While there are many threats to democracy these days (including rising populism, political party polarization, and income inequality), excessive executive branch powers tend to pose as great a threat as the latter factors. Many in America (myself included at one point) may think that ultra-powerful presidents or prime ministers only exist in the developing world and that democracy in the United States is unshakably stable and strong (and could never falter). However, Jane Mayer illustrates in her 2009 book The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals that this assumption is not the rule by examining the case of 9/11 and how the United States nearly undermined its own constitution (and perhaps the War on Terror itself) in its governments' response to the terrorist attacks in 2001. In this book, Mayer offers a cautionary tale that even the strongest democracies are vulnerable when responding far outside the law in an atmosphere of fear and anger present in crisis situations.
In crisis situations, governments tend to respond with force in order to broadcast an image of reassuring strength to its fearful citizens at home and abroad. President Bush's declaration of a global "War on Terror" to be fought by the free world, with the United States at the spearhead, is a textbook example of this phenomenon. Such a brazen attack on any country, let alone a country considered a great power in the international system, puts great pressures upon government (from the political elite to the citizens) to do whatever it takes to prevent a similar atrocity from taking place in the future. Combating and preventing terrorism by itself can be seen as a noble pursuit, especially for a democracy like the United States that prides itself upon upholding and expanding the values of freedom and liberty around the world, values that terrorism tends to suppress. However, this suppression of important law-and-constitution-based values on the part of terrorism goes both ways, as Mayer reveals in her account of how the intelligence community and the executive branch responded to 9/11.
The powers that be within the Bush administration at the time, especially President Bush and his Vice President Dick Cheney, faced in terrorism in all its difficulty: an enemy not present in a unified army underneath the recognized authority of a nation-state but rather pockets transcending state borders, no clear leader/formal power structure, and the use of tactics that routinely violate the internationally agreed upon rules of militarized conflict set out in the 1949 Geneva Conventions. The fateful decision was made for the United States to conduct this global campaign outside of the perceived-to-be cumbersome rules of both the Constitution and the Geneva Conventions in executive permissions allowing the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to gather the all-important intelligence guiding the War on Terror through what were termed as "enhanced interrogation" methods (Mayer, 2009, p. 142). In other words, many terrorist suspects were transferred around extralegal CIA prisons around the world, including the most notable and infamous of them all, Guantanamo, and subject to horrific torture through methods like simulated drowning (i.e. waterboarding) at the behest of the executive branch.
Besides the obvious moral lines that were crossed in this authorization of extralegal methods of interrogation, imprisonment, and intelligence gathering from executive branch-designated "unlawful enemy combatants" (i.e. making humans feel subhuman) were the all important political and militaristic ramifications: these techniques (originally part of the government-sanctioned SERE program where trained medical professionals oversaw military training designed to protect soldiers against torture as POWs) were not only unlawful under established sources of domestic and international law and gave the executive more powers than is safe, but jeopardized the military in the fact that the information gathered under the use of torturous interrogation proved to be unreliable. Why? If you're being subjected to these methods, you probably would say anything in order to make it stop. Also, those within the intelligence community who may have had expertise in say, terrorism, Middle Eastern culture, and the Geneva Conventions were often alienated by the CIA's practices, producing a harmful divide among domestic and international government agencies that would be able to more effectively fight terrorism when not involved in bureaucratic schisms.
Ultimately, a program meant to protect soldiers was twisted and abused horrifically by the CIA, damaging the United States' moral standing worldwide and, ironically, harming international efforts to address terrorism by radicalizing populations faster than terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda themselves. However, the taint went up to the highest levels of government, up to the President and Vice President, who unwittingly or not, expanded executive powers beyond what is safe for a democracy based on the rule of law and the checks and balances between the executive, legislative, and judicial branches. As the free world continues to fight against terrorism, Mayer recommends that leaders in the United States and elsewhere heed Friedrich Nietzsche's counsel that "he who does battle with monsters needs to watch out lest he in the process becomes a monster himself" (Mayer, 2009, p. 261).
Works Cited:
Mayer, J. (2009). The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How the War on Terror Turned Into a War on American Ideals. New York: Anchor Books.
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