October 9, 2021
'rule of law' or raison d'état, where the etat is the military-industrial complex
Imagine going about your business when a foreign operative sweeps you up, spirits you off to another country, tortures you, and then holds you for years, quite possibly the remainder of your life. That’s just another day for Biden’s handlers in military-industrial complex, and some light was thrown on this black site of American activity last week at the US Supreme Court.
Just the facts: Abu Zubaydah was apprehended by the CIA in Pakistan in March 2002 and was initially thought be a high-level member of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda. (A 2014 report from the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said “the C.I.A. later concluded that Abu Zubaydah was not a member of Al Qaeda.”)
Nevertheless, the military-industrial complex persisted. The Bush administration transferred Mr. Zubaydah to the Pentagon’s wartime prison at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, in September 2006, after more than four years in C.I.A. custody where he was subjected to torture at one or more black sites, including Poland. A “black site” is where “detainees” are held beyond the purview of courts and tortured for information. Mercifully, he was granted access to a lawyer for the first time in his sixth year of U.S. confinement, but unlike the defendants in the Sept. 11 case, he has never been charged with a crime.
The issue: involves an attempt to subpoena CIA contractors—”psychologists” retained to develop torture techniques against suspected terrorists in order to obtain information—and whether they should be permitted to testify in a in a Polish black site investigation. Biden’s military handlers assert a ‘state secrets’ privilege to bar disclosure of any military matters which should not be divulged, as defined by the military. But torture is not a secret and the Polish government admitted it was used as a black site.
So what’s Biden’s lawyers argument? Even though it’s not a secret, it would “confirm” what is ‘believed’ known. It would also ‘undermine’ foreign ally relationships because it was ‘understood’ it wouldn’t be divulged by the US—apparently hosting torture operations for imperialists could be deemed embarrassing.
In short, the government’s military arm can hold someone for 20 years without criminal charges, for much of that time outside the purview of any court. Plaintiffs can have his day in Court, except when National Security says so. (Not even US citizens are safe: remember, you might be executed at any time without due process in a foreign country, like Anwar Nasser al-Awlaki, the American who was killed in 2011 in Yemen by an American drone strike ordered by President Barack Obama.)
Raison d'état dates from arguments in international law at the time of the formation of the modern states‐system in the seventeenth century and means that there may be reasons for acting which override all other considerations of a legal or moral kind.
My prediction: look to the Supreme Court—handmaiden of the co-dependent bourgeois/military industrial complex—to uphold raison d'état ‘national security’ over the interests of justice.
Notes
https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043484190/supreme-court-considers-whether-cias-black-sites-are-state-secrets
https://www.therenditionproject.org.uk/prisoners/zubaydah.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/26/us/politics/supreme-court-cia-black-sites-guantanamo.html