force, the other seeking to use force to recover his lost freedom.

Order and liberty, therefore, are not competing concepts that must be balanced against each other to maintain some sort of democratic equilibrium. Rather, they are complementary values that contribute symbiotically to the stability and legitimacy of a constitutional democracy. Order and liberty go together like love and marriage and horse and carriage; one can’t have one without the other.
In his 1998 book, ‘The Structure of Liberty’ (?), Professor Randy Barnett distinguishes liberty structured by order from unbridled license by comparing it to a tall building, the Sears Tower in Chicago. License permits thousands of people to congregate in the same space, but only with the order imposed by the structure of the building—its hallways and partitions, stairwells and elevators, signs and lights—would those thousands be endowed with liberty, each to pursue his own end without trampling on others or being trampled on.
Like a building, every society has a structure that, by constraining the actions of its members, permits them at the same time to act to accomplish their ends. To illustrate the essential necessity of that structure, Barnett posits this hypothetical example: ‘Imagine being able to push a button and make the structure of the building instantly vanish. Thousands of persons would plunge to their deaths.’
Osama bin Laden pushed that button on September 11, and thousands of persons plunged to their deaths. Just as Barnett’s building was only a metaphor for the structure of ordered liberty, Al-Qaeda’s aim was not simply to destroy the World Trade Center. Its target was the very foundation of our ordered liberty.

Knowing what we now know about Al-Qaeda, it is easy to see that its radical, extremist ideology is incompatible with, and an offence to, ordered liberty. Al-Qaeda seeks to subjugate women; we work for their liberation. Al-Qaeda seeks to deny choice; we celebrate the marketplace of ideas. Al-Qaeda seeks to suppress speech, we welcome open discussion.
More fundamental, however, is the proposition that Al-Qaeda or any other terrorist group, simply by adopting the way of terror, attacks the foundation of our ordered liberty. Terrorism, whoever its perpetrator and whatever his aim, poses a fundamental threat to the ordered liberty that is the essence of constitutional democracies.
The terrorist seeks not simply to kill, but to terrorize. His strategy is not merely to increase the count of the dead, but to bring fear to those who survive. The terrorist is indiscriminate in his choice of victims and indifferent about the value of his targets. He uses violence to disrupt order, kills to foment fear, and terrorizes to incapacitate normal human activity.
In this sense, the terrorist is fundamentally different from the criminal offender normally encountered by our criminal justice system. By attacking the foundation of order in our society, the terrorist seeks to demolish the structure of liberty that governs our lives. By fomenting terror among the masses, the terrorist seeks to incapacitate the citizenry from exercising the liberty to pursue our individual ends. This is not criminality. It is a war-like attack on our polity.
In waging that war, the terrorist employs means that fundamentally differ from those used by the traditional enemies we have faced on the battlefield according to the established rules of war among nations. Those rules clearly distinguish uniformed combatants who do battle with each other from innocent civilians, who are off-target—a distinction that is not only ignored but exploited by the terrorist to his advantage. In this war, the international terrorist differs even from the guerrilla warriors who mingle among and, at times, target innocent civilians. The activities of the terrorist are not limited to some hamlet in Southeast Asia or remote village in Latin America. For the international terrorist, the world is his battleground, no country is immune from attack, and all innocent civilians are exposed to the threat of wanton violence and incapacitated by the fear of terror.
This, then, is the enemy we face: a criminal whose objective is not crime but fear; a mass murderer who kills only as a means to a larger end; a predator whose victims are all innocent civilians; a warrior who exploits the rules of war; a war criminal who recognizes no boundaries and who reaches all corners of the world.
I appreciate the search for root causes of terrorism, but we need to be clear: a terrorist is not a social worker, but one who works to defeat the social order. And a terrorist is not a politician seeking to advance a political objective, but one who would coerce agreement with his ideology by mortally threatening the polity.

In this war against terror, we face the danger common to wars and well articulated by Joseph Conrad in his novel ‘The Heart of Darkness’: how to defeat the enemy without becoming the enemy?
At minimum, in prosecuting the war against terror, we have to adhere to the rules and laws that govern the conduct of civilized nations—because our objective is to uphold that system of international law and order.
On the topic of international obligations, I will defer to the experts, in particular to the earlier comments of the Ambassadors from Germany, Spain and the United States. But allow me to offer some observations from the perspective of a former law-enforcement official and a domestic constitutional lawyer.
First, the dilemma is a dilemma primarily because most of us in the debate adopt one or the other perspective. For the libertarian or human rights activist, we usually concentrate on the costs of governmental action: that is, how does this action affect the rights of the accused terrorists, of those associated with the terrorist, and of the general public to be free from governmental intrusion. For the security experts, we generally focus of the costs of inaction. Because our job is to ensure the security of the country and the safety of her people, we live in dread that a preventable terrorist attack would happen under our watch, that we could have done more to protect the lives and liberties of those lost in the attack.
For the ultimate decision-maker, however, and the disinterested commentator judging those decisions, I think it is critical that we focus not just on the risk of action or the risk of inaction, but the relative risk of action versus inaction.
That is why we crafted and implemented a prevention strategy to identify and disrupt terrorist conspiracies before they can carry out their plans, instead of following the more traditional method of waiting for the crime to happen and then pick up the pieces and count the bodies.

There are two primary ways (outside of luck and prayer) to implement a strategy of prevention: information and detention. Of these, unless we are to repeat the mistakes of the past—in my country those mistakes include the indiscriminate roundups called the ‘Palmer Raids’ (?) and wholesale internment of Japanese Americans during WWII—information has to be the primary component. Questions surrounding information can be divided into two separate inquiries: first, what information should the government be able to collect under what circumstances, and second, what should the government be able to do with the information already collected.
In my view, from a counter-terrorism perspective, the second question is the primary one. If the government can make the best use of the legal authorities at its disposal and the information it has already collected, there would be little need for new expansions in governmental authority to collect more information. In order for information to be of any use, it needs to be shared. That is why a key feature of the U.S. counter-terrorism reform after ‘9/11’ is to lower the artificial wall dividing our intelligence community from our law-enforcement agencies. If all hands are called on deck in the common fight against terrorism, then the left hand should be able to know what the right hand is doing. The same applies in the international context. Because of the disaggregated nature of terrorist conspiracies—where the mastermind resides in one country, the plans are hatched in another, the training occurs in a third, financing comes from yet another region, and the execution is in an unrelated target country—sharing of intelligence and law-enforcement information across jurisdictions is critical for us to create the entire mosaic of information relating to terrorist threats. National or multilateral restrictions on the sharing of such information are a significant impediment to a coordinated and concerted international effort to defeat terrorism.
I understand that these restrictions have strong justifications in the protection of the privacy of ordinary citizens. But many of these privacy protections, like the Privacy Act in the U.S., have exceptions for law-enforcement and intelligence purposes. We need to think critically about these protections and exceptions to ensure that governments can fully and efficiently use information it has already collected. Failing such an assessment, there will be the necessity and increasing clamour for more governmental authorities to collect more information—something that I think is much more threatening to privacy interests.

Finally, I want touch briefly on the question of detention. The Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution prohibits law-enforcement officials from conducting preventive detention. Each and every detention by U.S. law enforcement has to be based on an individualized predicate, and to the best of my knowledge all have been.
With respect to military detentions, I think it is beyond question that military authorities in times of war have the authority to detain enemy combatants. A more difficult question is: how does this authority apply to the war against terror, where terrorists are not soldiers and do not restrict their killing to lawful combatants on the battlefield? I think that even here, we have to recognize at least concurrent jurisdiction of the military to detain such terrorists as enemy combatants, because that is in fact what they are.
The most difficult question with respect to military detention is, in my mind: how should the military be required to treat military detainees it has captured? Obviously, standards of humane treatment are a necessity. The more fundamental question is: what legal processes should be afforded to the detainees? Here, I think that few would disagree that an immediate adjudication before an independent judiciary is not required—otherwise battlefields would be filled with the bodies of lawyers (which, I must admit, some may not find such a bad thing).
However, I think that there has to be a promise of some sort of process. It does not have to be judicial—I think executive or military tribunals are recognized in law and tradition as adequate. And it does not have to be immediate; the government’s need for military expediency and intelligence interrogations should be accommodated.
The United States Department of Defense has promulgated regulations to govern the conduct of military tribunals authorized by the President’s executive order. I know that these tribunals are a subject of controversy, but having reviewed the procedures, I can say with confidence that they afford a full and fair trial with the attendant processes one would normally attribute to a judicial criminal proceeding. But in order to show the world that they are indeed fair, we have to use these tribunals rather than keeping the detainees in limbo beyond their usefulness as intelligence assets.
In particular, the military is currently detaining José Padilla, who was arrested at the Chicago airport based on intelligence that he was planning to detonate a dirty bomb. Although he is a United States citizen arrested on American soil, the United States government has not indicated when or whether he would be afforded legal process in any forum, judicial or military. Padilla’s petition for a writ of habeas corpus is currently being litigated, so it may be unwise for me to pass judgment or predict an outcome. But I simply cannot see how the Supreme Court would defer to military and executive processes, as the government is asking, when there is no alternative process to defer to. I do not question the President’s authority to detain him—I think that power is attendant to his duties as Commander-in-Chief in this war against terror—but I think past precedents provide little support for a detention without the prospect of any process.

I will close by quoting Karl Llewellyn (?), a renowned teacher of American law: ‘Ideals without technique are a mess. But technique without ideals is a menace.’ I trust that this conference will reaffirm our common ideals of the universal rights of man, and also that it would provide us with the techniques to secure those ideals against the threat of terror.”

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