Lawyers love legal reasoning. It promises a clean, clear path through sticky, tricky territory. But legal reasoning can enable grotesque real-world outcomes, like torture, or arresting journalists, or masked government agents detaining and disappearing people. On this week's Amicus, Dahlia Lithwick is in conversation with Joseph Margulies, Professor of Practice of Government at Cornell University. Margulies litigated some of the biggest cases of egregious human rights violations of the post-9/11 "War on Terror", an experience that informed his recent piece in the Boston Review:
Three of the four things that gave Trump a foothold, in my opinion, were failures in this century (the fourth is the legacy of slavery and the organized political violence that replaced it). The other three, though, are the War on Terror, the financial crisis, and social media. (COVID was the final catalyst, I think; having moved during the height of COVID, I can't express how much worse the US dealt with it than much of the EU.)
How ironic, then, to learn the term is better applied domestically. It turns out, not only was the U.S. government subsidizing war through the tacit approval and use of drug money abroad, but that American special forces operatives were running drugs on the side, sometimes utilizing military equipment and vehicles, while also pocketing millions of dollars in discretionary funds, all without any greater or noble purpose than boredom and greed.
At the beginning of this century, there were many critics of the Iraq War, the Patriot Act, the American use of torture, and the prolonged U.S. occupation of Afghanistan, but War on Terror proponents always had a ready answer: 9/11, the deadliest terrorist attack ever on American soil. The American response to that fateful day was an unapologetic carte blanche, with Vice President Dick Cheney even vowing that the U.S. would work on the "dark side" henceforth. The rules had changed. So would morality.
On 7 July 2005, three bombs exploded on the London transport network, killing 52 people. The atmosphere was tense as the community grappled with the tragedy.
